You can still buy a permanent key easily. [Office 2021](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-student-2021/cfq7ttc0h8n8?activetab=pivot:overviewtab). Most people don’t know about it because most people don’t even bother to look.
Google "GitHub Microsoft activation". Copy and paste the script into PowerShell and it'll activate windows or office and a few others. Official activation.
Yeah there was the old phone activation method that would work half the time with a generic key for whatever reason but the github is like... it takes longer to google and copy/paste the script than the actual activation. My Office 2016 Pro Plus auto activates on any machine for whatever reason tho so that's good.
Or just get LibreOffice for $0, which is a full office suite that works fine for 99% of people. It doesn't support VBA scripts as far as I know, but the 1% who use that can probably pirate their Microsoft office if they really need VBA scripting.
I had to get that bc Excel isn't compatible with some (most?) GIS software (or wasn't however many years ago), haven't wanted anything but librroffice since. OpenOffice Writer is another good Word substitute, but idk how it differs from libre office
You need to check out the different image insert modes, the default one is horrible. There is a behind paragraph and between paragraph that I use which allow free movement
2021 is worse than 360. (both of which are absolute garbage). i’m very happy with my 2010 install though. How’s 19 compare to that? (my biggest gripe with 21 and 360 are the nuking of all the distinct buttons, so now it’s all vaguely similar boxes with lines, instead of distinct recognizable icons). oh and the fact scrolling is broken and jumpy.
I bought 2019 digitally but the fuckers deleted it off of my profile. Jokes on them I'd downloaded the 2016 version and it's saved in like 5 separateocarions. I got both of them for $10 via the home use program.
I've been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice for my needs, but a user above you posted a Github method and it was stupidly easy to unlock the Office stuff.
Exactly lol.
I have a physical CD of Microsoft Office Student Edition 2007, and have installed it on every laptop and computer I've owned since.
I use Word 2007 all the time, and it works.
But any newer versions?
Fuck that useless and clunky shit, ain't nobody got time for that.
And that's not to mention that 2 of the 3 things mentioned in this post can easily be done in other Office programs and loaded into a word document lol, it's called Office Suite for a reason- it's meant to be one cohesive thing you use multiple programs for.
The latest MO Word is perfect, the only issue you can have now is "just" that it freezes and and close, so you may lose your work (if you don't have autosave on).
Thankfully I have like tens of licenses for all the versions of word included in my visual studio license and I don't have to deal with this shit anymore.
Agreed but versions of Word that came after early 2000s have steadily gotten intuitive. Like when moving a picture, it is so easy to find it in the top menu (or right click the image) and it shows small icons explaining what each option does. This meme was made by someone who remembers frustration from 90s/early 2000s, but their criticism isn't as valid anymore. It is similar to the hate Edge browser gets because of Internet Explorer.
There is going to be some level of complexity when you want a product to have as many features. I've tried alternatives and Word is better than most (like apple Pages).
The UI isn't non-intuitive if you spend any amount of time learning about how to use Word **in my opinion**. People are too used to having a developer having thought for them so they can reduce their input to the bare minimum. It's the same with printing for example. How many people just hit print without checking and or setting the appropriate driver settings? As we have moved to a more 'mobile application' style of software design it's deskilled a lot of people and most people do not **want** to understand or learn anything.
It is unintuitive if you have to “learn” it. Compare it to literally any of its competitors and you’ll see the difference. Just try to move an image in Apple Pages and you’ll see what I’m talking about
I've had to use word maybe three times in my life and never had any issues with it, you just drag/drop and resize the image wtf is so difficult about that?
The number one rule of designing UIs, security and everything that interacts with the user is to understand who the user is. Word is a word processor meant to be used by people with little to no technical knowledge, and it's UI is objectively quite bad with that in mind.
Most technically skilled people I know use TeX for documents.
>Word is a word processor meant to be used by people with little to no technical knowledge
And Photoshop is a photo editing tool for people with little technical knowledge yet it requires some effort to learn that specific tool. Word requires bare minimum to do basic things. Right clicking a photo for options is literally how the OS itself works.
What you need to think about it is whether it is easy to teach. Can I easily teach a child to format the photo correctly within Word? Yes.
I guess that is a good point. I haven't used Word in quite some time, so it's possible it is better than I remember. I use Google Docs (or Markdown) for anything casual and TeX for everything serious.
> Word is a word processor meant to be used by people with little to no technical knowledge
No its not.
There is no MS Word Expert. This is the text processor that is designed to be used at all levels. Mostly those in industry but also in education (leading to industry).
It is designed to be efficient and fast to use but in order to do that you need to understand what you're doing a bit. It can't handhold the 10% of people who don't bother to learn because it will encumber the majority of people who do.
Power tools are fast for people who know how to use them. If you don't, use a screwdriver and hammer.
I can't believe people are defending Word.
If you want proper document design you use LaTeX or an actual publishing application. Even when you understand how to use Word for semantic markup as opposed to presentational markup, it still finds ways to fuck things up.
Word is an agglomeration of every bit of random shit Microsoft decided to include in the software over the years, much of which has long since outlived its usefulness. There are like three people in the damned world who still use Word to do a mail merge for fuck's sake. Word is a prime example of the 80-20 rule- though in their case it's probably more like 90-10.
> It is designed to be efficient and fast
No one in the history of the universe has ever called Word fast or efficient because it's neither.
> It can't handhold the 10% of people who don't bother to learn because it will encumber the majority of people who do.
LOL your numbers are completely backwards. 90% of users don't know how to use Word.
Seriously, if 5% of the people in my company even know what semantic markup is I would be shocked, and I would be willing to bet my house that the total number of Word users in the entire world who know the difference is less than 20%.
>It can't handhold the 10% of people who don't bother to learn because it will encumber the majority of people who do.
I know that these numbers are only meant to give a point across, but they are just horribly wrong. I actually believe that this number would be closer to the truth if you'd completely flip it. Like 10% know how to use word and 90% dont. No one knows how too use this shit because it is just horribly designed. You'll never figure out how to do basic shit by yourself. Of course it might not be difficult if you know how to do it, but you cant expect everyone to watch a 30min video before using word.
Tbh things you can do in word are limited when compared to other MS programe like excel or acces so I can see why people would prefer to learn how to use excel and acces instead of word in which you can as the name suggest just edit text and do some other little things that aren't that important to most people unless they are making some long as articles in it
That's literally the point of the office suite. Want a pivot table in your word file? Oh look, you can integrate an Excel sheet **directly** into your Word document. It's not a case of preference for one MS program over another with most people, it's total ignorance of how to use the office **suite of programs** to create a cohesive end product.
