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Don’t Bother Replacing Office

Matt — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:00:14 +0000

Recently Mark Gimein wrote in his blog that Microsoft Office doesn’t have any real competition because its closest competitor, OpenOffice.org (OO), is free, but mediocre. According to him, because the latter suite is mediocre, few would use it to replace the Old MS Standby, and because it is free, no one can be expected to develop and subsequently sell an alternative office suite for anything more than nothing.

He makes some excellent points. For one, I think he’s right in saying that OpenOffice.org is in many ways a clone of MS Office pre-2007. Of course, this isn’t entirely true, but it appears that the purpose of OO and its predecessor, StarOffice, was to duplicate Office functionality for a lower price. Unfortunately, while Office underwent a pretty significant and, in my opinion, positive overhaul with its 2007 version, OO seems mired in the past, particularly in terms of its interface — functionality buried behind a dizzying array of menus, submenus, dialog boxes and property sheets. Gimein believes that the OO community has settled for “good enough” software since its price tag is $0. Furthermore, we shouldn’t expect anyone else in the open source community to produce anything superior in the non-sexy realm of office productivity software. I hope, to a degree, he’s right.

I don’t think anyone should bother replacing Microsoft Office in its current form. That is, a large office software suite with a plethora of features, most of them of acceptable quality, but none of them particularly amazing. Instead, I’d rather see the free software community develop modular, more specific tools that work together happily via open standards. The idea is old. Individual software programs should fulfill a particular niche within a larger procedural pipeline, not consist of the entire pipeline in themselves. People in the Linux/Unix world seem to get this. Why use Word for everything including word processing, HTML and image editing, desktop publishing, writing theses and dissertations (with references!), creating forms for users to fill-in, and sharing documents for viewing when each of these tasks really needs its own, dedicated system to do the job well?

I’m guessing my argument is moot anyway. The future of office software is not primarily on the desktop, but likely in the cloud (a whole other topic altogether). Like Google Docs, they’re likely to be a bit more streamlined than the Office we’re used to. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and learn about more focused systems that replace bits of Office functionality — text editors (other than Notepad), image editors, desktop publishing systems (even for academic posters!), HTML editors, database systems, diagramming tools, and so on. (Take note, there are free systems [other than OO] in all of these categories.)

For my own sake, I can’t go without griping about a couple of Gimein’s assertions:

Don’t confuse the so-called open source movement with the free software movement. Richard Stallman is more concerned with ethical issues regarding our liberty and freedom with software than about production processes and quality; those latter issues are promoted more by the Open Source Initiative, which is trying to appeal to the business world.
OO’s benefits go beyond the free price; the author neglected to mention that it natively supports the OpenDocument format, preventing users from vendor lock-in.

Bemoaning the Decline of Print

Matt — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:34:44 +0000

This morning I stumbled upon a blog entry titled Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time) by Mark Sigal. In the article, Sigal dreams of the new possibilities of when digital readers and other multimedia devices completely replace the printed book, in particular when Apple gets involved in the e-book reader business. (I personally don’t know anything about Apple’s e-book projects, but it’s really beside the point.)

This article is another example of dramatic, high-tech speculation in which possibilities in the future world astound us, and those who hold on to present or past ways are cast aside in irrelevance. In this case, it’s the bibliophiles who are desperately (and apparently, naively) holding on to the printed word; if only they would open their eyes to the inevitable developments — “books” with internet connections, interactive features, simulations, video immersion, and built-in social networking — they would see the light too! So the other author pleads.

For better or worse, I don’t quite consider myself a bibliophile. I like reading, but I tend to get distracted and forget about the two or three books I’m trying to engage. However, I, like some bibliophiles, am really hesitant to fully embrace the e-book reader trend, or the multi-media remaking of the book. My primary concerns are in the form of questions. First, there are the copyright issues. How will future e-books be distributed, who will have the rights to read them, and will I be able to give a copy to my friend when I am done (something I can do now with physical books, at no risk to my legal self)? Will e-books make me more or less dependent on energy companies, telecoms, and technology companies? Will they help the small publisher, or more greatly benefit the large media outlets (e.g., Amazon, Apple, etc)?

These last concerns are particularly directed at Sigal’s speculations about the new possibilities for multimedia in learning. Will future forms of what are now printed genres help me better reason about the world? Will simulations and immersive digital environments help me to better develop, communicate, and defend my ideas? Will they help me think and speak coherently? I for one have a really hard time reading a long wikipedia article without getting completely distracted with links redirecting me and my thought processes to other articles or other places on the web.

