Plaintext vs Office Suites
Recently, I've been forced back into using Word for the creation of design documents at my job. Ordinarily, I would prefer to do everything I can via plaintext, particularly org-mode as it has fantastic export functionality to the various office suites if required. However, regardless of which tools you find most useful or comfortable, you likely won't always have the opportunity to use them over the course of your career. This applies particularly to programming languages, especially Scheme other Lisps of which I am fond, but it should surprise no one that no company is writing technical design documents in org-mode via Emacs.
I haven't really used an office suite for writing for a long time (I now use org-mode for everything from my resume, to notes, to this very website), and back when I did use one (during university) then I would use Libreoffice primarily (and maybe check formatting in Word on a lab computer). Now that I've been forced to use Word for the first time since High School, I have to make a remark: I don't remember it being this terrible.
Maybe it's because I'm collaboratively editing with a few other people, I can't be certain, but it has a tendency to stop responding very frequently in the middle of each sentence. This is sometimes so aggregious that I can't even write a short, 4-word description in a table without the editor freezing half-way through. As you can imagine, it's particularly annoying to have to deal with this while on a call with a data scientist to try and determine a better way to phrase something (which is something I have to do often, as I'm lacking some business context for the design).
No keyboard driven editing is also a massive loss. I swear I remember there being hotkeys for inserting a new row into a table, but I simply can't find them now. Having to go from keyboard to trackpad to keyboard is possibly the most annoying workflow, coming from an ecosystem where I can do much of everything without ever leaving the keyboard. Paste behavior is another thing I've noticed - I thought I remembered Ctrl+Shift+V being bound to unformatted paste, but it seems to do nothing now which means I need to right click to paste unformatted text. It is very slow, and very tedious when I need to copy and paste multiple things from multiple sources into one document.
As an addendum, since writing this article I've also been ticked off by multiple pop-ups asking me if it's OK to save the document even though it has comments. For some reason, Microsoft's engineers decided that adding a preference for the sticky keys pop up was a valuable investment of resources, but doing the same thing to turn off this annoying popup would have been too costly. Anything to force your hands away from the keyboard and back to the trackpad, I suppose.
All of this makes me wish I was back in org-mode, or even Markdown (hell, I would even take LaTeX at this point) - there's nothing that I'm doing here that I couldn't do in a plaintext equivalent. Even collaborative editing - Emacs has many solutions for that. It just further reinforces my dislike of Microsoft products generally, and I can't say I would ever recommend someone shelling out money for a subscription to this mess of software. If you must use an office suite, LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are far superior.