Are Microsoft Office products the worst?

[40oz]

Is it just me or do Microsoft Office Products (eg powerpoint, word, excel) just terrible? It seems like the UI is just nonsensical and stupid... all the time.

I'm taking a course on Computer Information Systems and a majority of it is word processing and other Microsoft Office product related assignments. The layouts and options are different in between the different products, and a majority of the time, the type of document or presentation you visualize in your head is either impossible, or depends on a lot of hacky weird methods that are more trouble than theyre worth. Your basically limited to the predefined templates it create for you unless you want your presentation to look like shit. Microsoft Word is a little better at making things look good and the way you want them, but it's even better at being extremely frustrating and not letting you do the basic things you want it to do unless you know the software really well.

Just today, I was working on an assignment and part of it was to create a logo for a company, and make a letterhead, a powerpoint presentation, and business cards for the company. But for whatever reason, after I got the font and background image the way I wanted it, I can't copy paste the text and the background in the same proportions to fit a giant title slide in a presentation and then a tiny business card. I had to manipulate the fonts and images each time to make it look the same in all three things. And when I pasted the text in Powerpoint, and made the font size bigger, the text outline appeared thinner than it was supposed to, but you can't make text outlines inside powerpoint for some reason, So I went back to word, but apparently you can't make the font size any bigger than 72. HOWEVER, I could copy and paste the text from the powerpoint into my word document with the correct font size, then edit the text outline to be thicker, then paste it BACK into powerpoint. What the fuck, Microsoft?

I actually haven't had much trouble with Excel, myself, but I have had plenty needless inconsistencies when editing someone elses excel document, such as font sizes, spacing, and text alignment issues that were annoying to fix.

Am I just an idiot or are these programs really haphazard and stupid to use?

[Kontra Kommando]

I don't have an issue with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. But I think Outlook is terrible.

[Mr. Freeze]

I remember comparing learning Excel to decrypting the Zodiac's letters. I'm better at it now, but its interface is a massive pain in the balls.

[Memfis]

Word seems very confusing to me: click on one spot and I'm writing with these font settings, then click on another and suddenly different settings are used. Copypasting from one part of the text (or even worse, from another program) to the other is especially hard: you never know what it will look like until you try. Then you need to insert an image and you want to align it to the text in a specific way but...

[esselfortium]

Excel has some weird idiosyncrasies to get used to, but it is powerful as heck.

[Fulgrim]

I ditched Microsoft office for Open Office years ago. If you are looking for a alternative, I'd give it a shot.
https://www.openoffice.org

[Bucket]

Pre-2007, MSOffice was as good as it got. Then the ribbon interface was actually obtuse to the point where my productivity suffered. Now I just use Google Docs.

[Aliotroph?]

The ribbon appears have been an attempt to get people like my mom using more features in Office. It didn't work. The hilarious thing is other companies like Autodesk copied MS on that front. Why? Is there some kind of n00b who really needs to start clicking more buttons in AudoCAD?

I haven't used much PowerPoint in my life, but once I got a handle on all the things you can automate with Word 2007+ I was pretty impressed. So many people could do their work faster if their organizations standardized the sets of styles and templates installed in their copies of Word. Usually what happens instead is a document is written by somebody who understands the styles features and the automated contents and then gets passed to some clueless fool who can't figure it out and breaks it. Then three more people break it in different ways. Fun.

[fraggle]

So, disclaimer: I work (not directly but very tangentially) on a product that's a competitor to Office so you might consider me biased.

I consider the present-day MS Office to be a relic of the '90s.

Firstly in terms of its interface: it has too many features that clutter the interface and make it complicated to use. This is probably the result of a features war from back in the '90s - before Office became the dominant tool, it had to compete against other popular word processors (like WordPerfect), and having features that your competitor doesn't is a cheap way to "one up" them. The features war is long over, but now you're in the situation where Microsoft surely don't want to remove any of those features because there will always be a small number of people using any given feature, and removing them will never help you sell more copies.

