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.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You didn't even mention the ribbon lol.

[–] sheridan@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I actually like the ribbon UI compared to what came before. Jensen Harris from the office design team way back in 2008 gave this talk about how they invented the ribbon:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the "hide the menus" concept as hard as I've always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.

[–] ranzispa@mander.xyz 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

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