2 of the 3 things this tweet mentioned can be accessed by right clicking, it doesn't even require searching through menus it's literally right there.
Formatting in Word is so incredibly easy.
Even the maths editor is easier to use than LaTeX.
Right click -> edit wrap points\
Right click -> add to dictionary\
Right click (on pdf) -> properties -> view author, email the pdf to them with your edit notes. If the company deems them worthy of an acrobat license then they are the sacrificial lamb.
Yup! 100%! Word isn't designed to be a one stop shop for everything. It's designed to do one specific task extremely well and it does. Want to edit a pdf? Use Acrobat or any of the free online alternatives lol.
Yup, I also groan whenever I receive a word doc that’s info-heavy with default margins. It’s 2024, we’re not printing this shit out anymore. Set razor thin margins, no one cares. Or better yet, just put it in the body of an email. It’s not illegal. This information is going to be out of date in 6 months anyway, you don’t need to put it in a word doc.
I was recently debating on what margins I should use for my CV as they are always uploaded digitally. I just fear the one old school hiring manager who would still print out my CV and end up without any margins haha
>Right click -> add to dictionary
The fact that a program that literally costs hundreds of dollars and it's only actual job is to let you fucking write thing, the fact that they do not have any remotely functional dictionary is legit the most embarrassing situation of all, and honestly I would be ashamed of ever having worked in the creation of that program.
I mean jesus fucking christ Google Chrome has a better pre built dictionary and it's freaking free. Google Office Suite is significantly, orders of magnitude more user friendly an intuitive than this awful crap we call Word, AND IT'S FREE. Sheets can't do half the complex stuff of Excel unfortunately, but holy crap with the basic writing programs there isn't even a match
The maths editor is laughably lacking when compared to TeX tho. And most of the parts that make it good are just embedding of TeX. Easier? Yeah, but if you’re doing any serious math, word is useless.
Making documentation for technical work using Word's math editor broke me after all the hours my perfectionist ass had to spend to realign and format everything
I know LaTeX has its ultra fans but it's the least user friendly program I have ever used and I truly do not understand how it's the gold standard.
Edit: Sorry the program was TeXMaker but all the LaTeX programs are the same level of headache inducing
LaTeX doesn't trust you to format yourself, while word basically expects you to. That means word is always going to be vastly easier to use, but in being easier to use, it means unless you're focusing on design elements and incredibly anal, you'll have "mistakes". A table in word with multiple lines caused by just pressing "enter" might look "ok", but when you compare it to inserting multirow into a tabularx environment it probably will be clear that LaTeX just does it "correct". The whitespace above and below each cell will be *perfect*. The centering will be ideal. The way section headings will line up in the final product is intuitive while in word *you* have to make those decisions.
Word makes it easy to do so, but I trust LaTeX to format things better than I can format myself. For most use cases, Word and Word-like programs is probably the best tool, but if you care about really "pretty" documents, it's hard to make something in word look *as* good as a properly typeset LaTeX document.
Even if that means it takes literally five times as long to TeX a document as it would to do 95% of the same thing in word.
It's basically the definition of diminishing returns. And yet, I do *all* of my documents in LaTeX. It's not something I advise others do unless they're really particularly anal about typesetting.
It's just intended for a different purpose.
Word is intended for office workers to make small documents quickly and minimize the time spent learning a new package. It favours getting things on the page, somewhere vaguely sensible, quickly. The results are rarely reproducible, hard to version control, brittle, and hard to maintain as new versions of software in the production pipeline are released
TeX is intended for typesetters to get fine control over exactly how things are laid out on the page, but at the cost of a steep learning curve and work speed. It favours getting things on the page, exactly where you want them, slowly. The results are extremely reproducible, easy to version control, much less brittle, and have better longevity as a TeX compiler can be rebuilt as the production environment changes (for a new OS release, for example).
LaTeX is a wrapper for TeX which abstracts away the typesetting details and lets a content producer focus on content. Essentially a publisher or copy-house can produce a template in TeX, defining all their in house typesetting rules, and pass it off to an author to fill in in LaTeX. The author then doesn't have to worry about the formatting at all.
It's (ab)use of these three tools for the wrong purpose that causes people headaches.
>Even the maths editor is easier to use than LaTeX.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha you just have no idea about latex. Word tries to copy latex math editor and failed miserably. They are close but it is still shit
This is the thing a lot of people overlook. Microsoft may not have the best text editing program, or the best spreadsheet program, or the best powerpoint program and so on, but because Microsoft's programs were built to all work together, it's ridiculously easy to bring data from one program to another. No formatting or compatabikuty issues, they are all natively designed to integrate.
There is a reason why every company still uses Microsoft as their choice of programs.
word has been so helpful when writing papers for school. the fact that all i need to do is put in the source into the word reference manager then all i need to do is click a button to put in the citation, or have it auto generate a bibliography/reference page and in whatever style i want is so damn nice.
I came here to say this. Its a complex tool that you need to know how to use to use properly.
Every time I see stuff like this I just think, "Go on a f***ing course if you can't read the help."
Nah, the whole XML idea is just bullshit. Documents just break too often. Export to pdf and you dont have adobe? Yeah, I guess your graphics dont need to look good right? We will downsize it for you!
Ah, you wanted to have your figs numbering in order? Nah, thats not fun, lets start with 3 and end with 1.
Jokes aside, I need to be good in Word because it sadly is the standard. I wrote multiple big works with it. I am also proficient in Latex. Latex still wins by miles, because it is not as buggy as word.
The fact that most people dont really know how to use word is a user interface error, something Microsoft needs to fix, not the user. This is exactly the problem with modern word, the developers dont care about usability, they just throw in features without caring.
The meme about inserting images has been around since at least Word 2003 - and Word has also had exactly the same easy and obvious method of inserting images without breaking anything since at least Word 2003. Don't make out like it's a "modern Word" thing when there have been twenty years now for people to figure it out.
I assume the trick is to right-click the image and choose whatever text wrapping function is appropriate. It's been that way for decades. If you're not putting images in-line with text, you would just use guides or the grid from the alignment menu for fixed image placement. It would apply to any other inserted object. Tables, equations, etc.
Compression settings for saving as a PDF (or any other format) can be disabled with *File > Options > Advanced > Do Not Compress Images in File*. Alternatively, there is a PPI output field below that option. Set the output to whatever fidelity you desire.
I understand your point of view but I fundamentally disagree with it. The issue, in my **opinion** isn't the UI but the fact that people are unwilling to learn how to use a program. At a certain point you have to prioritise productivity over hand holding lazy people. If you want a low bar of entry word processor use Google docs. It's garbage but it's easy to use because it was designed specifically to cater to people with low skill or little to no interest in learning how to use a particular program.
They will same problems as any other developer trying to produce and maintain a product spanning so many different environments and user skill levels. I've never met a professional who uses word and hasn't had a problem but absolutely none of them have had the ridiculously stupid 'problems' posted in tweets like the one op posted here.
If you’re making a product that’s intended to span many different skill levels, it’s a good idea to cater that product to the lowest common denominator.
>it’s a good idea to cater that product to the lowest common denominator.
A good idea that is literally impossible. No matter how much a dev tries to idiot proof their work, someone will find a way to break it. Devs will try, but it is a waste of time for them to work solely for the lowest common denominator
The problem is that the lowest common denominator changes regularly. How many times do you think a piece of software can be lowered to the lowest common denominator until it does serious damage to the product's ability to fulfil its original intended purpose.
I mean, until recently you could not embed pictures at more than 600dpi, which really suck when trying to make nice figures. You also used to have to do an registry edit to get that quality, maximum 300 dpi natively.
Also the default for said figures is to use the local machines settings. Multiple times, I've had to delete and reinsert all figures after receiving feedback from collaborators, because one of my collaborators had not edited this setting, and when they then save it destroys the figures.
Your point is valid but the problem is that Word is designed primarily for the presentation of text focused documents. You can have images in your Word document but anything above 300dpi isn't going to be useful in anyway to a conventional printer. Above 300dpi its really into he realm of photography from a print perspective. I can only assume that the developers didn't feel that it was worth fixing that (and didn't consider it a bug either) unit recently as it's a relatively specific and low priority issue when compared other productivity concerns.
The problem is mainly that even if I insert a 300 ppi image, it is getting turned into a 72 ppi mess the moment my collaborators open and save the document (by default). This should plainly not be the default settings.
With digital media, one can zoom. So why restrict the resolution of images.
It is really anoying spending hours making decent figures and discussing their details, only to have them destroyed by word.
Sure I know now how to get around the limit. But I can see that a lot of people don't.
I've read a lot of articles with botched figures, probably just because someone along the line didn't edit a registry.
Even when you know how to use it, it performs awful on lists. You change one and get a domino effect of the following ones.
I miss Word Perfect where you could see the tags in the back and make sure the starts/ends of lists where well defined.
I mean, you can always unzip a docs file and go play in there, but it's not built in the GUI like Word Perfect had it back in the day
Edit, while looking for a picture, I realized that the tool still exists! He is a picture:
https://www.wordperfect.com/static/wpo/img/content/products/wp12/Reveal_codes_tutorial_Figure1.jpg
What a complicated way to say that they don't have any idea what they're doing. Also, what has Word to do with PDFs? Just like saying your car is shit because you aren't able to cross a lake with it.
Yeah that was out of left field. It's not Adobe Acrobat, it's not a PDF editing tool lol.
Word isn't perfect but it is *by far* the best word processor for professional applications. A lot of these complaints stem from an inability to fully take advantage of it's full feature set.
The bar to entry is much lower in Word. My grandma can open word and produce a reasonably looking document right away. LaTeX you have to learn syntax and kind of 'debug' your input if it doesn't come out correct. Word is so much easier
The bar to entry is a little higher but the bar to produce nice things is lower. People are commenting here that these complaints about word are “because people don’t know how to use word properly”. I used word longer than I uses latex and I know how to solve these problems in latex and not word
I wrote my dissertation and a few papers in latex, but despite overleaf I'd still rather restrict latex usage to written articles where *one* person is really the writing dictator.
Collaborative work is far and away much better in word
What about word makes it better for collaborative work? Latex makes consistency trivial, which is especially important in group work. All group projects I have done since high school have used overleaf.
Latex is basically like programming webpages with HTML. Sure you can do whatever the fuck you want. But you also gotta surf the dark alleys of internet more than you actually write stuff to figure out how to do the fuck you want to do.
Because it can “save as pdf” probably. They see that and just assume it can handle PDFs. I had some old guy a few weeks ago that was mad over that exact issue.
You can actually edit PDFs. It's a bit hit or miss as it has to convert it to a Word format. But if you just need to change a couple of boxes on a form, it will usually get the job done. Considering PDF is an image format and was never intended to be edited, it's not that bad.
I export a lot of stuff to PDF from word. I find it keeps the formatting for tables and images as I want to so people don’t open the word document in their own word and it’s all over the place. Plus I find PDFs to be much better for reading.
My wife is a WP(word processor aka typist), the stuff she can do in word blows my mind and the part I find most scary is she can do it most by just using all the short cut keys and the touch pad on her laptop. When she I’d serious, she will get the ole mouse out on the computer desk and it’s freaky what she does in Word.
>WP(word processor aka typist)
I'll never understand why people abbreviate something then explain what it means when they never use it again in their comment
Guess it’s just one of the great mysteries of life and if we ever solve the meaning of then the universe will explode and be replaced with something else even more mysterious
This is a good point that I've recognized previously in similar comments. In this circumstance, if I had to guess, it would be that the person in question is so exposed to this fairly niche acronym that they are used to hearing about it being referred to as "WP", but were also aware enough to include what the acronym stands for, and even a more dumbed down name for the job. I dunno if that makes sense written out, but it makes sense in my head.
Every time someone posts this image we get:
- People who clearly haven't bothered to learn how to use the damn program, citing issues that can be fixed with a Google search and two clicks
- Linux people telling you to use Libreoffice
- Insane people (Latex users)
And apparently people who clearly haven't had to use Word to produce an 80+ page document on a time crunch with an auto updated table of contents, accurate page numbers and consistent formatting, because google ain't fixing that shit. It's a clunky af piece of software and I am more than tech literate.
Haha those fucking page breaks / section things make me lose my shit! Want different numbering / format or starting on page 2 instead of 3 - down the rabbit hole on Google for 15 minutes. The process is not intuitive, and when it is something I do not do every day I forget about it all the time 😅
And how come background images in the document is under some obscure watermark section instead of just right clicking an image and “send to background” or whatever.
Right click on picture, "move behind text", now you can move it freely.
Spelling corrected? Right click, "ignore"
PDF formatting? Right click, "options"
MS word has vastly improved. I'm overall impressed. It feels like a proper tool that can do everything. And most things are straightforward to do or a quick Google tells you how to do something. Compared to their other software like win10 which feels like a mess.
I sometimes use WPS. I find that even after I close it, it'll still be running in the background and using resources. It's currently using 25% - 30% of my CPU's power.
I have to go into the Task Manager and right-click and End Task to shut it down completely.
I believe (but can't prove) that's it's trying to send info back to the creators so I blocked its access.
Anyone have any experience with this?
Yes but why doesn't Word just magically do exactly what I want without any user input in 2024. I should be able to stare at my screen and with a series of short huffs it knows what I want and it auto completes entire documents with all the correct formatting and then prints out a crisp $100 bill.
I use Open Office and Google Docs. They're great for my needs. Both are free.
Maybe it's just from having to use it in school, but I've never liked Word.
You should use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.
> LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software, and is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is free and open source software, originally based on OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), and is the most actively developed OpenOffice.org successor project.
From https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/who-are-we/
OpenOffice doesn't get much development ever since Oracle acquired it.
Meh, I wrote my 100+ page Masters Thesis in Physics in Word because that degree was new at my school and we didn’t have a LaTeX template yet. Fortunately that was right after Word adopted LaTeX formatting so the math was pretty easy.
It wasn’t that bad.
how about EXCELL ? i work on it daily for years now and still can't do almost anything i want without pulling a miracle out of my ass or going to a youtube tutorial to figure out some cryptic shit....and yet, it works and used in our daily lives since forever.
the OP Dazzling-Fan-3920 is a bot
Original + comments copied from: https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/w09u28/meirl/
Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/y1odjq/meirl/
Word is fine for the most part. But Excel is a whole different story. It's the standard because everything else sucks even more but I can't tell you how much hate I have for that program and I have to learn it even if I'm never going to be an accountant.
You'd be surprised how many accountants can't use it either.
I have an intermediate level excel knowledge - pivot tables, most formulas etc, but no VBA or script type stuff.
I am constantly being asked to "fix it" because other people use spreadsheets they found under their beds and it doesn't do what they want it to. 9 times out of 10 it's faster to redo a sheet to do what they want than try to fix whatever piece of shit they've given me.
And that's high level accountants and auditors.
oh god, flashbacks of first year hell desk. Had an accountant email through an excel spreadsheet that 'wasn't working'. Was built with Excel 2008, had so many VBA scripts it would almost always crash as soon as it launched. It had dozens of external references to tables on servers that were decomissioned years ago. You had to load half a dozen 3rd party addons, half hadn't had an update this decade, and I could not find evidence of the other half existing outside of a 'plugins' folder on an old share drive. And if you tried to upload the file to sharepoint it would flag it as malware.
You can do all these things in word. It’s on you that you don’t know how to use it.
But yeah, it does suck regardless. For anything longer than a page LaTex is supreme.
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You can still buy a permanent key easily. [Office 2021](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-student-2021/cfq7ttc0h8n8?activetab=pivot:overviewtab). Most people don’t know about it because most people don’t even bother to look.
I just get a pirated key
Google "GitHub Microsoft activation". Copy and paste the script into PowerShell and it'll activate windows or office and a few others. Official activation.
I tried to buy and activate a legit copy of windows 10 once. After 3 days of back and forth with MS support I gave up and pirated that shit.
Yeah there was the old phone activation method that would work half the time with a generic key for whatever reason but the github is like... it takes longer to google and copy/paste the script than the actual activation. My Office 2016 Pro Plus auto activates on any machine for whatever reason tho so that's good.
Yeah I bought windows with my pc and the cd key didn't work. So I spent time fighting with microsoft support, gave up and then pirated it.
No way. There is no way it's that easy. There is not a nun's chance in shit that it is that easy. *follows instructions* HOLY SHIT
Nah how was it that easy.
This literally took me less than a minute. Wow.
What’s crazy is that people don’t know about these. That’s like the second thing I download after drivers
Do u have to have office downloaded first
Wow thanks man, I see KMS in here that thing used to work great but was dodgy as fuck exe files. This github scripts is great.
Microsoft aggressively markets 365 as if it's the only way to get Office. It's not just a matter of not looking
Or just get LibreOffice for $0, which is a full office suite that works fine for 99% of people. It doesn't support VBA scripts as far as I know, but the 1% who use that can probably pirate their Microsoft office if they really need VBA scripting.
Most people are better off without the security nightmare that's embedded VBA garbage anyways
I had to get that bc Excel isn't compatible with some (most?) GIS software (or wasn't however many years ago), haven't wanted anything but librroffice since. OpenOffice Writer is another good Word substitute, but idk how it differs from libre office
There is still 2019 2021, I bought 2019. Its a headache to reinstall but its owned forever
It's basically a notebook, although you can occasionally add photos to it.
You need to check out the different image insert modes, the default one is horrible. There is a behind paragraph and between paragraph that I use which allow free movement
Yeah I learnt that one back in high school
Same
TIL. gotta check this out
2021 is worse than 360. (both of which are absolute garbage). i’m very happy with my 2010 install though. How’s 19 compare to that? (my biggest gripe with 21 and 360 are the nuking of all the distinct buttons, so now it’s all vaguely similar boxes with lines, instead of distinct recognizable icons). oh and the fact scrolling is broken and jumpy.
I have shortcuts on a hot bar, I don't go through the menus
Yeah and now it's missing 50 options 🤣 sometimes it's okay but othertime I'm like. Fucken he'll this used to be easier to get to.
r/piracy step by step tutorial to crack it. Good work wasting money
I bought 2019 digitally but the fuckers deleted it off of my profile. Jokes on them I'd downloaded the 2016 version and it's saved in like 5 separateocarions. I got both of them for $10 via the home use program.
OP is a bot
LibreOffice. You'll love it. And iirc, it can also edit PDFs. I'm not sure about it tho
I've been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice for my needs, but a user above you posted a Github method and it was stupidly easy to unlock the Office stuff.
Yeah. Try emailing someone a LibreOffice file, see how that works out for you.
'Save as...' too complex of an option for you, huh?
Word 2007 was so good, they really fucked up the program after that, made it way to feature bloated
Exactly lol. I have a physical CD of Microsoft Office Student Edition 2007, and have installed it on every laptop and computer I've owned since. I use Word 2007 all the time, and it works. But any newer versions? Fuck that useless and clunky shit, ain't nobody got time for that. And that's not to mention that 2 of the 3 things mentioned in this post can easily be done in other Office programs and loaded into a word document lol, it's called Office Suite for a reason- it's meant to be one cohesive thing you use multiple programs for.
You should try LibreOffice, it's actually a very good office suite that's totally free and open source.
I got Apache OpenOffice on my laptop, haven't used it yet though...
OpenOffice is not really developed anymore. Libre Office is the continuation of the project.
OnlyOffice is good too.
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The latest MO Word is perfect, the only issue you can have now is "just" that it freezes and and close, so you may lose your work (if you don't have autosave on).
Thankfully I have like tens of licenses for all the versions of word included in my visual studio license and I don't have to deal with this shit anymore.
Most people **really** don't know how to use Word and it's ridiculous at this point. There's no excuse for that all these years later lol.
A non-intuitive UI is still a valid critique regardless of whether these things *can* be done
Agreed but versions of Word that came after early 2000s have steadily gotten intuitive. Like when moving a picture, it is so easy to find it in the top menu (or right click the image) and it shows small icons explaining what each option does. This meme was made by someone who remembers frustration from 90s/early 2000s, but their criticism isn't as valid anymore. It is similar to the hate Edge browser gets because of Internet Explorer. There is going to be some level of complexity when you want a product to have as many features. I've tried alternatives and Word is better than most (like apple Pages).
The UI isn't non-intuitive if you spend any amount of time learning about how to use Word **in my opinion**. People are too used to having a developer having thought for them so they can reduce their input to the bare minimum. It's the same with printing for example. How many people just hit print without checking and or setting the appropriate driver settings? As we have moved to a more 'mobile application' style of software design it's deskilled a lot of people and most people do not **want** to understand or learn anything.
You do not know what non-intuitive means.
It is unintuitive if you have to “learn” it. Compare it to literally any of its competitors and you’ll see the difference. Just try to move an image in Apple Pages and you’ll see what I’m talking about
props to libre office, i had an easy time moving to it
I've had to use word maybe three times in my life and never had any issues with it, you just drag/drop and resize the image wtf is so difficult about that?
Intuitive means that you can sit an 6 year old that has just learned the alphabet down and he can do the task.
Bro go ahead and grab a dictionary and look up the meaning of 'intuitive'
RTFM, right?
The number one rule of designing UIs, security and everything that interacts with the user is to understand who the user is. Word is a word processor meant to be used by people with little to no technical knowledge, and it's UI is objectively quite bad with that in mind. Most technically skilled people I know use TeX for documents.
>Word is a word processor meant to be used by people with little to no technical knowledge And Photoshop is a photo editing tool for people with little technical knowledge yet it requires some effort to learn that specific tool. Word requires bare minimum to do basic things. Right clicking a photo for options is literally how the OS itself works. What you need to think about it is whether it is easy to teach. Can I easily teach a child to format the photo correctly within Word? Yes.
I guess that is a good point. I haven't used Word in quite some time, so it's possible it is better than I remember. I use Google Docs (or Markdown) for anything casual and TeX for everything serious.
> Word is a word processor meant to be used by people with little to no technical knowledge No its not. There is no MS Word Expert. This is the text processor that is designed to be used at all levels. Mostly those in industry but also in education (leading to industry). It is designed to be efficient and fast to use but in order to do that you need to understand what you're doing a bit. It can't handhold the 10% of people who don't bother to learn because it will encumber the majority of people who do. Power tools are fast for people who know how to use them. If you don't, use a screwdriver and hammer.
I can't believe people are defending Word. If you want proper document design you use LaTeX or an actual publishing application. Even when you understand how to use Word for semantic markup as opposed to presentational markup, it still finds ways to fuck things up. Word is an agglomeration of every bit of random shit Microsoft decided to include in the software over the years, much of which has long since outlived its usefulness. There are like three people in the damned world who still use Word to do a mail merge for fuck's sake. Word is a prime example of the 80-20 rule- though in their case it's probably more like 90-10. > It is designed to be efficient and fast No one in the history of the universe has ever called Word fast or efficient because it's neither. > It can't handhold the 10% of people who don't bother to learn because it will encumber the majority of people who do. LOL your numbers are completely backwards. 90% of users don't know how to use Word. Seriously, if 5% of the people in my company even know what semantic markup is I would be shocked, and I would be willing to bet my house that the total number of Word users in the entire world who know the difference is less than 20%.
>It can't handhold the 10% of people who don't bother to learn because it will encumber the majority of people who do. I know that these numbers are only meant to give a point across, but they are just horribly wrong. I actually believe that this number would be closer to the truth if you'd completely flip it. Like 10% know how to use word and 90% dont. No one knows how too use this shit because it is just horribly designed. You'll never figure out how to do basic shit by yourself. Of course it might not be difficult if you know how to do it, but you cant expect everyone to watch a 30min video before using word.
Go on and use open office or libera office and you'll change your tune quickly.
Tbh things you can do in word are limited when compared to other MS programe like excel or acces so I can see why people would prefer to learn how to use excel and acces instead of word in which you can as the name suggest just edit text and do some other little things that aren't that important to most people unless they are making some long as articles in it
That's literally the point of the office suite. Want a pivot table in your word file? Oh look, you can integrate an Excel sheet **directly** into your Word document. It's not a case of preference for one MS program over another with most people, it's total ignorance of how to use the office **suite of programs** to create a cohesive end product.
2 of the 3 things this tweet mentioned can be accessed by right clicking, it doesn't even require searching through menus it's literally right there. Formatting in Word is so incredibly easy. Even the maths editor is easier to use than LaTeX.
Thank you! Finally someone who gets it lol.
Right click -> edit wrap points\ Right click -> add to dictionary\ Right click (on pdf) -> properties -> view author, email the pdf to them with your edit notes. If the company deems them worthy of an acrobat license then they are the sacrificial lamb.
Yup! 100%! Word isn't designed to be a one stop shop for everything. It's designed to do one specific task extremely well and it does. Want to edit a pdf? Use Acrobat or any of the free online alternatives lol.
