[nylug-talk] .oO or MS Office ? Neither!

[Gary Mort]

martin yazdzik wrote:
> We need a back to basics program that also looks great, is flexible, and does not require more than a trip to help to do what needs to be done for everything from typing a math quiz to writing a doctoral thesis with
> slides and footnotes, and that does what the e u wants, rather than what the programmers think would be cool.
>   

I would argue that word processors do precisely that already.

How would you handle footnotes on a typewriter?  You would place a 
number as you type and than at the end you would fill in your footnotes.

How about slides?  You would leave enough space for them and manually 
insert them later.

You CAN do all that with office products today.

You can also set it up so you can enter those footnotes as you type the 
document.  You can setup shortcuts for all those font changes and such 
that you commonly use, but would not be appropriate for someone else.

Heck, with office products today you can link their data to a relational 
database, or in some cases an XML file, so you can do the content 
editing externally and generate a document from all that content.

Yes, all these features are "cool" for programmers and only used by a 
small percentage of people.  However, by the same token if you don't 
need a feature do not use it.

What people need to do, in my opinion, is expecting programs to do their 
work for them and stop spending hours trying to figure out how to 
automate 15 minutes of work.