Don’t forget LaTeX!
Dude, I’m a surgical tech - my job is to stand in an OR and be a surgeon’s bitch while we’re flaying some fucker open. …and I still spend what feels like 90% of my day on Outlook -_-
I think you’re supposed to Inlook during surgery.
I will always appreciate a true Excel power user. I’ve seen some black magic shit.
Yeah, but it’s the kind of black magic where you accidentally summon Cthulhu and only notice it, after he destroyed half of the city.
What is stopping you from proposing better software?
Never worked in a corporate environment?
Sure I have.
If you spin it by saying it would improve productivity, they’ll listen and pretend it was their idea all along.
Or (way more likely) they’ll just not listen or find excuses. That’s how large corporations work. Do you really think, you’d be the first one to propose that maybe excel isn’t the best tool for the job?
I can see Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as stupid.
But Excel is perfect! You can’t say You have mastered it.
Even if You have written a book about Excel, it transcends You.
Unpopular opinion time: but give me a csv and a python script any day over excel.
I can’t count the hours I spend cleaning up and debugging xlsx files from customers that were completely unusable due to excels automatic data type feature.
Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.
I can’t tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace “New” Outlook is.
For Microsoft, “Modern, sleek, streamlined” are just marketing terms for “We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you’ll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development.”
Those are different categories of problems.
Excel really does too much. Biologists literally renamed a genom because Excel kept turning it into a date. If any other database did that, the vendor would hear a friendly but stern “get fucked”.
They’re using a spreadsheet and getting burned when it acts like a spreadsheet. It’s like complaining that a screwdriver did a bad job hammering nails.
Yeah, that’s my point. Excel is almost never the right tool, but since it’s doing so much, it can be used for almost anything, just in a very shitty manner. And in reality, it is used for almost anything.
Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
It’s turning complete, so it’s should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
I’m not sure, if it’s autocorrect or misinformation, but it’s “Turing complete”, after Alan Turing.
The Ribbon interface used on office products isn’t there because it’s good UX. It exists because there’s a software patent on it.
If office didn’t use a patented UI, someone could make office software that replicated the UI of MS Office which would allow companies to switch to other products without having to retrain staff.
Microsoft was enshittifying their software long before anyone else.
I did an internship where I was creating a prototype UI for a Windows application, and used the ribbon API to build it. I thought it was a well thought out design, and was definitely an improvement over nested menus. A problem I’ve seen come up a lot though is shitty implementations where the pattern wasn’t followed correctly making it really hard to find things because the developers put items in dumb places.
Generally in UX you want often used buttons to always be in the same place to take advantage of muscle memory. Text is more intuitive than an icon, but an icon will use less screenspace, so once the user learns the icon, you can have an interface that’s more user friendly (though less intuitive) so that’s fine. Small amount of experience or training needed with the softwareresults in more buttons available at all times, so it’s worth the trade off to use one button bar. Less used items should be put into a menu because a) it’s not used often so it’s fine to be hidden away unless needed and b) it’s not used often so the user isn’t going to be familiar with an icon so text is preferable.
The ribbon is some weird combination between a menu and a bar with buttons on it. So all of the disadvantages of menu (buttons aren’t always on the screen) and all of the disadvantages of button panel (icons that have to be learned for nearly every single feature). The advantages of being able to access the most used features from muscle memory is lost, the advantage of being able to discover lesser used features by simply reading text is lost.
It’s just indecisive design. Not putting any thought about how the user actually uses the software, Just chuck some buttons onto a ribbon somewhere, make a pretty icon so it looks good and let the user click on various ribbons an click on random pretty buttons until they find the button that adds an attachment to an email in outlook. But when they find that button, make sure we default to OneDrive instead of the Documents folder because pushing cloud storage is currently the top priority as MS.
Sorry… bit of a rant there. But yeah, just put thought into which features will be used most often make them to be the buttons on the bar, put everything else into a menu. Worst case is the user has to click two things to use a feature, which is the same as using ribbons. Best case the user is clicking the same button they’ve clicked 100 times before and it’s in the exact same place as when they clicked it all of those times before.
Ribbons are just a crime against UX.
I just want to come in with extra hatred for the “start” button, which looks like it’ll just open another ribbon, looks like another ribbon but doesn’t. No, it opens a full size menu where items are primarily arranged vertically for some reason.
Is it just me or is office 365 just worse and more impractical than the old office suites?
I think it’s mostly because they keep trying to push other services down your throat. For example, opening a link in Outlook opens it in Edge, even when your default browser is something else. I can’t use Edge for that link, I’m not signed into stuff there. So now, because of retarded decisions like that, Outlook actually is missing basic features that Hotmail in the 90s had.
because of retarded decisions like that
You know you could have just used shitty instead of using a slur, which would have the same emphasis without the baggage of the other word.
Shitty has a different meaning. Above commenter meant to say the person making the decision was differently abled with regards to their cognitive capabilities. The other is excrement.
I’m sorry for your loss
I did computer science, and we used MIPS Assembly…
I ask you, when has anyone EVER wanted to use a MIPS processor lol.
Also, for AI, we were forced to use LISP, which the lecturer didn’t teach. He graded us using a poorly written script, and if your program crashed his script, he gave you 0. You only got 1 attempt. But, when is the last time, ANYONE has used LISP either lol
And Perl… And PHP, etc
PHP is pretty cool if you know what you’re doing and use its modern, object-oriented features. It’s also very easy to write horrendous spaghetti code with it, which is what most people sadly do and give it a bad rap.