Microsoft has tried for years to try to deal with the bloated interface. Remember Clippy? Back in the early 2000s they also added that irritating "Smart Menus" feature that would hide menu items that you didn't use so often. The Ribbon is just the latest attempt to simplify the interface and possibly their most successful - personally I consider it a deeply obnoxious evisceration of the traditional menu/toolbar interface, but I've encountered quite a few people who seem to like it, so maybe I'm just stuck in my ways.

The other way that it's a relic from the '90s is that it's fundamentally a tool that predates the Internet. MS Office comes from a time where you shared your documents with others on floppy disks. If you're just writing a letter to your grandma it doesn't make a lot of difference, but if you're collaborating with others it actually makes a huge difference.

If you've ever collaborated with someone else to write something using Word you'll probably have experienced what a nightmare it is to use. You inevitably have to carefully divide up who will write which sections, it's a frenzy of .doc files emailed back and forth while you lose track of which comments have been addressed, which sections those comments are referring to and what's the latest version of the document.

All of these problems go away if you use a tool that's designed from the start to support online collaboration. Even Microsoft seem like they may have realised this with Office 365, though I haven't tried it myself so I don't know if it's any good.

Sadly the ubiquity of .doc files and the fact that MS Office is the only tool that can reliably work with them 100% of the time means that it's probably never going to go away and will be around for years to come. But hopefully over time people will gravitate to better things.

Aliotroph? said:

The ribbon appears have been an attempt to get people like my mom using more features in Office. It didn't work. The hilarious thing is other companies like Autodesk copied MS on that front. Why?

Microsoft themselves seem to consider the ribbon a huge success, which I find incredible, because personally I find it to be an incoherent amalgam of different UI elements. Possibly there are people who prefer it just because having icons and visual controls is more "friendly" than text-based menus.

The more troubling thing is that since introducing the ribbon in Office they seem to have gone on to add it in a dogmatic and thoughtless way into all of their other products. A while back I read this blog post that does a really good job of dissecting Microsoft's crazy rationalization of how they added it into Windows Explorer.

[geo]

I'm still using Office 2002, far better than anything else. I just can't use the more recent versions of Office from the past decade. The interface is cumbersome and stupid and you know what? Nothing is wrong with it after 13 years.

[axdoomer]

I have been a big Microsoft user since I ever started computing. A year ago, I decided to get rid of Windows and use Linux. That wasn't easy because a lot of things that I needed to do required some Windows program. If Microsoft didn't have a monopoly, it would be much easier to switch to something else. When they change one of their programs (eg: Ms Office Word) and add something you hate (eg: Ribbon thingy), you're force to use it, else you must use the older one that's no longer updated (and they like to tell you that you must buy the new version because the older one may have security issues).

It's difficult to do some professional work on LibreOffice when almost everybody uses MS Office and your formatting gets screwed up when they load your document. Google Docs has made my life easier. It's free and people can't complain they don't want to use it because it's a cloud software that runs in a browser, so you don't have to install it. When you're a student, you can see others' changes in Google Docs in real-time in the cloud and that makes it the ultimate tool for team work.

It needs patience to find alternatives and when you have to do work that somehow depends on C# or ASP.Net, there is no solution but to use Microsoft's OS.

While I'm studying, I get Windows 8.1, MS Visual Studio Ultimate, Office and fifty other MS software of all sort for free. That's just another Microsoft's strategy to make future software developers dependent on their tools and make money.

That's not their only strategy, for example Visual Studio has non-standard features available so your C++ source code won't compile on other compilers

It's not the first time they use such strategies. They have been sued because they were doing their own Java compiler that made programs that only run well on Windows because they didn't want people to run their own programs on other OSes, but it's supposed to run on every OS.

Microsoft has a pre-installed OS monopoly and has been sued by the US for that. You can read about their doubtful and abusive practices on the web.

Spoiler

Summary: M$ is Evil. Bill Gates is driven by control and he likes monopoly.

[raymoohawk]

the only office program i like is the most recent onenote. i loved using that thing with my wacom. my current computer doesnt have it tho. i recently started using libre office instead of microsoft office, only program i miss is onenote.

[Inkie]

Fulgrim said:

I ditched Microsoft office for Open Office years ago. If you are looking for a alternative, I'd give it a shot.
https://www.openoffice.org

I remember using it back in high school. Worked well, but when I saved in office format to use in class Office wouldn't recognize the files. They had to be opened manually.