I like new things. They’re fun and exciting. I also understand that communication media change and will continue to change. (Personal case in point: I’m writing a blog.) However, don’t give up on print just yet. Don’t give up on that which is non-interactive. Don’t give up on the linear construction of ideas. And please, don’t just assume that if Apple is coming out with a new technology that the best thing to do with it is to push it into our schools.

Update (1 October 2009): I just read an article regarding these new kinds of media and some and those who are suspicious.

Review: Web Style Guide

Matt — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:54:56 +0000

I recently read the Web Style Guide (3rd ed.) by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton. This book struck me as a mature, down-to-earth, and useful guide to designing for the web. The authors intelligently address the web development process, information design, page structure, layout and typography. They avoid gimmicky trends and focus on approach as opposed to rushing into new technologies; it’s not a how-to guide or a book about any particular web system or language. Instead, the authors elaborate on emerging standards and conventions the web community has developed over the past two decades.

I was particularly impressed by Lynch and Horton’s commitment to universal usability, that is, designing to support all users, including those not typically supported such as the visually-impaired. As a result, they rightly emphasize the semantic nature of HTML. For example, instead of creating your headings with a styled

tag, use the appropriate tag and style as necessary. (This prompted me to re-familiarize myself with some of the underused features of HTML, including for abbreviations, for in-document citations,

for addresses, and

,: for lists of terms and definitions.) By using these tags instead of styled
or
tags, you can provide hints to screen readers and search engines about how to render or interpret your web content.

The Web Style Guide is generally helpful, easy to read, and well-written. (I recommend it if you plan to re-design your own website.) If you don’t feel like purchasing the text or simply want to sample some of the content, you can access the full text online.

m

ps: unfortunately, reading this book made me realize that I have a lot of work to do to improve this site. Don’t judge me by the authors’ standards just yet!

Improving the MS Word Experience

Matt — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:38:22 +0000

During the process of writing my master’s thesis, I learned how to use LaTeX. Prior to this experience, I certainly wasn’t fond of using Word, particularly for creating large documents with figures and bibliographies, but now I know I’ll never go back, if I can help it. Word is, however, what most academics I’ve encountered use for writing papers (perhaps in a slightly better world they’d be using OpenOffice instead). Thus, if you’re going to collaborate with other Word users, sometimes you just have to buckle down and use it.

Fortunately, while recently working on a paper in Word, I came across a few bits of information that made using Word just a bit more tolerable, and led to the production of a slightly more attractive document, in my opinion. These tips are particularly relevant to authors using a document template for, say, a conference submission. (In my case it was the ACM CHI template for CSCW.)

Enable auto-hyphenation. With this setting enabled, Word will try to hyphenate long words at the end of justified paragraphs to minimize unsightly lines of text with far too much space between words. For some reason, the auto-hyphenate option is disabled by default. When using a two-column, justified paragraph layout as in the ACM template, using auto-hyphenate can really make your documents look better, and may even allow you to squeeze in a bit of extra content. See this MS support page to learn how to enable auto-hyphenation. (Fortunately, LaTeX already does this quite nicely.)
Manually insert hyphenation suggestions when necessary. In some cases Word is unable to hyphenate a word at the right edge of a column (particularly words it doesn’t recognize). For these occasions you can manually insert an invisible hyphen suggestion. If it needs to, Word will hyphenate the word at the point you suggest. Again, see this MS support page to learn how to insert hyphenation suggestions. It’s easy. If you enable the option to view all formatting marks, you can see all of the manual hyphenation suggestions you insert (and delete them as well).
Insert the proper dash manually. Dashes are long versions of the hyphen (see the wikipedia page on dashes for an overview). I used to rely on AutoCorrect to adjust multiple hyphens into a dash, but no longer. With num-lock on, insert an en dash using Ctrl + - and an em dash with Ctrl + Alt + -.
Insert ellipses manually. Use Ctrl + Alt + .
Use relative positioning for your figures. Instead of trying to manually position your figures, anchor them to a place within your text that makes sense (e.g., where you first reference it). By doing this you can position figures relative to the top or bottom of page margins, and they will automatically move with the anchor point as you edit the text. See this MS support page to see how to enable relative positioning. (Once on this page, expand the option “Position a drawing object in relation to page, text, or other anchor.”) Find out how to set an anchor point for your figures in one of the responses on this page. (Incidentally, this person advocates not placing figures in a text box, but I find that placing figures/graphs/tables in text boxes makes it easier to maintain the relative caption position. If you have a better way of handling it, please let me know!)
Once I adopted relative positioning with in-text anchors, I no longer had to wait until the end of the writing process to position my figures.

I hope some of these tips make your Word experience more bearable. In the mean time, take a look at LaTeX.