Your Office Application preferred set of tools

daviddelven

Considering you are not in any too deep market niche, If you also collaborate with other researchers or coworkers,

1) Which tool is your main Office application for generating long-form text (including Table of Contents, Citation, advanced references, etc...)?
2) If you use M365, are you happy with that environment and how it evolves (or not) over time?
3) What is your operational workflow for pulling the information inside your slip box to your Office Application?

ZettelDistraction

These days I start from my ZK in Markdown and export in Word, LaTeX, or PDFLaTeX. If I have to prepare documentation for work, I'll go from Markdown to Word format and tweak what I need if I have to use Microsloth Orifice.

daviddelven

What is precisely the reason that makes MS Word (or *.docx) so ubiquitous in most workflows? Should we consider it an "_standard de facto_"?

zk_1000

Most users are taught office work on MS products. There's no need in switching at the cost of relearning with new tools. MS products are even sponsored to schools for this reason.

At work we are using LibreOffice and open formats like .odt, .ods.

PDF is much more of a standard than Docx.

daviddelven

Another topic that concerns a "de facto standard" is further editability. I come from an industry (construction) that deals with interoperability issues, but most also come from a misunderstanding: recipients want to keep editing the information container they receive. And this is not always expected, especially from an authorship perspective.

I.m.o., the lack of process-oriented culture in some domains (siloed ones) enables the trend of asking for editable formats (i.e. *.docx) instead of just the *.pdf or another one that lacks the editability purpose (even though we know that technically we can edit it). Concepts such as Authorship, responsibility roles, etc... are essential to consider whenever we require and/or deliver information.

I didn't want to open the gate of open standards vs proprietary formats since the market is the market.

GeoEng51

@daviddelven said:
3) What is your operational workflow for pulling the information inside your slip box to your Office Application?

I use Scrivener as my main writing tool. Notes from my ZK are imported directly as text snippets. Those ideas get massaged, re-arranged and combined with connecting text, and then eventually exported either as a PDF or as a Word doc for sharing with others.

daviddelven

@GeoEng51 Whether we cook using snippets or merging through other bridges, some users seem to rely on Layouting features outside the writing tool, keeping the writing focus on only one tool. (MS Word, Adobe InDesign, etc...)

zk_1000

One requirement for tools is the onboarding process. More employee are familiar with MS products compared to alternatives. Training new tools increases costs.

The other is compatibility. Formats become deprecated over time and you find yourself searching for all windows95 doc files and upgrade them.

Documents have an editing history. You can see the author for every single edit.

Collaboration must be interactive to ensure everyone is working on the same source, otherwise uncoordinated changes might occur.

Without interactive interface collaborative editing must not occur.

I also experienced the demand for editable documents where editing must not occur. I've observed human behaviour that should not happen. People feel the temptation to edit a document. It is only a matter of time for an unauthorized change to occur. They even try to bypass supervision in an attempt to keep their change unnoticed.

jregan

I use Ulysses for writing and note taking. If I want to pull something into the Archive, I export the content as text populated with all the necessary markdown that I need. I can also export to Word (docx) and other formats. Although I have not used it much, the latest version has implemented internal linking where a user can link to any heading in a sheet, project or library.

Amontillado

I'm a sucker for discussion of writing software. My favorite engine of creation is Mellel. Very stable, very powerful, and easy once you understand Mellel's way. It's different than Word, which doesn't bother me in the least.

I'm a lone renegade writer. Collaboration hasn't yet been an issue. It seems to handle docx import and export without trouble, so I think I would be OK.

Where Mellel really shines is future proofing, at least in my use case, despite the fact Mellel uses a proprietary file format.

With no need for support information, I was able to decode Mellel's wonderfully transparent document format. It took about two hours to write a mail merge utility in Python. That's counting the time it took to learn Mellel document format. Another two hours yielded a nice document structure and style analyzer.

Scrivener is another example of nicely transparent storage. I wrote a sync between Scrivener and an Android office suite of some kind long ago, also in Python. The Scrivener project format was a snap to figure out, and then I discovered Literature and Latte will send anyone who asks complete file structure documentation.

Of course, if one is to muck around inside of documents one should take responsibility for any self inflicted data disasters. I suppose. I never had any disasters. ;-)