I blame office stagnation on when Office came prepackaged with all windows machines. Made competition from other office programs difficult, and really stagnated the market.

[Holering]

You may not agree but Microsoft Office suite is perhaps the most powerful in the world. For professional employees, accountants, project management, and business purposes, Microsoft Office is the only way. There's alternatives like "Libre Office", "Abi Word", etc, but you don't get the robust support of Microsoft and their third parties.

I think the only Microsoft Office product that might seem worse than previous versions is "Office 2013". It appears to have touch devices in mind so many of its uses and functions may seem alien or plain worse.

[Doominator2]

What I find worse about the microsoft office products is that every time they update, they change the layout making it more confusing than efficient.

[GreyGhost]

Fulgrim said:

I ditched Microsoft office for Open Office years ago.

Same here, after falling out of love with Office 97 I flirted with 602PC Suite for a while then moved on to Open Office. I've also all but abandoned Microsoft's proprietary file formats in favour of the Open Document format.

[Superluigieth1]

Kontra Kommando said:

I don't have an issue with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. But I think Outlook is terrible.

[printz]

Isn't the ribbon meant to reduce the redundancy of having each command twice in the interface (one in the menu and also in the toolbar)? The ribbon basically unified the menu with the toolbar. DRY (don't repeat yourself).

I really like Word and Excel. They've been the first tools I've ever used on computers, and I love their customizability and moddability. I have less fondness of PowerPoint simply because of its purpose (presenting talks), and also its dumbed down feature set compared to Word, due to limited use case.

I think Office/Microsoft's best feature is great integration for workplaces (hence the name Office), not just the document editors.

Nowadays, I use it too rarely for it to be worth the price. Even the company I work at just uses LibreOffice (which is alright for doc editing, but lacking for email/messaging, where I have to use weak, inconsistent alternatives from other software). Still, I find LibreOffice quite buggy, unlike (pretty surely) Office.

Do other jobs than mine really juggle Word docs all day?

[Maes]

Inb4 somebody claims that the vi/LaTeX combo is much more awesome than Word, l0l.

As for the various word processor "alternatives": they are not really viable alternatives to Word if you have to collab with people who are already using Word, and you can't risk discovering which feature/formatting/object will be mangled by the (always imperfect) import/expert options of LibreOffice/OpenOffice/Google Docs/whatever (BTW, I'm fairly sure all three use the same "Word Alternative" engine underneath, so their capabilities and limitations are similar). BTW, since the DOC/DOCX format isn't an open one, you can't really expect perfect interoperability and a 1:1 feature match in any alternative/competitor product.

These alternatives are only good if you only work on documents with a minimal set of common features that everybody's favourite word processor can handle, keep your documents to yourself, plan to distribute only their final printed versions (or uneditable electronic versions, e.g. PS or PDF), or collab strictly with people who have all agreed to use the same word processor as yourself.

Yeah yeah, we all know word processors with a proprietary binary format are bad and are the poorest means of exchanging documents in a collab environment, but like it or not, Word is the de-facto industry standard. Even in academia, the use of Word far surpasses the "proper" LaTeX approach (and many academics never even touch the stuff. I'm guilty of that myself).

[Aliotroph?]

I'm with you there. LaTeX can be strangely error prone. It will often make a mistake formatting a document similar to what Word does, but it will be harder to fix. It's probably made worse by all the different packages from different developers that don't necessarily want to talk to each other correctly. There was a time my friend tried to install ArabTeX. He gave up. It always broke no matter what we did with it. His LaTex'd CV does look damn pretty, though.

To answer printz's question: yes. So many jobs involve nonstop Word documents. I suspect a lot of them involve retyping Word documents because they always seem to lose the original one and now only have a poorly-scanned PDF of the printout. People need to learn how to search their inboxes.

[Maes]

As anyone who has ever written a paper in collab knows, Word documents often degenerate into a sort of meta-communication medium, with the review/comment feature forming entire discussion threads, as a document goes back and forth between contributors, not to mention the headache of merging different versions of the same document edited by different people...

