this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
244 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
87598 readers
3967 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Of those four, only Outlook really could have used some changes. The other three were perfected 20 years ago. And how do you improve perfection? You can only make it worse.
Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all "email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)" apps are pretty bad. You'd think someone would have implemented something better by now.
Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn't need to be any better.
Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as "styles". You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.
Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.
Fine - Word can retain a "compatible layout" mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let's push things forward.
What is the point of writing better software when the entire ecosystem is built around Microsoft? Though certainly Zoom ate Skype's lunch, and Slack is better than Teams... but maybe e-mail is too core a functionality, and, let's face it, there's old guys at the top that will fire their entire IT department before they get rid of their precious outlook. All my PST files for the last 20 years are on there! I have 200 inboxes and 400 rules!
Interesting thoughts on Word. I just know for what most people use it for--documents--it's perfectly fine. It drives me up the wall that people pay for 365 subscriptions just so they can do that.