Examples of brain dead software design

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#3299494 21-Oct-2024 14:59

neb:

KiwiSurfer: Unpopular opinion perhaps, but both Word and Excel are fine when you learn how to use them properly.

They're fine for basic tasks. Ever tried doing anything a bit more sophisticated in either? There's a reason why publishers use absolutely anything but Word for book manuscripts, for example.

Back in 2008 I write a 250 page technical thesis entirely in Word, using EndNote for references and MathType for inline equations. It was...fine? It would probably be better now that it has a more capable built-in equation editor.

You definitely needed to learn how it wanted you to do things though. Otherwise you'd just end up fighting it and Word would win every time.

neb

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#3299497 21-Oct-2024 15:09

A thesis is fine because you can make it fit with what Word lets you do, but preparing a book manuscript that has to fit a publisher's rules and guidelines for a book layout with Word is pretty much impossible. Even just trying to get camera-ready output which is the same across two or more runs is near impossible.

mkissin

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#3299499 21-Oct-2024 15:12

neb:

A thesis is fine because you can make it fit with what Word lets you do, but preparing a book manuscript that has to fit a publisher's rules and guidelines for a book layout with Word is pretty much impossible. Even just trying to get camera-ready output which is the same across two or more runs is near impossible.

That's fair. It was a lot more work getting camera-ready papers written for IEEE which had to conform to extremely specific requirements.

In that case though, it was even worse making the diagrams, and getting them into the right size and DPI. I spent waaay too much time fixing rejections from the IEEE automated diagram checking tool.

neb

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#3299502 21-Oct-2024 15:17

Ugh, yeah, and the IEEE Word templates were prepared by the sort of people who align text by manually inserting spaces until things sort of line up. I ended up doing my own style sheet after fighting their one for way too long.

KiwiSurfer

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#3299888 22-Oct-2024 14:50

neb:

KiwiSurfer: Unpopular opinion perhaps, but both Word and Excel are fine when you learn how to use them properly.

They're fine for basic tasks. Ever tried doing anything a bit more sophisticated in either? There's a reason why publishers use absolutely anything but Word for book manuscripts, for example.

I use both in my day job and for personal use and find both adequate for a variety of documents/spreadsheets.

The only time I have issues is when I receive a document/spreadsheet from someone who has no idea how to use Word/Excel properly. E.g. one person send me a 100+ page doc and asked why the table of contents function wasn't working. Turned out they bold/underlined/up-sized every heading by hand. Had to explain to them how to use Styles and they were blown away. Basic stuff like this is often not taught in schools etc and it shows in how most office workers don't know many of the more, as you say, "sophisticated" functions that has been present in Word/Excel ever since the 90's. All they know is how to type their crap and press print -- when Word/Excel is capable of much more.

KiwiSurfer

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#3299889 22-Oct-2024 14:53

neb:

Ugh, yeah, and the IEEE Word templates were prepared by the sort of people who align text by manually inserting spaces until things sort of line up. I ended up doing my own style sheet after fighting their one for way too long.

Yep that's a pet peeve of mine as well. That's a good example of where if Word is used properly that's a non-issue. On my experience, it doesn't matter what tool you give the office worker, they'll always use spaces to align things properly even when the tool they're using has a proper alignment tool. There's heaps of other examples of people doing stuff manually that can be easily solved with a Word function. It just so happens Word is the most abused tool in the office and Word gets a bad rep just because of that.

FineWine

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#3300007 22-Oct-2024 17:39

This is going to be controversial, but how about using Pages and Numbers instead😊

Whilst the difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a bit longer. However, miracles you will have to wait for.

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neb

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#3300010 22-Oct-2024 18:22

FineWine:

This is going to be controversial, but how about using Pages and Numbers instead😊

Or for FOSS types you could use existing tools. Friend of mine wrote his entire thesis in Six, the Unix wordprocessor.

TinyTim

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#3300060 22-Oct-2024 18:38

I did all my papers and thesis in LaTeX...

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#3300161 22-Oct-2024 23:05

KiwiSurfer:
neb:

Ugh, yeah, and the IEEE Word templates were prepared by the sort of people who align text by manually inserting spaces until things sort of line up. I ended up doing my own style sheet after fighting their one for way too long.

Yep that's a pet peeve of mine as well. That's a good example of where if Word is used properly that's a non-issue. On my experience, it doesn't matter what tool you give the office worker, they'll always use spaces to align things properly even when the tool they're using has a proper alignment tool. There's heaps of other examples of people doing stuff manually that can be easily solved with a Word function. It just so happens Word is the most abused tool in the office and Word gets a bad rep just because of that.

That's what happens when you get rid of the secretarial pool.

Instead of 2 or 3 highly efficient typists doing all the fancy typing and layout ,
you now get an office full of people doing a halfarsed job.

And I miss the tea lady. Morning tea at the desk, no work interruptions

Now you get a swarm of staff gas bagging around the coffee machine.

No wonder our productivity has gone down.
:-)

mkissin

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#3300185 23-Oct-2024 07:45

SepticSceptic:Now you get a swarm of staff gas bagging around the coffee machine.

No wonder our productivity has gone down.
:-)

That gasbagging is the entire rationale behind the various RTO mandates!

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#3300273 23-Oct-2024 10:09

TinyTim: I did all my papers and thesis in LaTeX...

Ditto! Great piece of software.

My referral links: BigPipe | Mercury

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#3300321 23-Oct-2024 10:14

SepticSceptic:
That's what happens when you get rid of the secretarial pool.

Instead of 2 or 3 highly efficient typists doing all the fancy typing and layout ,
you now get an office full of people doing a halfarsed job.

When I get given 20%arsed jobs from people I just tell them what is this crap did you do it in wordpad and then paste it over or something and make them sort it out with correct headings and using the correct template. I am not fixing their crap because they lied and said they could work microsoft word and instead went thru and manually applied fonts and sizes to things and indented with the spacebar.

Richard rich.ms

KiwiSurfer

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#3300454 23-Oct-2024 11:40

FineWine:

This is going to be controversial, but how about using Pages and Numbers instead😊

I work with a wide range of organisations and I've yet to find any that accept these Apple formats.

caffynz

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#3300455 23-Oct-2024 11:45

A new one for me: I've recently downloaded an app for password-less sign-in, where at the sign-in page, instead of using my email/password, I can use the app to scan the QR code that is displayed.
After scanning the QR code, the app then asks me if it is me that is signing in (with yes/no answer options)..... Um - didn't I just pick up my phone, unlocked the app through facial recognition, toggled the QR scanner, and scanned the QR code? Who else could it have been?

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