D. G. Marshall
Dear #Microsoft
When I open a new blank document in Word, I want to open a new blank document.
I don't want a document with "Select the icon or press Alt + i to draft with Copilot" in large unfriendly letters across the top of the page.
This is not a blank document.
I don't want #Copilot
I've tried to uninstall #Copilot
#Copilot no longer shows up in the list of apps, but it still keeps butting in while I'm trying to write.
Charlie Stross
@irina @davidtheeviloverlord Get back to me when LibreOffice can handle documents of ~100,000 words containing ~5000 tracked changes and ~500 locked comments and allow me to accept/reject them, annotate the comments, and export a .docx file that Word accepts as correct. If it can do that I'll *consider* replacing Word for that one part of my business workflow that someone else insists I use word for (and I don't get paid if I don't).
Irina
@davidtheeviloverlord Can I softly whisper "LibreOffice" or do you need Word in particular? (It does export compatible .doc and .docx, tracking changes and all)
Dr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶
@davidtheeviloverlord @cstross Copilot is the new Clippy!
Charlie Stross
@a_cubed @davidtheeviloverlord The only difference I can see is that this is like MSFT circa 1996 deciding to sunset Word and Excel and REPLACE them with Clippy …
Charlie Stross
@JetlagJen @irina @davidtheeviloverlord My problem is I have to turnaround a novel's worth of tracked changes (an order of magnitude more than 200!) and I don't have enough time to re-do the job if the tool I'm using chokes 90% of the way through the job. And as it's on the critical path of the production schedule I then get paid six months late.
Jen
@cstross @irina @davidtheeviloverlord we use LibreOffice for working on clients' Word files when we help them publish. We rarely have any issues with it. 60k words, a few chapter headings, 200 tracked changes? Easy.
But occasionally, we do have issues, and it's always really big, complicated files, with lots of additions like many tracked changes or tables or hundreds of footnotes. So we have to have Word available.
Irina
@cstross @JetlagJen @davidtheeviloverlord Argh. I see the problem and sympathize.
Knud Jahnke
@cstross @irina @davidtheeviloverlord
I would never even consider using Word for such a task. Whenever I had to use it then this resulted in major frustration. Since ~1991.
We're successfully using Overleaf and Latex for all science publications here and that includes many tracked changes, comments and typically 10k to 50k words. But it's not word-compatible and resides online...
Charlie Stross
@knud @irina @davidtheeviloverlord Tough: trade fiction publishers run on Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite. And authors are required to fit into their workflow because they're dealing with dozens of authors a month simultaneously.
Charlie Stross
@knud @irina @davidtheeviloverlord See, that's your thing: academic publishers are not in the same business as commercial publishers—who actually edit the stuff they end up publishing.
Knud Jahnke
@cstross @irina @davidtheeviloverlord
😬
Scary, literally, to me.
Our (astronomy) scientific publishing workflows are all LaTeX based, bc no other format will properly encode formulae and properly place figures automatically. But that of course is a very specific use case - however that makes it again very easy for publishers since they get near print-ready manuscripts.
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