I feel physically ill and almost literally raped by Word 2016 after having used it for the past 6 months writing my thesis. I hereby vow to never use this murderous program again. I can finally understand my mother when she talk about how "the computer just does things on its own!" Yes I am homo but god damn I mad.
Hold me and suggest to me what I should use instead.
>Hold me and suggest to me what I should use instead.
In the same boat just about 2 months ago.
Asciidoc or markdown.
Somehow I never used Word enough to develop such a hatred for it. I discovered LaTeX early on in school and used it throughout uni. Now I use some more niche stuff like S1000D due to my job, but I remain word processor-free.
You should definitely learn some lightweight markup or LaTeX.
LaTeX is incredibly tempting, but that is the only alternative I had heard of so far. Maybe I'll check out as well and stick to whatever is easier, I guess. Or least frustrating.
For researching and writing large dissertations and essays, etc, I use Scrivener.
I had to use it for technical documentation at work once, what a disaster. Now back to TeX, it's simply better.
Maybe Word works better for normies but they don't write technical documentation.
LaTeX is a nightmare. Instead of focusing on the writing you sometimes have to look up snippets of code and download packages to format things the way you like it.
its shit
>not writing it plaintext and giving a final formatting and illustration pass
TeX is the only viable answer if you're in maths or a scholar – Working with English, German, Old Greek, Old Hebrew and Latin in the same Document was a nightmare when I had to write my first paper, using Word 2013. Switched to XeTeX straight away and never looked back. Managing references is wonderfully easy, too; no need to have an abomination like Citavi or Zotero hack itself into your Word Processor to generate your references.
Although for maths I heard words equation editor doesn't suck as hard as it does for mixing languages with proper hyphenation etc.
Libre office is my go to.
or Vi
write in markdown, then convert to latex with pandoc and fix anything that doesn't look beatuful as is
Word is not even good for that. I can't find the most basic of functions, while other things require me to jump through hoops to achieve. Some programs are suboptimal because they do not have all the functions. That is fine. Word is a pile of shit because it does not have basic functions, while having bullshit functions that I'll never use or even understand how to use to my advantage.
Basically, you're doing it wrong. Write the content, then focus on making it look the way you want. And don't just toss random snippets in, separate them in to a template file and (re)define macros.
However, it's not your fault, the LaTeX community doesn't really make a big deal about the whole "separation of content and style" thing. This is why I kind of like the XML world better, the difference between "content" and "stylesheet" is much clearer.
>Word 2016
Libreoffice ain't that bad these days or you could have used Google docs too.
Latex is cool and if you use online services it's not hard to set up + you get something like version control and colaboration.
>not pushing your thesis to your public git repo
You're not being very specific. What exactly made you mad? If you want a suggestion you should tell others what you are looking for.
Should have used groff.
Word is good for what it does but for thesis and anything more complex use Texmaker.
The formula editor is shit in word
Who the fuck doesn't use LaTeX to write their thesis?
All tech-brainlets, so like 90% of all graduates.
I want to go back to Office 97 and 2003.
Latex is a huge chore to set up if you don't have a predefined template, but it pays off in the end
I did. I don't see how it's such a big deal.
If you are a noob just use Overleaf, just wörks.
>gnu
sounds like a nightmare. don't get me wrong I like open source, but anything specifically labelled gnu is usually a pain in the ass
It's just a GNU implementation of Troff.
Libreoffice is alright, but god damn is it slow on windows machines.
Maybe on linux machines too, don't know.
OP could always try WPS office.
latex is standard in many industries. I use it for all my assignments and my thesis.
What's so bad about it? I get their technical stuff isn't smooth, moving tables and writing equations is a chore, but it works
a pain in the ass but works, is not where we should set the bar for software though. is it?
MS Office is indeed one of the shittiest software suites out there, but Adobe still takes the cake.
It's like 'fuck your PC it's not your PC anymore': the software.
Thanks for the warning. I was almost about to consider the suite as a replacement for office.
libreoffice
90% of people don't write anything technical, it's all words which is perfectly good.
I use this online tool which converts your equations into LaTeX form, saves a lot of time
Vscode and a base html file with bootstrap 4 cdn.
Literally easyer to write than a word document , faster (emmet) and looks way better.
Probably tons of places use Word or similar for technical documentation. I recently started working in technical documentation in aerospace, and although they moved to S1000D, there's still a lot of leftover Interleaf/Quicksilver documents.
>sucks at using Word
The absolute state of this fucking board
Word tries to automate too many things and it does it badly.
what's wrong with it? or is your windows machine slow? i will agree it's bloatware though. it ran badly on my core duo laptop and anything with 2 cpus is more than enough for a god damn document. might want to try abiword or an old version of wordperfect if on windows. appleworks/clarisworks was stellar but i don't think anything is compatible with it anymore.
Markdown
The author is a very cool dude.
It really fucking doesn't. It's easy as piss to write and format in the stupid thing.
I mean MARKDEEP
Goddammit
>or is your windows machine slow?
It's fast enough. Ryzen1600@3800
Libre is just very slow in comparison, doesn't even really matter what machine.
When scrolling through large documents or spreadsheets it doesn't smoothly scroll at a nice and high framerate, so you can get to the parts you're looking for at a simple glance f.e. It just makes a few big jumps with relatively large intervals. Really annoying when working with big text.
I don't get what's wrong with Word? I regularly wrote papers with it in grad school.
There's nothing wrong with Word, it's just that people are still upset about the Linux thing and have to vent their anger somehow.
Please be patient.
>presses enter once
>entire formatting of an 80-page document breaks
Libreoffice
Used it since it fork from OpenOffice (which I used for a few years at uni) on linux and windows machines.
Biggest issue I had was endnote (uni provided it as a plugin with word). Bibtex kinda werked, until it didn't.
Zotero. Use the chrome plugin. You'll never look back and you can easily import and export.
Unironically have a desktop webpage ver. of onenote open now...