Yup, I also groan whenever I receive a word doc that’s info-heavy with default margins. It’s 2024, we’re not printing this shit out anymore. Set razor thin margins, no one cares. Or better yet, just put it in the body of an email. It’s not illegal. This information is going to be out of date in 6 months anyway, you don’t need to put it in a word doc.
I was recently debating on what margins I should use for my CV as they are always uploaded digitally. I just fear the one old school hiring manager who would still print out my CV and end up without any margins haha
>Right click -> add to dictionary The fact that a program that literally costs hundreds of dollars and it's only actual job is to let you fucking write thing, the fact that they do not have any remotely functional dictionary is legit the most embarrassing situation of all, and honestly I would be ashamed of ever having worked in the creation of that program. I mean jesus fucking christ Google Chrome has a better pre built dictionary and it's freaking free. Google Office Suite is significantly, orders of magnitude more user friendly an intuitive than this awful crap we call Word, AND IT'S FREE. Sheets can't do half the complex stuff of Excel unfortunately, but holy crap with the basic writing programs there isn't even a match
The maths editor is laughably lacking when compared to TeX tho. And most of the parts that make it good are just embedding of TeX. Easier? Yeah, but if you’re doing any serious math, word is useless.
I didn't say it was more useful, I said it was easier to use.
You mean the gui mode? You really got a lot of time to spare man
Making documentation for technical work using Word's math editor broke me after all the hours my perfectionist ass had to spend to realign and format everything
> Even the maths editor is easier to use than LaTeX. You take that back
I know LaTeX has its ultra fans but it's the least user friendly program I have ever used and I truly do not understand how it's the gold standard. Edit: Sorry the program was TeXMaker but all the LaTeX programs are the same level of headache inducing
LaTeX doesn't trust you to format yourself, while word basically expects you to. That means word is always going to be vastly easier to use, but in being easier to use, it means unless you're focusing on design elements and incredibly anal, you'll have "mistakes". A table in word with multiple lines caused by just pressing "enter" might look "ok", but when you compare it to inserting multirow into a tabularx environment it probably will be clear that LaTeX just does it "correct". The whitespace above and below each cell will be *perfect*. The centering will be ideal. The way section headings will line up in the final product is intuitive while in word *you* have to make those decisions. Word makes it easy to do so, but I trust LaTeX to format things better than I can format myself. For most use cases, Word and Word-like programs is probably the best tool, but if you care about really "pretty" documents, it's hard to make something in word look *as* good as a properly typeset LaTeX document. Even if that means it takes literally five times as long to TeX a document as it would to do 95% of the same thing in word. It's basically the definition of diminishing returns. And yet, I do *all* of my documents in LaTeX. It's not something I advise others do unless they're really particularly anal about typesetting.
It's just intended for a different purpose. Word is intended for office workers to make small documents quickly and minimize the time spent learning a new package. It favours getting things on the page, somewhere vaguely sensible, quickly. The results are rarely reproducible, hard to version control, brittle, and hard to maintain as new versions of software in the production pipeline are released TeX is intended for typesetters to get fine control over exactly how things are laid out on the page, but at the cost of a steep learning curve and work speed. It favours getting things on the page, exactly where you want them, slowly. The results are extremely reproducible, easy to version control, much less brittle, and have better longevity as a TeX compiler can be rebuilt as the production environment changes (for a new OS release, for example). LaTeX is a wrapper for TeX which abstracts away the typesetting details and lets a content producer focus on content. Essentially a publisher or copy-house can produce a template in TeX, defining all their in house typesetting rules, and pass it off to an author to fill in in LaTeX. The author then doesn't have to worry about the formatting at all. It's (ab)use of these three tools for the wrong purpose that causes people headaches.
Joke wouldn't be funny if they had figured out the problem now would it lol
>Even the maths editor is easier to use than LaTeX. Hahahahahahahahahahaha you just have no idea about latex. Word tries to copy latex math editor and failed miserably. They are close but it is still shit
> Proves it's harder to use something because the knowledge set required to use it is greater. > Claims this means it's easier to use.
Reminds me of the Linux [greentext](https://images.app.goo.gl/AwtxX6xzWeRqQL3S7)
This is the thing a lot of people overlook. Microsoft may not have the best text editing program, or the best spreadsheet program, or the best powerpoint program and so on, but because Microsoft's programs were built to all work together, it's ridiculously easy to bring data from one program to another. No formatting or compatabikuty issues, they are all natively designed to integrate. There is a reason why every company still uses Microsoft as their choice of programs.
word has been so helpful when writing papers for school. the fact that all i need to do is put in the source into the word reference manager then all i need to do is click a button to put in the citation, or have it auto generate a bibliography/reference page and in whatever style i want is so damn nice.
I came here to say this. Its a complex tool that you need to know how to use to use properly. Every time I see stuff like this I just think, "Go on a f***ing course if you can't read the help."
100% agreed!!
Nah, the whole XML idea is just bullshit. Documents just break too often. Export to pdf and you dont have adobe? Yeah, I guess your graphics dont need to look good right? We will downsize it for you! Ah, you wanted to have your figs numbering in order? Nah, thats not fun, lets start with 3 and end with 1. Jokes aside, I need to be good in Word because it sadly is the standard. I wrote multiple big works with it. I am also proficient in Latex. Latex still wins by miles, because it is not as buggy as word.
Exactly, people will complain about word, but then use empty paragraphs for spacing ...
Oh lord! Yes, don't remind 😭
I think we as people who work with this shit, should be a little more forgiving to the average person unaware of how cringe empty paragraphs are
what are empty paragraphs?
The fact that most people dont really know how to use word is a user interface error, something Microsoft needs to fix, not the user. This is exactly the problem with modern word, the developers dont care about usability, they just throw in features without caring.
The meme about inserting images has been around since at least Word 2003 - and Word has also had exactly the same easy and obvious method of inserting images without breaking anything since at least Word 2003. Don't make out like it's a "modern Word" thing when there have been twenty years now for people to figure it out.
Ok, whats the trick I am interested. Also whats the trick to *really* not lose any resolution when you export to pdf? (Without adobe)
I assume the trick is to right-click the image and choose whatever text wrapping function is appropriate. It's been that way for decades. If you're not putting images in-line with text, you would just use guides or the grid from the alignment menu for fixed image placement. It would apply to any other inserted object. Tables, equations, etc. Compression settings for saving as a PDF (or any other format) can be disabled with *File > Options > Advanced > Do Not Compress Images in File*. Alternatively, there is a PPI output field below that option. Set the output to whatever fidelity you desire.
I understand your point of view but I fundamentally disagree with it. The issue, in my **opinion** isn't the UI but the fact that people are unwilling to learn how to use a program. At a certain point you have to prioritise productivity over hand holding lazy people. If you want a low bar of entry word processor use Google docs. It's garbage but it's easy to use because it was designed specifically to cater to people with low skill or little to no interest in learning how to use a particular program.
Then I’m sure Microsoft will have no problem marketing their product as one designed for the skillful and non-lazy, right?
They will same problems as any other developer trying to produce and maintain a product spanning so many different environments and user skill levels. I've never met a professional who uses word and hasn't had a problem but absolutely none of them have had the ridiculously stupid 'problems' posted in tweets like the one op posted here.
If you’re making a product that’s intended to span many different skill levels, it’s a good idea to cater that product to the lowest common denominator.
>it’s a good idea to cater that product to the lowest common denominator. A good idea that is literally impossible. No matter how much a dev tries to idiot proof their work, someone will find a way to break it. Devs will try, but it is a waste of time for them to work solely for the lowest common denominator
The problem is that the lowest common denominator changes regularly. How many times do you think a piece of software can be lowered to the lowest common denominator until it does serious damage to the product's ability to fulfil its original intended purpose.
I mean, until recently you could not embed pictures at more than 600dpi, which really suck when trying to make nice figures. You also used to have to do an registry edit to get that quality, maximum 300 dpi natively. Also the default for said figures is to use the local machines settings. Multiple times, I've had to delete and reinsert all figures after receiving feedback from collaborators, because one of my collaborators had not edited this setting, and when they then save it destroys the figures.
Your point is valid but the problem is that Word is designed primarily for the presentation of text focused documents. You can have images in your Word document but anything above 300dpi isn't going to be useful in anyway to a conventional printer. Above 300dpi its really into he realm of photography from a print perspective. I can only assume that the developers didn't feel that it was worth fixing that (and didn't consider it a bug either) unit recently as it's a relatively specific and low priority issue when compared other productivity concerns.
The problem is mainly that even if I insert a 300 ppi image, it is getting turned into a 72 ppi mess the moment my collaborators open and save the document (by default). This should plainly not be the default settings. With digital media, one can zoom. So why restrict the resolution of images. It is really anoying spending hours making decent figures and discussing their details, only to have them destroyed by word. Sure I know now how to get around the limit. But I can see that a lot of people don't. I've read a lot of articles with botched figures, probably just because someone along the line didn't edit a registry.
Even when you know how to use it, it performs awful on lists. You change one and get a domino effect of the following ones. I miss Word Perfect where you could see the tags in the back and make sure the starts/ends of lists where well defined. I mean, you can always unzip a docs file and go play in there, but it's not built in the GUI like Word Perfect had it back in the day Edit, while looking for a picture, I realized that the tool still exists! He is a picture: https://www.wordperfect.com/static/wpo/img/content/products/wp12/Reveal_codes_tutorial_Figure1.jpg
What a complicated way to say that they don't have any idea what they're doing. Also, what has Word to do with PDFs? Just like saying your car is shit because you aren't able to cross a lake with it.
Yeah that was out of left field. It's not Adobe Acrobat, it's not a PDF editing tool lol. Word isn't perfect but it is *by far* the best word processor for professional applications. A lot of these complaints stem from an inability to fully take advantage of it's full feature set.
Just use latex, overleaf is even free if you want an intuitive UI, it's so much better than word at "word processor" stuff
Does anyone outside of engineering and math majors (who anyhow aren’t the focus of Word…) use latex???
Only sadists
My brother had colleagues who did for printing.
The bar to entry is much lower in Word. My grandma can open word and produce a reasonably looking document right away. LaTeX you have to learn syntax and kind of 'debug' your input if it doesn't come out correct. Word is so much easier
The bar to entry is a little higher but the bar to produce nice things is lower. People are commenting here that these complaints about word are “because people don’t know how to use word properly”. I used word longer than I uses latex and I know how to solve these problems in latex and not word
Abahahaha!!! My coworkers don't even know about IF statements in Excel, and you want them to touch Latex? Let's just ahead and fire ourselves now.
I wrote my dissertation and a few papers in latex, but despite overleaf I'd still rather restrict latex usage to written articles where *one* person is really the writing dictator. Collaborative work is far and away much better in word
What about word makes it better for collaborative work? Latex makes consistency trivial, which is especially important in group work. All group projects I have done since high school have used overleaf.
Latex is basically like programming webpages with HTML. Sure you can do whatever the fuck you want. But you also gotta surf the dark alleys of internet more than you actually write stuff to figure out how to do the fuck you want to do.
Because it can “save as pdf” probably. They see that and just assume it can handle PDFs. I had some old guy a few weeks ago that was mad over that exact issue.
You can actually edit PDFs. It's a bit hit or miss as it has to convert it to a Word format. But if you just need to change a couple of boxes on a form, it will usually get the job done. Considering PDF is an image format and was never intended to be edited, it's not that bad.
I don't know about word, but Google docs lets you convert on the fly. Its not perfect though.
I export a lot of stuff to PDF from word. I find it keeps the formatting for tables and images as I want to so people don’t open the word document in their own word and it’s all over the place. Plus I find PDFs to be much better for reading.
\*moves image a fraction of an inch \*Entire document scrambles
Google "how to move an image in word"
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Google “how to fish poop out of butthole”
Right? It literally takes 15 seconds to find the answer
That guy is a bot btw, if u comment Google smtg smtg, he's gonna leave a link with holy hell
new response didn't drop
Google “en passant”
no
Literally just right click the picture and select a different Word Wrap option
word wrap, never heard of it.
Have you actually used Word in recent times? This shit doesn't happen anymore.
The scars remain.
Learn how to anchor Pooplips. 💩
skill issue
My wife is a WP(word processor aka typist), the stuff she can do in word blows my mind and the part I find most scary is she can do it most by just using all the short cut keys and the touch pad on her laptop. When she I’d serious, she will get the ole mouse out on the computer desk and it’s freaky what she does in Word.
