Post #1275084

2026-01-31 17:30 UTC

I consider myself a Word power user. I've spent 1000s of hours in it and I know just about every obscure feature and quirk. I've designed professional corporate template suites in it. I hate it so much. It is so fucking archaic and janky. It has so many modal dialogs. There are features I need to get to regularly that are like 6 modal dialogs deep, and I have to close them all to see if the change I made was good; if not I have to go through them all over again. It has a sort of stylesheet, but it has built in styles that you can't delete if you don't need, and the inheritance hierarchy among them is a mess. Then there are "font themes" which are conceptually separate from the styles but can impact them. I could go on. All the Word alternatives aren't much better because they imitate Word too closely in my opinion. I think the approach to word processors needs to be rethought at fundamental level.

Replies (6)

@balsoft@lemmy.ml 2026-01-31 17:56

I haven't seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, L^A^T~E~X for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.

Open ##1275203
@jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 2026-02-01 00:14

Yeah, word processors are garbage. Oddly, Google Docs is the least junky one, probably because JS had a bunch of limitations at the time it was started, and Google had to limit the features. I’ve been pretty happy with Pandoc, some LaTeX, and scripts. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.

Open ##1275204
@ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2026-02-01 00:52

You didn't even mention the ribbon lol.

Open ##1275208
@RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 2026-01-31 18:30

God the style presets in OnlyOffice are driving me insane. Sometimes they apply, and change the style accordingly, sometimes not. Sometimes they need a double click to apply _all_ of the styling. They reset with any page formatting change. The list is comically absurdly long, and yeah, some aren't deletable. What the fuck are T1 through T94? Why can't I just create a few custom header and footer styles for my document? It's just a piece of fiction. It doesn't need 307 different header styles, and every possible variation of footnote, goddamn.

Open ##1275209
@ranzispa@mander.xyz 2026-01-31 20:05

When I have to work on docx I generally can do it with LibreOffice and I'm quite happy with that. Sometimes I can not, I had for example this pesky thing which wouldn't let me edit parts of the document as it was locked, especially on tables. No amount of conversations across file formats fixes that for some reason. That is when I have to open up the office365 webpage. What a fucking piece of garbage. Most things you mention do not even exist in there. You can write a document and add comments, managing styles is already a bit too much for the yearly fee they charge you. I hope they make it possible again to install the office suite on Linux. And in no way I'm saying I like LibreOffice better than word, they're both quite terrible; but at least one of them runs on my system.

Open ##1275210
@MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2026-01-31 19:53

Basically a lightweight markup (instead of xml) in a container to carry media and styles with it?

Open ##1275211