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by zelphirkalt 1595 days ago
It is the kind of software, that is shitty, but millions of people use, because they are unaware of how much better software for the same purpose can be, because they have not tried other options. Every time I have to use either a Google docs document or some Office 365 document, I discover things like nested unordered lists being broken, no styles for some kind of element, not being able to save new styles. It is just ridiculous, that people consider these softwares to be appropriate solutions. They are the lowest common denominator plus an extra portion of bugs.

Powerpoint on Office 365 is a joke. You try to work with bullet lists in a presentation and you are f'ed. The stupid thing doesn't work. Indentation and unindentation are not 2 opposite operations that easily revert each other. It's completely broken.

Recently I hit another bug in online Excel. Whenever I would enter a number into a cell, it would take that number, split it up into digits and add line breaks between those digits. wtf. I was unable to input a simple integer number correctly into any cell. How has this bug even been deployed without anyone noticing?! I guess they don't have proper quality assurance, testing with all major browsers. Or they just out of principle give me the middle finger, because I am not using their silly Edge browser.

Don't get me started about how sluggish everything feels.

Similar is true for MS Teams. That is one of the biggest offenders. MS has, in the year 2022, still not managed to do, what Discord and others have gotten solved years ago. Voice chat in the browser. You cannot use MS Teams with Firefox properly. It will tell you something about your browser not being supported, while it is actually them who f'ed up and basically every other voice chat solution works just fine. They try to give you that picture of your browser being inappropriate, while their own shitty software is the thing that is inappropriate. Surely scares many people into using Edge or something. MS Teams has always had a bug in the desktop app (which you have to use, if you don't want to use a non-Firefox browser ...), that at some point it tells me, that my "microphone is not working". It is a silent warning, that pops up in the call window, so that I only see it, when I look there. No notification, no warning sound, nothing. I basically only notice, when someone asks, whether I am still in the call. But that's not all, no no ... They recently f'ed it up even more, by simply not _showing_ that message any longer! Now the bug hits me completely silently. Must have been one great bugfix of some developer there. "Hey, how can we make that bug go away? Ah, I know! Just don't show that error bubble any longer! Then no one will know that there is a bug! I can go home early today!" -- Or whatever that person has been thinking.

That is the state of Office 365 as well. Bug-ridden shitty software, that doesn't get the most basic things right. I think Word 95 or something worked better. With Google docs the functionality is even more limited. It's like a little child's toy, compared to an actual word processor. Take any of the bigger free/libre solutions, they are hundreds of times better than those Google docs or Office 365 toys.

2 comments

One issue with Office 365 Excel that I forgot to mention: Try moving the cursor using the arrow keys on your keyboard real quick. For me it sometimes deletes cell contents, when I press right+down. (How can such a thing ever happen?!) I found this when I was idly trying to move the selection in a "circle" (well a square of 2x2 cells) and mispressed.
So what do you use for slides?
When it is forced upon me, I have to use Office 365 on the job. That is how I discover all these silly issues.

When it is not forced upon me, I usually use LibreOffice Impress, which also has its issues. When I am done, I export as PDF and then use presentation mode of my PDF reader to present the slides.

I have also seen fancy online tools, which have simpler slides but more navigation during presentation, with up,down,left,right switchting to other slides in a "field of slides" instead of a mere "sequence of slides" like in traditional more power point like tools. I would also like to use things like the Racket lang for slides for example, but haven't looked at it in detail.

But when making a presentation for the job, it might contain material, that is not to be released, so I can only use the sanctified online tool (Office 365), or offline tools. What's more is, that there is a sort of template, which I am supposed to conform to, which of course is done in Office 365 Powerpoint. And of course you cannot export that template properly, to use it in other applications. Well, at least one thing I noticed positively about Office 365: You can export finished documents to Open Document Foundation formats like .odt. That is actually a move, that I do not fully understand MS making. Usually they want to keep everything in the MS world, everything proprietary formats, but then they offer that export. It's almost unreal.

Anyway, even if there was no better tool, that would still not be a justification or excuse for the absolute horrible quality of software, that is Office 365 and Google Docs. I would feel more comfortable using a DSL to code up my slides than using those tools.