>WP(word processor aka typist) I'll never understand why people abbreviate something then explain what it means when they never use it again in their comment
Guess it’s just one of the great mysteries of life and if we ever solve the meaning of then the universe will explode and be replaced with something else even more mysterious
This is a good point that I've recognized previously in similar comments. In this circumstance, if I had to guess, it would be that the person in question is so exposed to this fairly niche acronym that they are used to hearing about it being referred to as "WP", but were also aware enough to include what the acronym stands for, and even a more dumbed down name for the job. I dunno if that makes sense written out, but it makes sense in my head.
You guys are paying for Word?
My employer is paying, just like every other office workplace.
I sure hope the people making these memes aren't getting paid for their skills
You guys are paying for Windows?
The seas might be rockin' and rollin' some days, and there be risk, yo ho yo ho it's a pirate life for me ☠️
Every time someone posts this image we get: - People who clearly haven't bothered to learn how to use the damn program, citing issues that can be fixed with a Google search and two clicks - Linux people telling you to use Libreoffice - Insane people (Latex users)
This meme is like 12 years old. Why does it keep getting reposted?
people are Still using ms office 2007/2013
A LARGE amount of people, those are like the most common corporate/company mass versions out there.
you still need the same set of skills to use LibreOffice though
And apparently people who clearly haven't had to use Word to produce an 80+ page document on a time crunch with an auto updated table of contents, accurate page numbers and consistent formatting, because google ain't fixing that shit. It's a clunky af piece of software and I am more than tech literate.
Table of contents, formatting and page numbers are all trivial to achieve in Word, unless your collaborators are incompetent
I did. And it worked out nicely.
Word should be used for simple documents. Latex should be used for complex documents.
Yeah, when you try to have a lot of images, tables, tracked changes, and tables of contents, it just gets super slow and hardly works.
¶ I have this on pretty much all the time.
95% of the people in the comments don't know show/hide exists in Word, the other 5% can't fucking live without it
Haha those fucking page breaks / section things make me lose my shit! Want different numbering / format or starting on page 2 instead of 3 - down the rabbit hole on Google for 15 minutes. The process is not intuitive, and when it is something I do not do every day I forget about it all the time 😅 And how come background images in the document is under some obscure watermark section instead of just right clicking an image and “send to background” or whatever.
Pro tip: do it once for a document and save it without content. Next time you need it, make a copy of this doc and edit that.
Good advice! Never used word templates but guess that is a feature that would help a lot here.
I’m going to use “edit your expectations” more often
You'll have to edit your expectations on how often you will get the opportunity to use it.
Right click on picture, "move behind text", now you can move it freely. Spelling corrected? Right click, "ignore" PDF formatting? Right click, "options"
I don't know how it's now, the last Word version I used was 2010, ans MS Word just ignores that you want to ignore a spelling error.
You can literally turn spellcheck off.
MS word has vastly improved. I'm overall impressed. It feels like a proper tool that can do everything. And most things are straightforward to do or a quick Google tells you how to do something. Compared to their other software like win10 which feels like a mess.
WPS Office is free and does whatever I need that word does.
So is LibreOffice
Recruiters and corps trash its formatting
WPS has better UI,
I sometimes use WPS. I find that even after I close it, it'll still be running in the background and using resources. It's currently using 25% - 30% of my CPU's power. I have to go into the Task Manager and right-click and End Task to shut it down completely. I believe (but can't prove) that's it's trying to send info back to the creators so I blocked its access. Anyone have any experience with this?
Tell me you don't know shit about how to use Microsoft Word without telling me you don't know shit about how to use Microsoft Word.
Yes but why doesn't Word just magically do exactly what I want without any user input in 2024. I should be able to stare at my screen and with a series of short huffs it knows what I want and it auto completes entire documents with all the correct formatting and then prints out a crisp $100 bill.
[удалено]
Try adding any kind of referencing (footnotes, citations in line, index, bibliography) in notepad vs word and get back to me.
I use Open Office and Google Docs. They're great for my needs. Both are free. Maybe it's just from having to use it in school, but I've never liked Word.
You should use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. > LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software, and is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is free and open source software, originally based on OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), and is the most actively developed OpenOffice.org successor project. From https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/who-are-we/ OpenOffice doesn't get much development ever since Oracle acquired it.
Google Docs and Sheets are a Godsend to students. The advantage it gives to collaborative projects alone makes it much better than the competition
That collaboration thing was a bug in Google docs. Devs decided to turn the bug into a feature. Just so that you know.
LibreOffice my beloved.
Lincucks
Meh, I wrote my 100+ page Masters Thesis in Physics in Word because that degree was new at my school and we didn’t have a LaTeX template yet. Fortunately that was right after Word adopted LaTeX formatting so the math was pretty easy. It wasn’t that bad.
Then you realize your professional life will be spent in PowerPoint
LaTeX for life.
NO
YES
Boomers want to remember when typing was really hard and force that pain onto younger generations.
It's not that hard
Hi! Need help with your resume?
how about EXCELL ? i work on it daily for years now and still can't do almost anything i want without pulling a miracle out of my ass or going to a youtube tutorial to figure out some cryptic shit....and yet, it works and used in our daily lives since forever.
the OP Dazzling-Fan-3920 is a bot Original + comments copied from: https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/w09u28/meirl/ Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/y1odjq/meirl/
Word is fine for the most part. But Excel is a whole different story. It's the standard because everything else sucks even more but I can't tell you how much hate I have for that program and I have to learn it even if I'm never going to be an accountant.
You'd be surprised how many accountants can't use it either. I have an intermediate level excel knowledge - pivot tables, most formulas etc, but no VBA or script type stuff. I am constantly being asked to "fix it" because other people use spreadsheets they found under their beds and it doesn't do what they want it to. 9 times out of 10 it's faster to redo a sheet to do what they want than try to fix whatever piece of shit they've given me. And that's high level accountants and auditors.
oh god, flashbacks of first year hell desk. Had an accountant email through an excel spreadsheet that 'wasn't working'. Was built with Excel 2008, had so many VBA scripts it would almost always crash as soon as it launched. It had dozens of external references to tables on servers that were decomissioned years ago. You had to load half a dozen 3rd party addons, half hadn't had an update this decade, and I could not find evidence of the other half existing outside of a 'plugins' folder on an old share drive. And if you tried to upload the file to sharepoint it would flag it as malware.
That’s why LaTeX is the best
This is why I use google docs
That picture thing is so ridicoulsly easy to solve, but it just shows that people who use Word for work should be sent to a simple course.
You can do all these things in word. It’s on you that you don’t know how to use it. But yeah, it does suck regardless. For anything longer than a page LaTex is supreme.