On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 12:34:51PM -0400, Jerry wrote: > On Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:49:49 -0600 > Chad Perrin articulated: > > > > I eagerly await the day when office suites go the way of the dodo. I > > think people use them more due to a form of Stockholm Syndrome than > > out of any specific need, in most cases. > > Would you care to elaborate on that statement? Is your prejudice based > on the fact that there is nothing in the open-source community that can > even begin to match the robustness and ease of use of MS Office, and so > as to simplify this question, I am referring to the latest offering; ie > MS Office 10, or do you have some other specific complaint?
It's not "prejudice". That assumes I prejudge. My judgment is based on years of fighting with the BS features of office suites of all descriptions for years, and loathing every minute of it. I don't care whether they're open source, closed source, or blue-green algae source. Office suites are basically just featuritis sores growing on the faces of our computer working environments. Feature creep has gotten so out of control in MS Office that the "ribbon" was invented to deal with the fact that it had far more features than the interface could reasonably manage. The "ribbon" is, in fact, basically a very clever, well-designed answer to a problem that should never have existed in the first place, and as such the "ribbon" ends up being little more than one more feature in something that has far too many features in the first place. People actually open MS Word or OO.o Writer to do nothing but make simple, unformatted notes to themselves. Have you people never heard of a damned text editor? For all the document merging and management features of these things, in the end one is usually better off not using any of them; just cut and paste instead. Cut and paste takes less than a minute, but I've seen "expert" MS Office users spend half an hour screwing around with document merging to do what could as easily have been done with a simple cut and paste. For actual content merging, despite all the derogatory noises MS Office users will typically make about the evils of the command line and how difficult it is to use, what might take an hour in MS Office can often be accomplished in roughly equivalent fashion using simpler file formats and a couple of command line tools like grep and cat in under five minutes. By the time you get to the point where all these ridiculously overburdening "advanced" features are "needed", you're better off storing your data in a database and moving on with your life. . . . but we've strayed off-topic quite far enough in this thread. Maybe we should drop the subject here. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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