It’s basically an abysmal text editor combined with the worst page layout software the world has ever seen. Creating documents with it very much resembles masturbating with a blender.
Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.
So many open source options out there that if you think MS word is the only options out there then you’re not looking hard enough.
Do you really think the multi billion dollar company I work for is going to switch?
You ain’t paying. Why do you care?
Editing PDFs is not a feature the format natively supports (or supported?).
To me the crappiest “feature” is that M$ intentionally disregards their own document standard to EEE the ecosystem and vendor-lock their consumers.My favourite feature is the insanely counter-intuitive indenting and bullet points.
word documents are compatible with open office and I’ve been able to switch to open office at home with no impact on my ability to save them as .doc files and use them at work or school.
I switched to onlyoffice not looking back
99% of issues people have with Word are because they never bothered to learn how to use it. Remember those IT classes back in school where they taught you how to do a mail merge? Yeah I bet you can’t remember how to do that now.
The normal user still uses multiple spaces and newlines to format their documents instead of tabstops and pagebreaks. Doesn’t use automatic Table of contents or knows how to use sections to make the page numbers show up where they want. It doesn’t help, that the online version doesn’t support section insertion. I pretty much never use Word, but it’s an incredibly complex piece of software, people don’t know how to use. Even the elusive positioning of pictures isn’t all too hard if you know what anchors do.
I too respect the monopoly hostile aggressive territory power abuse into enshittification pipeline business strategy, fellow normal poor
edit a pdf? lol? be a good person, never send pdfs, use a proper format, docx or even better odt, just fucking raw md
Once you’ve tried VIM, you’ll never go back.
Mostly because you won’t be able to exit VIM.
I would use word for this, but I can’t close vim. I guess I’m learning LaTeX.
Last night, I was talking to my brother - who’s a mathematician by trade - and learned the following from him:
LaTeX is Leslie Lamport’s (hence La) macro package on top of TeX.
I’ve never used it, but for around fifteen years I’ve been working around people who do … And yet I never knew that.
I used it a lot for university… and I did not know that.
I did migrate to pandoc and markdown for a lot of stuff, with custom template files.
An abyssal panda using pandoc. Who could have seen it coming.
Markdown is very useful, but I don’t think I’ve ever written enough to earn template files.
My brother is one of the two smartest people I know and knows a lot of things I didn’t know I didn’t know. He’s earned a lot of respect from me.
I wrote latex template files that the markdown rendered into, that way I could use my own macros and styles.
That is some professional grade typesetting there.
:termyour way to freedomSend help, I ran
:term vim, now I’m double stuck
:q (my face in reaction to this)
It’d be more impressive if you went
ZZ.You called?
:q!
:qa!What a strange emoticon…
Ya, the first few times I used vim (well neovim) I exited by closing the terminal
Use LibreOffice
Only Office > Libre Office
I used LibreOffice Writer for my coursework the past semester, and when I used my spouse’s Windows computer to double check the images were correctly placed before submitting a paper they were on completely different pages. This was when I saved it as a .docx, because the only two options accepted were .docx or pdf. I wound up doing everything as a pdf if I needed images, but I think LibreOffice doesn’t have a save as pdf option? Or if it did I missed it, I just used Google Docs to save it as a pdf.
Submitting anything as an editable format like docx or odt is a bad idea. The moment a document is finished and I give it out of my hands, I turn it into an pdf.
You can export to pdf and the hiccup you encountered is M$ intentionally not following their own format.
IIRC you have to use the “Export as” option instead of the “Save as” for a .pdf file.
Good to know, at the time my brain was absolutely fried so it doesn’t surprise me that I missed it, lol
PDF is one of those weird “not for editing” formats, like STL. Hence why it’s often in an Export As dialog rather than a Save As.
It used to be even hackier. You’d have to get some separate PDF authoring software which would present to applications like a printer driver, so to create a PDF version of your document you’d start with the Print command, not Save or Export, then instead of your printer you’d select your PDF authoring software, then when you clicked Print it would create a file on your hard drive instead of hosing data down a parallel or USB cable to one of Satan’s Own Favorite Contraptions.
LibreOffice has a native export to PDF. And, if you use (almost) any Linux, you have a PDF printer included.
Print to PDF is the way!
Even better, you can create a “Hybrid PDF” which embeds a second copy of the file in ODT format inside the PDF. This makes it re-editable.
Word supports ODT but it doesn’t support reading these ODT files embedded in PDFs though.
Hello! Thanks for the tip!
I am on Linux but haven’t needed to use office software in nearly 20 years, how do you access the pdf printer? Is that different from saving as a pdf through the menu?
Edit: thanks for the help everyone!
You literally ‘print’ to pdf. Instead of a physical page appearing from the demon box, it will give you a prompt of where to ‘print’ your file. Windows has it too, though I always use the pdf export and not the print. But in a pinch it’s good.
export is typically better as it preserve selectable text, if you print as pdf it will be as flat as a real paper (modern readers will still let you select text but you will be prone to any errors the text recognition can make)
You hit print and select the PDF output. It probably works everywhere you can select a printer.
