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Every time I make a submission to an editor and they say they want it in .doc because they like to work offline in Word I just instantly know some things about the person’s appetite for quality

At least I didn’t have to pay for Google Slides.

MS products have this Stockholm Syndrome aura about them. People are so used to them being crap that it feels like that's what's normal.

If there is one phrase I’ve said consistently for 40 years it’s “oh Microsoft”

All garbage and have been for decades

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwjB...

And yet, they're not remotely as bad as google docs/sheets/etc... If you're writing any document longer than a memo, use LyX.

I used PowerPoint extensively for years. Many a curse word was known to waft from my office.

Same here!! Google drive , Word and Excel suck! I liked them much better on my 10 year old Mac. On an iPad they’re less than user friendly.

I just can’t believe so many kids in schools are still having to suffer… it being the product they are taught to use.

The "attention to detail" bit isn't particularly needed, although some familiarity with LaTeX would be essential (esp. generating it to a PDF). Creating a slide presentation in Beamer didn't take long at all, esp when saving the time I normally had wrestling with PowerPoint's "Autoformat".

Slides appear to be an easy zero install option to try.

If you have a Mac, try Keynote

The more I work with minimal UI document creation tools like Markdown / HTML with CSS, LaTeX and even things like @Notion (or other accessible Markdown editors), the less I can tolerate "old-school" document creation tools. Also #marp for presentations. Using these together with version control 🤩

I prefer Apple’s keynote.

Felt exactly the same. Basic formatting, such as bullets, now becomes an arduous task.

What would you replace it with? I'm starting to budget and the massive excel Bibles led me to believe it was nice and feature packed.

Outlook is SSSOOOOO annoying. Search function sucks.

Pretty sure that’s the issue-people on the product teams want to show their superiors that they are adding features or change them, instead of just trying to make the user experience easier and more smooth. Bonuses and promotions linked to something more quantifiable. Plus captive clients.

Do you remember toolbar hell?

Ribbon isn't a bad concept, it's just so poorly implemented. Frequently end up clicking around the ribbon tabs scanning each for the feature I want.

I blame Clippy.

Same guy behind Teams.

It seems to de-improve with each update.

Did you mention that it lowers your productivity?

I mean what scenario would you possibly need to know that :)

PowerPoint is the only decent-ish one (at least for my use-cases). Word makes me physically ill, Especially if there is a sketchy template involved

I only use office if a spreadsheet has to many rows for Google Sheets (usually over 10,000).

So many people in my industry use Macs. Nobody uses Pages, despite it being a far superior program. I sigh.

My agency within the federal government insists on us creating our training materials in Microsoft Word. Our incredibly image heavy training materials. When we have access to Adobe but they refuse to allow us to use it for this.

upthread consensus seems to be 1. Apple's Keynote, 2. Canva, 3. N/A.

I've been forced to use MS office products a whole as a professor at a college, and it's ridiculous. Awful UX, reduntant features, weird overlapping names like "groups" on Teams but "teams" on OneDrive... I hate it. Btw, now I use only Google stuff: Docs, Slides, Spreadsheets and so on. Much better

I had to use word a while back, and what shocked me is that it is somehow a significantly worse experience than using Word in the 00s How a program so simple could have devolved so much is beyond me

Design by committee!

My kids use it for school. Publisher crashes when changing layout settings and PowerPoint fails to open some pptx file, that libre office impress can open just fine. And don't get me started on the convoluted button presses required to save to hard disk on computer and not OneDrive...

I never moved away from Office 2007. DVD version.

I love how share screen and leave are right beside each other in Teams. I’m surprised I haven’t ended a meeting yet while trying to share.

Really dislike the new save as dialog

Try using them on sharepoint. Even worse.

Canva is a solution a lot of people have recommended

"PowerPoint is powerless and pointless like a butter knife. "Outlook always leaves me with a crappy outlook on life. "Excel only excels at crashing, which is absurd! "And all the other apps suck too! W-W-WORD!" -- thefump.com/music/song/p...

Comments used to be functional, now you might as well not even bother. it’s completely maddening

Oh, god, are you telling me Clippy is coming back after the inauguration along with all the other Russian agents in the new administration?

Excel is a marvelous tool.

It’s amazingly effective at turning decent Excel graphs into crap uglier than I would make if there were no default colors.

Switched to Figma. Not looking back.

While today’s tech/coding offers phenomenal productivity in word processing—still remember using “Word Star” and “Word Perfect” in learning how to word process in college. Today’s opportunities demonstrates HUGE progress comparably to past software.

I don’t like any Microsoft product because Microsoft has a bad habit of overstuffing and overdesigning everything. It’s powerful software sure, but it’s also cumbersome, bloated and inconvenient. It can do anything but you never wanna use it.

Formatting in Microsoft Word was the cause of nearly every one of my mental breakdowns in law school. Now I exclusively use Apple’s office suite.

Libreoffice is the only office suite anyone actually needs---and it's free.

My former law school used teams during the pandemic and I was taken aback by how bad it is compared to literally everything else

I've had to endure it for a couple years now. It's actually gotten BETTER in that time, but is still absolute shit. Amazing.

A tale as old as time.

The loading times baffle me, the telemetry is unnecessary, and the fact that the new outlook is basically a webapp has now become unusable, I miss the Eudora days.

I can open a word processor in <2 seconds on my 37y/o Amiga. Word on my modern 64-core amd x86_64 with oodles of RAM takes at least 20. They do the same job! Why is Word a web app, wrapped in a browser, disguised as a native app?! Modern software practices are baffling.

Microsoft help is sooooo bad too! Everytime I have to google how to do something in Microsoft Office I click in the Microsoft Help link thinking: "well, they're the experts!" spend 15 min trying to figure out the help, then googling the issue again.

Friends this weekend: we're doing minecraft for a month, join us! (and install this add-on, this extra pack, configure it this way, wait, don't use _that_ minecraft use this one, and also MS wants me to ...) I'm out, have fun

i reserve a special region of hatred in my heart for microsoft office specifically

I use 365 for work and every time I open a Word file on my iPad the formatting is completely borked. I just want to be able to make something on the desktop and easily pull it up on my mobile devices without it getting completely smegged up!

LibreOffice is love, LibreOffice is life

They make them worse so that the good ones shine even brighter. The sadistic bastards! It’s probably clippy whispering evil thoughts to them.

It takes years, decades even, of hard work, blood, sweat and tears to mess these things up so badly. Or you could just buy Apple. I used to take pride in spending less, but I’m older now and I have reached the point where I just don’t give a flying monkey…

Outlook is horrible too.

It's like meeting the aunt you haven't seen since you were 8 years old. My god she is small !

Me typing a sentence in PowerPoint... PowerPoint: Nah, you only wanted three of those words. Imma just gonna delete the rest.

It may be farther back than a decade now, but whenever they last changed the UI, it seems like they cut back on some features and just generally made it harder to use

And Excel makes my Mac choke if it is open at the same time as Word or PPT

i have been saying that excel is *easily* the least bad office product it's not so powerful as far as analysis and calculation programs go but for back-of-the envelope plotting and documentation it actually does the job which is more than its other microsoft office peers