That's definitively a case where an online editing system such as Google Docs has a definitive advantage -only one copy of the document to edit- but unless everybody agrees to use THAT and ONLY THAT right from the start, then it's pointless.

[flubbernugget]

I still like the ribbon

[Maes]

To go back to the OP, the various Microsoft Office products can have quite a different look & feel: Powerpoint feels like a toy, Word is a confusing mess of options, sub-menus, hidden functionality etc. while Excel usually was the "serious" of the bunch, plus there are the less well-known "members" of the Office family, like Visio, OneNote etc.

If anything, the ribbon interface somewhat unified the UI between those products.

[cq75]

fraggle said:

Microsoft themselves seem to consider the ribbon a huge success, which I find incredible, because personally I find it to be an incoherent amalgam of different UI elements. Possibly there are people who prefer it just because having icons and visual controls is more "friendly" than text-based menus.

The more troubling thing is that since introducing the ribbon in Office they seem to have gone on to add it in a dogmatic and thoughtless way into all of their other products. A while back I read this blog post that does a really good job of dissecting Microsoft's crazy rationalization of how they added it into Windows Explorer.

I quit using Microsoft Office unless I had to after Office 2003, I use Libreoffice now. I use Office 2010 at work, though.

I'm getting tired of hearing Microsoft saying that people will get used to their half baked UI ideas (e.g., Windows 8, the ribbon interface), I used Office 2010 for 3 years, almost every day, and I still am far less efficient with it than Office 2003, and it takes up more screen space (minimizing the tabs only works if the tab names are descriptive of what's in them, I can't remember what's in "Home" and what isn't).

I know it probably helps sales to make the new version of Windows / Office look different than the old version, I'm pretty sure this combined with limited competition in office / "let's copy apple/google" is the reason why these changes get suggested, and why they stick with them, not to make the software actually easier to use.

Autodesk put the ribbon in autocad, I'm guessing to try to make Autocad easier to learn, but yet for me coming from no experience at all with CAD tools, I immediately had an easier time learning Autocad with the menu bars (hovering over every icon to figure out what it does is slow), and I eventually settled in to manually typing commands.

[Linkrulezall]

yes


This post has been translated from its original form by the Ralposter 3000, saying things as Ralphis would say them with the touch of a button!

[Enjay]

I despise the ribbon interface. It's awful and slows you down when you are competent enough at computing to use a program quickly but not so familiar with a program that you know all the short-cut keystrokes to allow you to bypass the menus entirely.

IMO, as a single user, Office/Word (etc) 2003 was the best. However, I need to use the newer versions because my work does and people use "x" documents (*.docx etc) and features within them that only the newer versions of Word (etc) support.

You can get filters to load "x" documents in Office 2003 but the programs (understandably) don't support all the features of their newer versions and many of these are used without the users even realising that they are doing it. So, when you load up an "x" document in a 2003 version of the program, you may lose some formatting or feature of the original file. "x" documents are becoming increasingly ubiquitous so I have to use the version of office that supports them properly. In my experience, Open Office and similar alternatives do not do a good enough job of supporting those file types either.

[GreyGhost]

Enjay said:

In my experience, Open Office and similar alternatives do not do a good enough job of supporting those file types either.

It might help if Microsoft didn't have an annoying habit of re-inventing the wheel, then bullying everyone into using their version.

[axdoomer]

Micro$oft said:

Why make things easy and open-source when you can make them proprietary and complicated?

[chungy]

GreyGhost said:

It might help if Microsoft didn't have an annoying habit of re-inventing the wheel, then bullying everyone into using their version.

Only your first link is actually Microsoft's format (and so named to make it confused with OpenOffice). The second link is OpenOffice's original format, and the third is the standards-body submitted derivation that's meant for any software the implement; the latest version of Microsoft Office actually has full read/write support for it, which is fantastic for compatibility... if people have the latest version of Office.

If you really want an example of Microsoft fuckery, see this.

[Infirnex]

fraggle said:

Sadly the ubiquity of .doc files and the fact that MS Office is the only tool that can reliably work with them 100% of the time means that it's probably never going to go away and will be around for years to come.

This right here is the ONLY reason I still used Word. Otherwise I highly recommend LibreOffice instead, but it can be....finicky with doc files.