I know this is in a different league..but I wrote Foundations of Programming in Word, and then The Little MongoDB Book in Markdown + Textile (in Textmate). Writing in Markdown was a much more liberating experience as it was much quicker and let me focus more on the content rather than the document.
I've always really liked Word, it's a great product, but for 99% of people it just does way too much and is thus way too expensive. Office is worse...gmail is better than outlook, anything is better than powerpoint or access.
My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold.
You're right about Excel. It is the corporate behemoth that may never be slayed.
I'm thinking of getting a Mac, but can the Mac version of Excel do keyboard shortcuts like on Windows? (E.g. "alt, o, h, r" to rename a sheet, or "alt, i, w" to insert a sheet). From my experience, it doesn't. Losing shortcuts would put a heavy drag on my productivity.
It's interesting, because Visicalc was originally dominant. And then Lotus 1-2-3 was dominant. And now Excel is. Each could read the format of the previous one, but improved features/performance. The switchover appears to be related to platform changing, to IBM-PC, to GUIs. Which is how it usually goes. One would expect an Excel-slayer to emerge from a platform that replaces Windows - such as the web or the iPad (or some new GPU/many-core architecture that gives us speed equivalent to extrapolated clock rate increases if they hadn't stopped at 3GHz about 10 years ago), if it somehow invades the enterprise. i.e. a Windows-slayer.
No - Mac Excel cannot do the old Windows shortcuts. It was the reason I held out for years, but once the useless ribbon turned up on Windows the shortcuts became a sloppy reverse compatibility addition. When Visual Basic arrived back on the Mac there was no reason to keep windows excel.
During the whole OOXML debacle, there were many examples discovered of ambiguous or flat-out wrong behavior in various versions of Excel over the years, the kind of wrong behavior that could easily have altered the outcome of financial transactions that were managed using spreadsheets. You can probably find some if you hunt for them on Groklaw. I seem to remember one related to a date basis parameter, so that might be a good first keyword set to try.
Excel only adds up to about 6 decimals. I worked on a project of an Endowment Fund (billions) and Excel was flat out wrong when computing billions over decades.
The worst part is: Excel is the Dogma. If your results do not match with Excel, make it.
I'm not sure what you do with Excel, but another major downside for the Mac version is it doesn't have statistical analysis like its Windows counterpart does.
Not a big issue unless you're doing psychological research or work in finance.
I really hope markdown is developed enough to take off, or someone develops something similar on firmer ground (since there's a lot of ambiguity in the definition). Whenever I use word or to a lesser extent mediawiki I feel like a lot of my effort is wasted in fiddling around just to get the formatting right. Sometimes this is bad enough to break my flow and significantly affect productivity.
Overall I feel as though the fiddling tax with markdown is only a small increment, maybe say 5 or 10% of total effort on average.
This, and the fact that gitit is really good, and has math support (which I desperately need,) are the reasons I'm considering finding a hosting solution for happstack and moving all my stuff there…
How does Markdown compare to LaTex? I wrote in LaTex most of my career and only the past 10 years with Word. I generally liked LaTex, except I didn't like the fact that the doc I edited was not the doc distributed (dvi, pdf, ps). But its hard to beat the typesetting in LaTex.
Oddly, I find PowerPoint to be a great app. In fact, if I need to quickly draw something, I'm more likely to do it in PowerPoint than Illustrator or Design or anything. Why do standard drawing programs suck so much at doing quick sketches (at least for people like me who can't draw)?
Markdown compiles to a subset of HTML, whereas LaTeX is able to express pretty much anything that can possibly be put in pages of PDF.
As such, Markdown is very clean and focused. You can figure out all features of Markdown in a few minutes. As you know, LaTeX can be excruciatingly complex but astonishingly powerful
Markdown focuses on getting anything that isn't content out of the way. LaTeX defines it, rather explicitly.
I use both. I used to use LaTeX for everything, but I realized I didn't really need the power. Now I use Markdown, and have a custom style sheet for the html it creates (for printing, using the awesome Marked.app).
If you use pandoc to convert your markdown to tex, it will pass through any TeX commands embedded in the document, so you can get the best of both worlds.
