LeeAbe
4296
I would argue adjusting things is far easier, the only thing you have to learn is where the settings are.
It’s so hard to tell in Word where one paragraph ends and another begins, and which styles should affect new paragraphs. Or the spacing between paragraphs. Word seems to fight me at every step.
I read that Word’s predecessor, Microsoft Works, let you look at a document’s “source” or markup.
ed. It may have actually been Corel WordPerfect.
Learning page breaks was necessary, since page numbering differed between sections.
And of course, the margins of the appendix differed with margins.
Not that I’m aware of. But I have worked long and hard to get to a spot in my life where I can tell Word to get fucked forever.
Pretty dumb to require me to upload 6gb of videos plus game saves to one drive, then have to download it from one drive just to get it on a computer 2 feet away.
LeeAbe
4301
Most of that is just a button on the ribbon, or at worst a dialog box. It sounds like you just haven’t used it much. The hardest part of Word is knowing where to look for an option, but the help feature is pretty good at showing you.
Agreed it does sometimes get weird with formatting though, especially tabs, which drive me nuts.
I used to write my college papers in Pages, just because it’s pretty basic, and then format them in Word. Maybe I just got good at it?
LeeAbe
4302
On Apple stuff sure, not on Windows. At least in my experience.
Word Perfect for EVAR!
Editing in source was SOOOO easy!
It is less than $100 for a lifetime (I think) license. May be worth a try.
Is Apple putting out a decent WYSIWYG word processor these days? I honestly have no idea. When I’m writing text these days it’s typically either in a README.md or a Confluence page.
stusser
4306
Word is OK on MacOS. Excel is terrible though.
Thumb drive?
When it was a stand-alone app, OneDrive (SkyDrive?) was smart enough to know which PCs were local and avoid going out to the interwebs. Dunno if that survived when it got integrated into Windows.
LeeAbe
4308
Pages is fine, just basic. I like it because the interface is free of a million buttons and options, I can write without distractions. It is no where near as robust when you want to format though (and the interface can be frustrating). That’s why I would write college papers in it and then do the formatting in Word.
Of course it doesn’t support Markdown, and it seems like everything on MacOS supports Markdown (except anything from Apple or Microsoft).
That’s a bit harsh. I use Excel everyday on my Mac and it does everything it needs to. It’s just slow for some reason. Slow enough that it can be very annoying when making a new spreadsheet or you have lots of charts. It doesn’t have all the hotkeys that the PC version has either, or it if does, they aren’t obvious to me.
Excel on Windows is just a joy to use after you have used it on a Mac for awhile. So zippy and easy.
stusser
4309
Yes that’s why it’s terrible, it’s incredibly slow.
You should try out Mellel. Things like sections, font and style controls, layouts actually makes sense are is not something you constantly fight with (as in Word).
LeeAbe
4311
That looks pretty neat, I wonder why no one is the Mac podcast/blogging community ever mentions it? They all seem to use Ulysseses, AI Writer, etc.
If I had to write a college paper today, I would probably just use DEVONThink and format it in Word though. They weren’t that complex and I don’t think Word is as bad as others do.
Enidigm
4312
Mellel is fun and games until you try and export the project to a non-Mellel word processor. Be sure if you like Mellel to make it the last point of contact and dont need to share the unpublished document. Exporting to Word makes a giant mess.
Enidigm
4313
Because the YouTube tech community today is a bit masturbatory and can only perceive technology in terms of… making tech videos about technology. So things like “how fast can I process 4K video” is all anyone cares about now for computers; and for word processors, it’s basically either for writing scripts or for markup’ed up blog posts. Mellel is a technical paper processing software and these guys don’t write technical papers.
Although Ulysses/AI Writer also have iOS/MacOS cross compatibility and cloud saving through automatic cloud saves through iCloud, which make them easy to use on the go.
That’s true. Still, every other software fails when exporting to Word, when formatting and layout is important.
Mellel’s control of the sections and styles and it’s pricing and licensing is attractive enough for me as an alternative to MS Word. For people who accept pdf submissions, I’ll submit in that form.
For those who work with Word, they’ll have to accept a direct cut and paste into Word, they can then try to format using Word’s inconsistent (even between versions) and often extremely messy formatting. It’s a nightmare working with diagrams in Word, so much so that I render them as PNG now for embedding (and if I’m doing that, I may as well use Mellel, since the handling of pictures are far more consistent!).
Formatting with Word always seems to be a struggle, especially when cutting and pasting from other documents and then trying to align the formats. A few years ago, I had a systems analyst on a major project write a solutions overview using bits and pieces from other documents as well as new material. The result was a mish-mash of formatting that just got worse as we tried to fix it. I think we eventually dumped the whole thing as plain text and did the formatting from scratch.