Windows also has that, but you have to navigate your way out of OneDrive folders.
The PDF printer would be accessed via the Print functionality. It’s a virtual device that renders output to a file instead of a physical printer.
There’s a button in the toolbar to export to pdf
LibreOffice is as good as Word. Which sadly means there are still no really good document editors out there.
Yeah but it’s free.
Also there may be no good document editors but there is a good typesetting language.
I’ve been enjoying OnlyOffice myself! (LibreOffice is fine, I just like the UI of OnlyOffice more.)
$150 a year, you mean
And unwanted AI features!
Software as a disservice.
Saad ='(
It’s $150 for a “perpetual” license - but that’s not including any one drive storage. The Office 365 SaaS (I think now it’s Microsoft 365?) starts at $99/year.
I know this because I’ve been trying to find a solution for my sister who absolutely needs office to get a workable solution for Linux. Supposedly, she has to submit papers/writing as docx and can’t trust LibreOffice not to fuck up formatting.
I’ve never used it, does it handle docx authorship better than libre?
Honestly, I’m not even 100% sure they need Word or if they’re just being told that by their boss.
People aren’t paying for Word, they’re paying for Excel and getting all the other goodies included.
Yeah, LibreOffice is fine for home use, maybe even really small businesses that don’t have to trade spread sheets with external customers, but Excel is the killer app.
Calc’s a fine spread sheet program, but it’s frustrating as hell after using Excel for 30+ years. You can’t trust that it will properly import an Excel sheet and it sure won’t do macros.
100% for real. I simply can’t do freelancing Excel work with LibreOffice because I know the 1:1 compatibility falls apart quickly. Basic formulas are about as far as I can trust it.
Is there a decent FOSS alternative to excel? Libre has been my goto for years because I never needed anything more, but just in the last week I have a new client with some more rigorous needs, and I REALLY dont want to bite the buellt on 365
I will just leave this here in case you need to go the MS route.
I went over the powershell script out of boredom,
Found thistry { [void][System.AppDomain]::CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); [void][System.Math]::Sqrt(144) }Anyone knows why they are trying to do 2 tasks that actually do nothing?
A line immediately after that: “Windows Powershell failed to load .NET command. Aborting…”
So presumably some of those commands will fail if .NET is missing.
Beautiful. Thank you.
Not that I know. Grist and Proton Sheets are worth checking out.
Depending on your exact needs a more specialized tool like SmartSheets or AirTable (browser based, subscription) can be good. WPS office is a little better than Calc in some ways, but no full replacement for Excel.
The main problem with LibreOffice as a whole is the vast install base of MS Office. If you can work from the beginning in LibreOffice and store things as ODTs and ODSs, you’ll have a fine time. The second you need to work with someone who uses MS Office or deal with legacy documents made in Office, it beats your chin on the floor.
LibreOffice Writer has eaten comments on documents several times for me. Word handles comments much better.
That’s fair. Imagine if people invested that much time into calc. A person can dream…
The problem is everyone expects Calc to be Excel, including full compatibility with reading and writing of Excel’s file formats. As Excel is a constantly moving target, following that path means you’ll forever be a second-rate Excel that’ll never quite be fully compatible.
I find Calc to be a fine spreadsheet program myself, though I’m hardly a power user. If you want to use Excel, then just go use Excel.
This is a valid point for sure. If I didn’t receive ms office for free I’d use LibreOffice. I do use it on a personal level though.
I straight up used draw.io to create a paper form. I needed high information density so I can’t waste space formatting stuff the normal way, I need something more graphical and publisher got axed.
Exactly. Excel is the workhorse. The combo between Exchange and Outlook is the other major major strength of MS Office.
LaTeX supremacy has entered that chat
Overfull hbox has left the chat un formatted
expecting word to edit pdfs is like expecting excel to edit compiled matlab programs
Also I don’t see the problem with the other two.
Move image? Works fine if you select the right wrapping.
Ignore spelling mistake? Right click -> ignore once / ignore all / add to dictionaryFrom my experience with word, ignore spelling mistake is a lie, it always starts complaining again eventually (and changing spelling from us to uk almost never works)
Those without tech literacy love to blame the software.
A bad workman blames his tools after all.
I think from an end-user perspective it’s realistic to expect Word to edit PDFs. It’s just that the PDF format is an unbelievably complex clusterfuck and thus requires an entirely separate and expensive program.
i mean, it’s equivalent to using a typewriter to edit a printed page. pdf was not designed to be edited.
What? If pdf wasn’t designed to be edited, why are there pdf editors?
because people who don’t know computers can’t learn to use the right file format.
pdf is a container format for code that is run by printers. it’s not something that can be easily changed. pdf editors are hacks upon hacks upon hacks.