In my experience, Markdown is easier for just words and for things eventually going online. But as soon as I need tables, references, non-trivial layout and especially equations, I pull out LaTeX.
My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold.
May I ask what specifically you think an Excel-killer would need to do to succeed? And why you think the web-based spreadsheets haven't been able to do it so far?
I worked in medical and banking...these industries seem to run on Excel. Performance is an issue, and the amount of "legacy" code running in macros/vba is staggering. You are talking about thousands of excel spreadsheet which is each like it's own little application.
I recall talking to someone at MS about .NET 4.0 and I asked what were the big scenarios -- and I was surprised to hear that Office programmability was one of the top scenarios. He didn't know exact numbers, but he said that there may be more lines of .NET Office code (VSTO and VBA) than ASP.NET.
Go and ask your random analyst friend if they know VBA, and you'd be surprised how many know it (and with it know things like dynamic typing, implicit arguments, event handlers, etc..).
"And why you think the web-based spreadsheets haven't been able to do it so far?"
A huge number of business and engineering applications integrate with Excel - all the way from supporting easy data import and export (and not just through CSV files, which Excel actually handles really badly) up to fully fledged "live" integration through local web services.
Until a web-based application can reach in through the firewall and pull data from a LOB, ERP or finance app and display it as well as Excel can then web-based spreadsheets aren't going to make that much headway.
Ok, say Google sold their spreadsheet for installation on corporate servers. That would address the firewall problem. Would it be enough to kill Excel? What more would they have to do?
I doubt it - the spreadsheet in Google docs, even at a casual glance look to be missing some key features that are incredibly useful (Trace Precedents/Trace Dependents being one that jumps out at me).
There is also the fact that there are an awful lot of "mission critical" spreadsheets out there with huge amounts of VBA in them - I can't see Google supporting that (and you probably couldn't as a lot of these things call client side objects through COM).
To be honest, I don't think users want an Excel killer. Yes it has weaknesses (why it still can't handle Unicode CSV files properly is still a mystery) - but overall most people just see it as part of the standard corporate computing landscape.
You could perhaps make the whole model more interesting (e.g. by having better support for the hierarchical multi-dimensional data that finance people in particular just love) but then you'd probably lose the wonderful simplicity of the basic 2D sheet.
[NB I've spent a lot of time building finance apps that have Oracle Hyperion as a backend - which is a specialized 12 dimensional hierarchical database that is the market leader in its particular niche].
Just another super important point about this, you are talking about two industries who, for the most part, haven't bought into the public cloud yet.
I'm not gonna say "most", because, I really don't know, but I'd bet that most (oopps!) of these companies have firewalls that block google docs and the likes. Their idea of "cloud" is to run virtualization on their own servers in their own data centers and call it a day.
There's huge security (mostly made up), regulatory (mostly made up) reasons for them not to move to the cloud.
I assume you say "mostly made up" in the derogatory sense - how come? I'm basically okay with the spirit of what HIPAA is trying to accomplish, which is not sharing my medical information with anyone I don't explicitly authorize, accidentally or otherwise.
I'm no expert, but from what I've seen, both medical and financial regulation aren't nearly as detailed and absurd as IT-Risk/Compliance make them out to be. They don't say that you can't host with AWS (or AWS private cloud), but both those departments will insist that you can't.
It really comes down to being an unknown and it being easier (and perceived as safer) to "just say no". It isn't the regulation that I dislike, it's that said regulations are used to keep large organizations in the stone age. And, to be honest, from what I've observed, it really comes down to people not wanting to learn/work and having a powerful excuse (REGULATIONS!!) to avoid doing so.
Absolutely correct. Anyone who tells you that HIPAA requires you to do XYZ is full of shit. The difficulty with HIPAA is that it sets a very basic framework that you have to fill in with your own policies and procedurs. How strictly you follow your own procedures is what will get you in hot water.
I've always really liked Word, it's a great product, but for 99% of people it just does way too much and is thus way too expensive. Office is worse...gmail is better than outlook, anything is better than powerpoint or access.
My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if you want to break the Office stronghold.