It’s basically an abysmal text editor combined with the worst page layout software the world has ever seen. Creating documents with it very much resembles masturbating with a blender.
Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.
So many open source options out there that if you think MS word is the only options out there then you’re not looking hard enough.
Do you really think the multi billion dollar company I work for is going to switch?
You ain’t paying. Why do you care?
To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It’s like trying to “edit” the ingredients of a cake after it’s finished. You don’t edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.
I edit PDFs all the time for work. It’s a pain in the ass, but perfectly doable. Trying to prevent people from editing files by making it annoying is not in any way a sane strategy.
As said it’s possible to edit PDFs but of cause it’s a pain in the ass because that format doesn’t have a lot of semantics information about the original source. PDF doesn’t understand how to reflow text to the next line.
It’s a bit like having a Photoshop file with many layers, saving the image as PNG, sending that PNG to someone else, they open it in Photoshop and than complain about why Photoshop is trying to prevent the PNG from being edited.
You can edit the PNG but it’s a pain in the ass because the original layer information is lost. Same with PDF. Nobody ever tried to prevent anyone from trying to edit PDFs but of it’s more that fixing some minor typo is certainly is a pain in the ass because thats not what this format was designed to do.
And yet… libreoffice does it pretty ok
Well yeah, because it’s not feasible to deconstruct a baked cake, not because “things that are made shouldn’t be edited”.
It’s also not feasible to deconstruct a PDF. It doesn’t have a concept of paragraphs and lines. Almost all semantic relations and information is lost while saving a PDF.
Except there are programs that can edit pdfs fine.
Editing PDFs is not a feature the format natively supports (or supported?).
To me the crappiest “feature” is that M$ intentionally disregards their own document standard to EEE the ecosystem and vendor-lock their consumers.Want to edit the header just on page 6? Or feel like being sexy and having a single page in landscape or a different size?
Easy! Just make a bunch of separate documents, export them as PDFs, and merge them in Adobe Acrobat.
I agree lots of things about word sucks. But FYI single page landscape is achieved by using two section breaks. It’s not ideal, but its somewhat understandable given how styles are prioritized. I’ve tried others that work well, but they also suffer on things that word does well that we take for granted.
The way it should be handled is to just let me rotate a single fucking page. It’s 2025 and there is zero excuse for that bullshit.
Like I said, I agree it sucks. I’ve had the exact same thought many times.
I felt so happy to remember this >20 year old image when I saw the title of this post. I remember finding it very funny back then. Anyway, what’s the appraisal? Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.
would you send that to my mom please?
My favourite feature is the insanely counter-intuitive indenting and bullet points.
This why LibreOffice called out Microsoft for using “complex” file formats to lock in Office users
You using complex file formats for vendor lock in
Me using complex file formats because my code base is shite.
We are not the same
That’s how I feel about most Microsoft products actually.
I feel like Microsoft products steadily get worse over time. It’s like they spend money to have their programmers seen how bad a product gets before people will get fed up and dump it.
Microsoft products can be quite good, but you’re right that they are severely hampered by boneheaded decisions.
Microsoft Office is still very good overall. Definitely one of Microsoft’s better products. The ribbon UI was revolutionary and is still great.
The Mac version of Microsoft Office is also a good example of how good and bad versions alternate. Office for Mac 98 was terrible. Office for Mac 2004 was great and and in many ways better than the windows version. 2008 dropped support for Visual Basic. 2011 reintroduced it. Microsoft’s email client for the Mac changed between Outlook, Entourage, then Outlook again with various changes and supporting different features.
My favorite versions of Microsoft operating systems are: DOS 5, Windows 3.1, NT 4, 98, XP, 7, 10, Phone 8.
I’m still mad Microsoft canceled their fantastic flight simulator.
That was my first thought too. Somehow they seem to be able to make the shittiest possible version of everything they attempt, and yet it almost always becomes the standard that everyone uses.
Used Microsoft Works in the early 2000’s. Only discontinued in 2009 apparently.
At one point, Microsoft was maintaining three different word processors.
- Word, the top of the line component of the flagship Office product
- Works, their “for home and small business” product that was honestly good enough for basically everyone, to the point you have to ask why anyone would buy Office, which is almost certainly why Works got canned, and
- Wordpad, because a GUI OS is basically useless without a rich text editor.
Where does Microsoft Write enter the equation?
Let me Wikipedia that for you…It was rolled into Wordpad circa Windows 95, and that write.exe is present in newer versions of Windows but it’s basically just a link to Wordpad.
According to Wikipedia, MS Write uses .wri files, which can be opened by LibreOffice 5.1 and later but not by any Microsoft software from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later.
I was just being silly.
Well tough shit, I learned something anyway.
We all did!
If my memory serves, Write supported full text justification, but Wordpad only supported left, center and right justification. So any easy win for Write imo.
The real miracle isn’t Word’s features, it’s how it’s still the default after decades of collective pain.
Same reason Windows is still the default on desktop: EEE and vendor-lock.
Word is the proof that God exists and he’s still real fuckin’ pissy about that apple.
You can get word for apple
If you don’t use \LaTeX, that’s on you.
As someone that recalls using Word 5.5 in DOS for a book report in 5th grade, as with all things, the peak has come and gone.
IMO, the enshittification curve started about 2010ish when MS demanded internet connectivity for features that didn’t work. Saving PDFs was its peak. RIP Word 2007, which I used well into 2015.
I expected Lemmy to be less repost-obsessed than Reddit yet here we are.
