Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is true, but only if you try to achieve the exact workflow that Office 365 offers. Maybe it is time to try to be a bit more subversive. Do we really need everything that Office can do? Is Microsoft's abstraction of office work really the holy grail of modern office work or is it causing "empty work"?


This is an important point but often it's existing docs and files that cause the most grief, with subtle issues like differences in font rendering or line spacing.

For example, I wanted to make a simple change to a Word doc in Libre Office that included a side bar/column of text in a fixed size table on multiple pages. In Word the layout looked great.

Unfortunately due to font subtleties, in Libre Office the side texts overflowed the tables and the last sentences were cropped. It took some fiddling to make things fit and look as good as the original, but in the process I had to make the font smaller which lost some clarity. I did play with line spacing but that got fiddly.

In summary, a 5 second edit of an existing document laid out 'just so' perhaps 5 yr ago ended up becoming 20 minutes of hassle.

New docs could be laid out better and differently to make future edits easy, but that ignores the large legacy of existing stuff that many will have.


The migration is an opportunity to subvert the "Office" abstraction to start with.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: