

Charles Stross replaces MS Office 2011 for OS X with LibreOffice  - davidgerard
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/24/utterly_unusable_ms_word_dumped_by_scifi_author_charles_stross/?mt=1424891474775

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static_noise
This is about Microsoft Word on MacOSX - many people may not know that
Microsoft Office on Mac is a different product from Microsoft Office on
Windows.

It is a much smaller market so bigger problems are to be expected. Glad that
LibreOffice works for him but the current title of this submission is just a
flamebait and misleading.

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davidgerard
It's the actual title from the page.

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DanBC
Yes, the register relies on shitty linkbait titles and pisspoor "journalism".

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WalterSear
I don't think we should be rewarding people for turning 3 tweets into an
article without actually adding anything to them.

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davidgerard
Stross expands on the tweets in the comments.

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freehunter
Maybe Stross has different needs as a writer, but I work for a company that
provides RHEL laptops to their employees as a rule, and we also get Windows
VMs just to be able to run Microsoft Office, even though Libre Office comes
preinstalled. There's no way they would go through the trouble of licensing
RHEL, then licensing Windows, then licensing Office if it wasn't any better
than Libre Office.

This article is almost completely useless. What does it matter what tools an
author uses, especially when he's very opinionated on the topic? You can't
even extrapolate this to other authors due to that fact.

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EliRivers
I don't use MS Office because it's better; I use it because people keep
sending me bloody MS office documents, and they complain if I send back
anything that isn't an MS office document.

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sp332
LibreOffice can read and save .docx and other MS Office formats just fine. And
MS Office can read and save .odt files. So what's the problem?

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freehunter
Have you ever opened a PPT in Libre Office? Or a doc with pictures? Or a
spreadsheet with any advanced features?

Just because they're capable of opening each others formats doesn't mean
they're good at it.

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anjc
Maybe it's a matter of opinion. My opinion is that Office has its faults, but
having written hundreds of <30 page documents and numerous >100 page ones,
nothing comes close to being as...acceptable as Office. Google Docs, for
example, is utterly unusable past 30 or 40 pages. Latex is beautiful but often
not worth the hassle.

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maaaats
Google Docs is also incredibly limited. It's like using Wordpad. I can't
believe how often it's suggested as the Word killer, when it's absolutely
useless for anything but plain text with some headings.

~~~
anjc
I love its collaborative aspect (which is impossible to use when the document
is longer than 30 pages), but you're right, it's not even close to being a
Word killer.

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bbody
I have been using Scrivener
([http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php))
for writing I do, it is cheaper than MS Office and seems more geared towards
authors. But I don't know if it solves his change tracking problem.

~~~
sp332
Stross also composes in Scrivener. He explains the workflow in the comments.
[http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/02/24/utterly_u...](http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/02/24/utterly_unusable_ms_word_dumped_by_scifi_author_charles_stross/#c_2448418)

~~~
bbody
My apologies, I didn't see that. Now the article makes a lot more sense.

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leni536
Well, for writing a novel isn't markdown more than enough? I usually use LaTeX
and I don't know much about the tools around markdown, however I wouldn't
suggest LaTeX to a SciFi author right away. I assume it's kind of easy to
handle with pandoc.

Change tracking is quite easy this way: use your favorite diff utility. You
can even version control your documents if you want.

Also, what publishers do with the resulting .doc or .odf files anyway? I
assume they throw away all formatting the author did and they do the
typesetting in some more professional tool. If this is the case the author
shouldn't care about typesetting at all and just pour the contents of his/hor
novel in a text file. Markdown is suitable for this.

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DanBC
You totally miss the point: authors do not want to use MS Word. Stross only
uses Word because it's what his publisher forces him to use. He apparantly
uses Scrivener to write with Word as a final step for the publisher.

(This is why the Register fucking sucks: their empty article failed to mention
this; it's all in the comments and the comments are hidden.)

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leni536
TBH the shitty article tricked me to think that Stross uses Word (or from now
Libreoffice) all alone. I do not know Scrivener, it could be a really good
product and it seems that it works well for him for dealing with editors who
are only willing to use .doc files.

Although I missed _the point_ I still have a point. And that's is that the
author and the editors shouldn't mess with formatted documents since it only
makes change tracking significantly more complicated compared to plain text
files or markdown files. Of course you have to bump into editors who are
willing to deal with plain text files or markdown files (I assume it's not
going to happen).

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yuhong
One of the older blog comments talked about problems opening Word 5.1 files in
Word 2011 for Mac. It wasn't difficult to find files that would cause problems
myself.

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davidgerard
MS Word is really bad at compatibility with itself. LibreOffice does ancient
Word files much better than MSO.

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yuhong
I am talking about the Word 2011 for Mac version only though. The Word 5.1
files open fine in all the Windows versions I tried after the format is
unblocked.

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integraton
It's pretty interesting how a story about both Charlie Stross and software
usability, complete with Charlie Stross providing additional information in
the story's comments, was inexplicably knocked within minutes (the time it
took me to read the story and comments here) from the front page to the third
page (at 12 points and less than an hour old), following an interesting
pattern related to stories that shed any sort of negative light on Microsoft
or the company's products.

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DanBC
People flag the register because, as this examples shows, the titles are link
bait and the articles are worthless.

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integraton
This article is not "worthless." It's a popular writer whose blog is notably
popular here on Hacker News talking about writing software usability.

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DanBC
But the only value is in the comments where stross explains his workflow and
explains why Word is broken. This shitty article fails to provide any
information that can't be got from Twitter.

