Once you've tried VIM, you'll never go back.

Mostly because you won't be able to exit VIM.

Use LibreOffice

$150 a year, you mean

People aren't paying for Word, they're paying for Excel and getting all the other goodies included.

Yeah, LibreOffice is fine for home use, maybe even really small businesses that don't have to trade spread sheets with external customers, but Excel is the killer app.

Calc's a fine spread sheet program, but it's frustrating as hell after using Excel for 30+ years. You can't trust that it will properly import an Excel sheet and it sure won't do macros.

LaTeX supremacy has entered that chat

expecting word to edit pdfs is like expecting excel to edit compiled matlab programs

I got so frustrated trying to use Word to write a document at work that I just gave up and wrote the whole damn thing in LaTeX. Lots of nested bulleted lists (or worse, numbered lists) and Word do not play nicely.

Sucks to be the guy who has to edit it when I'm gone.

That's how I feel about most Microsoft products actually.

TGFM - Thank God for Markdown

Seriously, though. 9 times out of 10, markdown has all the formatting I need for the task at hand. On the rare occasion I need something more, I’m glad I have access to Apple Pages, but it comes with its own set of unique challenges.

To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It's like trying to "edit" the ingredients of a cake after it's finished. You don't edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.

Want to edit the header just on page 6? Or feel like being sexy and having a single page in landscape or a different size?

Easy! Just make a bunch of separate documents, export them as PDFs, and merge them in Adobe Acrobat.

Used Microsoft Works in the early 2000's. Only discontinued in 2009 apparently.

Word is the proof that God exists and he's still real fuckin' pissy about that apple.

This why LibreOffice called out Microsoft for using "complex" file formats to lock in Office users

https://www.neowin.net/news/libreoffice-calls-out-microsoft-for-using-complex-file-formats-to-lock-in-office-users/

The real miracle isn’t Word’s features, it’s how it’s still the default after decades of collective pain.

As someone that recalls using Word 5.5 in DOS for a book report in 5th grade, as with all things, the peak has come and gone.

IMO, the enshittification curve started about 2010ish when MS demanded internet connectivity for features that didn't work. Saving PDFs was its peak. RIP Word 2007, which I used well into 2015.

Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.

Editing PDFs is not a feature the format natively supports (or supported?).
To me the crappiest "feature" is that M$ intentionally disregards their own document standard to EEE the ecosystem and vendor-lock their consumers.

My favourite feature is the insanely counter-intuitive indenting and bullet points.