[kaliszad]

There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. If your corporate application doesn't run with a useful web interface, you probably have other issues too.

Word is an application that puts looks, thousands of mostly useless features and pixel-pushing up front. Excel at least really enables normal people to do some advanced calculations on data but the former still applies. Both are very complex tools mostly hindering any kind of value-added thinking and creativity but give you enough foot-guns and are really "fun" to support if you count Outlook in as well. I mean, how do you program an application that regularly crashes and corrupts the email database? LibreOffice is the same kind of thinking, because it mostly is a copy of the ideas in Word, Excel etc. Actually, when we are at it, Google Docs is more or less as problematic as the other tools.

Actually, just opening any of these applications seems a bit overwhelming. Why should you care that the readable font is 11 or 12 px big (it actually isn't that comfortable to read, but ok)? Why should you care that the default font is called Calibri or whatever? This is information and complexity that is shown by default that usually adds exactly nothing to your business. The same is with colours. Why should you want to have the option to select custom colours with two clicks or so when most people choose colours badly? The default colours offered are really not that great either.

[macintux]

You’re arguing against decades of experience to the contrary.

I certainly would prefer plain text for most content a business generates, but the market has overwhelmingly voted in the other direction.

I believe for some interactions with the U.S. government Word is even mandatory. And it’s effectively mandatory for collaboration with everyone else.

[futuretaint]

many industries are dependant on Excel also. entire industries. Accounting, finance etc...

[kaliszad]

You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars.

Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)

[arcturus17]

Spreadsheets are insanely versatile and useful. I think if you were to redesign a lot of the things they do as custom apps, you’d end up with poorer version of a spreadsheet, like you’re saying.

I’ve experienced this first-hand when building custom business apps. You’re building your UI in React or whatever only to conclude: “Fuck, this is a spreadsheet.”

[kaliszad]

Actually, at OrgPad.com my colleague Pavel (~Paul) is writing a collaborative editor in ClojureScript + re-frame/ Reagent/ React. There is even a very rough video about it (in Czech though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY where you can see the current state of work, including the debugger Pavel has written. We will have some basic tables/ spreadsheets in the final version and we plan on having some very cool table calculation abilities later. ;-) So yeah, we thought about it.

[kaliszad]

Here is a more technical video in English that was just uploaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVcNmNFzmc

[kaliszad]

That people use something and maybe even extract some business value from doing so doesn't necessarily mean the product or the ideas around it are great and cannot be improved upon in various substantial ways. People used to ride horses and cows, people used slaves for manual work instead of inventing and using the steam engine at scale much earlier e.g. in ancient Greece or Rome.

I don't mind rich text and I know a bit of typography to avoid some common mistakes but I don't think most users really appreciate a full scale of sizes in pixels for a font or other information not relevant to the content they are producing. Most would be much better of using normal, small, large, very large for presentation or posters or something like that. The absolute values could be set in settings or overwritten somewhere maybe but Word isn't actually meant for designing websites or posters. It does all of those things to some degree but it very much isn't the right tool for the job in those areas and shouldn't be treated like one.

Btw. nobody can tell, if the businesses wouldn't be better of using something more robust than Excel even when that would mean actually training people to use a different tool. Most companies probably never train Excel, so even using that is very certainly inefficient. You know, there isn't much business value in Excel macros with viruses in them or macros nobody understands - so maybe what they calculate isn't even correct in some or all cases.

Excel is great for some things, but for many things it is used in practise it is actually quite bad. E.g. some people write working hours in Excel. There are much better apps just for that. You could have Google or Microsoft Forms, that are much easier and more robust. The data can then be used as well in a spreadsheet or imported into a DB. Unfortunately, Word and Excel (and Outlook) have developed their own gravity field in many industries and so the (very low) local maxima cannot be escaped (somewhat easily).

Having a government use anything as a stamp of approval does it a bit of disservice. If we would rely on current governments for innovation, we could just as well return to the caves directly. More seriously, if by collaboration you mean sending people word documents by email named final-assessment-v2-final.doc (because docx hasn't really arrived in many places and people suck at useable version control) then I am with you. Everyone else (including you probably) just writes the text into the email directly or uses something actually collaborative (for example Google Docs). The real final version is produced, after a consensus has been reached using more efficient communication channels.

The state of affairs is the market for pretty much everything currently is in a bubble. The US governments debt is more than twice the total amount of gold mined during the whole of human history (https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...) if a tonne of gold is roughly worth 60 Mio. USD. We haven't improved the working efficiency since the end of 90s much if you are frank. I wouldn't be so sure the market is a good measure of a products absolute quality actually.

[mlac]

This is similar to the plain text argument, but the main thing about standard ms office apps is that they are accessible and easy to use. I can use excel to open a spreadsheet made in the last 20 years.

