Comment by kkfx
17 days ago
A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.
My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.
You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.
To be fair ms word is rooted in a world paper once ruled and the paper/document metaphor is becoming increasingly less relevant.
I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms).
Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in.
Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.
Spreadsheets are perhaps the only pseudo-visual programming tool to have achieved significant widespread use, but they are terrible:
- the logic is hidden; until you click on a cell, you don't know "what it actually contains"
- there is no entry point, no main(), so there is no way to read it other than keeping 100% of what the sheet does in your head, or ignoring parts of it and risking breaking them while working on others
- the logic tends to be coded in single lines rather than multi-line with proper indentation, which makes reading it very difficult
This is just the conceptual basis, without even counting the improper auto-formatting of cells that has even led to renaming genes to prevent them from being considered dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... or the absurdities regarding date calculations.
They can be convenient when you have to play around with a few pieces of tabular data, yes, but the price you pay is much higher than working with high-level languages that would be easy for even the average user to understand if only they had started with them.
Shiny?
It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!