Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.
word documents are compatible with open office and I’ve been able to switch to open office at home with no impact on my ability to save them as .doc files and use them at work or school.
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.I switched to onlyoffice not looking back
My favourite feature is the insanely counter-intuitive indenting and bullet points.
99% of issues people have with Word are because they never bothered to learn how to use it. Remember those IT classes back in school where they taught you how to do a mail merge? Yeah I bet you can’t remember how to do that now.
The normal user still uses multiple spaces and newlines to format their documents instead of tabstops and pagebreaks. Doesn’t use automatic Table of contents or knows how to use sections to make the page numbers show up where they want. It doesn’t help, that the online version doesn’t support section insertion. I pretty much never use Word, but it’s an incredibly complex piece of software, people don’t know how to use. Even the elusive positioning of pictures isn’t all too hard if you know what anchors do.
If you don’t use \LaTeX, that’s on you.
edit a pdf? lol? be a good person, never send pdfs, use a proper format, docx or even better odt, just fucking raw md
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.
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.
And yet… libreoffice does it pretty ok
I expected Lemmy to be less repost-obsessed than Reddit yet here we are.
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
I honestly have more things against excel than word… or maybe im just mad about how ribbon was stupidly implemented in excel
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.
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.
Never understood the attraction. It sucks.