I know everyone who has worked in an office setting can at least open and read a spreadsheet. I don’t know about an ms form or an access DB. The default (and sometimes only) ways most people can process text files on their machine is notepad or word. Word is way better than notepad for text processing.

If I send out a docx file, I know the formatting will be consistent when they open it. We can track changes easily without having non-technical people figuring out git or some other repo, and it will be compatible and easily viewable if we acquire any companies or are acquired.

The MS apps have basically become the standard applications to process plain text.

Lastly, I understand the value of some applications for data processing over excel. But when you’ve got to train up a new marketing or sales person every 6 months in R, that will get old very quickly. You can at least expect they know Excel and should be able to understand a spreadsheet.

[kaliszad]

Actually, Microsoft Office apps (others are not much better if at all) are not objectively easy to use for everyone. Just sit down a kid in the 2. or 3. grade and let them write about what they like with some structure, include pictures, print it out. You can go further: can they share a Word or Excel document on social media and will it generate a preview or do people have to download the whole document first and have some app that understands office documents installed? Ok, now sit them down in front of a brand new computer with Windows. How long will it take until they can edit a document in Microsoft Word, when they have to buy and install Office first?

Not very hard tasks to me - because I have done all of them hundreds of times. Other, even more advanced tools by Microsoft of course would fare much worse even with people like you and me, otherwise quite proficient with digital tools, if we haven't learned to use the one tool beforehand.

Yeah, Word is better than Notepad if what you want is to write rich text, but is it actually much better than WordPad from the usability perspective?

You have other problems, when your environment is so unstable that you have to hire new people every 6 months. Nowadays, you cannot expect any knowledge really unless the people can show a certification. Even a diploma in CS from a university doesn't mean the people know how to program useful stuff.

[mlac]

I’m not saying they are easy to use, but they are the standard. I’m also not saying I like that they are the standards, but everyone with 3+ years experience at a large company out of college can use Word to edit text in a document. Or should be expected to.

A new trainee every six months for a sales or marketing department isn’t crazy - it could be growing or a team of 6 people rotating out every ~3 years. I’ve bounced between WYSIWG and plain text, but there is a hard and steep learning curve when you ask people to use plain text.

Word also has spell-check and other features we take for granted.

[ericd]

As far as I can tell, the legal world still runs completely on Word redlining/track changes. Also, Excel almost literally runs many businesses.

As long as those are true, I'm not sure you can say "there just isn't much you really need eg. Word for", unless you're never on the business side. If you deal with the people who use them, you probably also want to use them to avoid headaches. Network effects are a bitch.

If you're only ever slinging code, sure, congrats, you may never need to use either.

Note, I'm not arguing that either is good.

[breakfastduck]

> There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for.

You can't be serious. There's not much businesses need excel for?

[kaliszad]

Do they need table calculation or do they need Excel specifically?

I am not saying, Excel isn't useful in any case. I am saying, it is very far from a good solution in many, many cases and state concrete examples.

[matwood]

Everyone only uses 10 features from Excel, the problem is that those 10 features are different for every user. Anytime someone says users don't need Excel or it can be easily replicated by some other tool, they likely haven't spent much time with Excel or users.

[kaliszad]

Well, I have used Excel extensively so I know its warts very well. You can use Excel right but in my experience anytime I have seen even quite capable people working with Excel, nobody in that work setting would exactly describe it as fun. I know at least one person, who really uses Excel very proficiently and maybe even have something approaching fun while doing it. But he is literally teaching Excel to other people. I have done 30 hours in his course and learned quite a bit.

[breakfastduck]

Being unfun to use != being useless to the business

[ocdtrekkie]

You'd be shocked how dependent office staff can be on obscure MS Office features that I, a systems engineer, has literally never heard of and couldn't imagine someone needed.

Heck, this year I watched someone struggle to find and license a third party add-on just to do a mail merge on Google Workspace.

[kaliszad]

I know, I have seen it first hand. It was lots of wasted time for very little value pretty much every time I have seen it. I hope you have a better experience.

Most of the time, actually stepping back a bit and thinking about the problem at hand for a minute can save many hours of tedious work. E.g. keeping track of hours worked - probably just use Toggl and export a CSV at the end of a month or something - much better UX overall than a form in Excel that you have to print out. Doing project planing in anything from Excel, over SharePoint, OneNote, Outlook Calendar etc. was always extra hassle in my experience. Everything kind of works but not really, you avoid doing changes, because it is very tedious.

I have seen all the enterprise "Export to Excel" web interfaces that are usually so bad, you cannot get anything done without the Export/ Import feature. I mean, Export/ Import is great but maybe you should just have na API and/or a useable web interface. There of course, Excel/ Spreadsheet is a temporary saviour but you should think about why do you have to use such a bad software system at all!