Post B77L0gUrzXF5HO4Zxg by david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
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 (DIR) Post #B77L0gUrzXF5HO4Zxg by david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
       2026-06-08T08:11:52Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       I remain convinced that the reason most MS Office replacements struggle (beyond various anti-competitive behaviours) is that MS Office is really bad at what it does. Word can’t do line breaking properly, makes semantic markup hard, doesn’t keep cross-references in sync automatically, and renders inconsistently between local and online versions. Excel interleaves functions and data in the most error-prone way possible and randomly interprets data as other types. PowerPoint is worse for producing animations than a 1996 edition of Flash. None of these tools are good solutions for the problems that people apply them to. You cannot displace a bad tool with a copy of the bad tool. People have little incentive to switch (until people start chanting ‘sovereignty’ as if it’s a magic spell) because you don’t solve their problems. People who are using the existing tool have a load of work arounds to deal with the fact that the tool is not a good fit for the tasks and any deviation in your behaviour from their current tool will break some of these.You need to offer something that is actually a good solution to their problems. This is what I would build:First, a good vector drawing tool. Take a look at OmniGraffle for what this looks like (maybe a couple of releases ago. I haven’t used the latest one and Omni Group keeps making all of their products worse with each release). This is important because it is a building block for two other key parts.Next, a semantic text editor that tightly integrates with a desktop publishing program (they can be two views in the same program). Word is used in two ways, first to feed into publishing flows (where it’s a bad fit because it doesn’t do semantic markup well) and second as a DTP tool. But it’s a terrible DTP tool. Aldus Pagemaker on Windows 3.11 was better! The absolute minimum you want from a DTP tool is to be able to define to text boxes and have text flow between them. Word can’t even do that. But this is where you build on the vector editor: it defines page layouts and the text is flowed there. Ideally also provide an Access-like form tool, so people can fill in the top-level semantic markup without realising. You want to write a letter? Here’s a template that expects a to and from address, a salutation, a signature, and a message body. Fill in those bits and you get something properly typeset on company letterhead. Add a Flash-style keyframe animation layer that uses the vector-drawing core. Now you have a better presentation tool than anything that exists today. Provide the ability to add notes and export key frames as pages in a PDF, and export to something web based for presenting.The spreadsheet is the most interesting bit. You want something that behaves somewhere between Lotus Improv and Jupyter Notebooks: non-destructive data storage, generated columns, and a language that’s as easy to use as Excel’s calc language, ideally with the ability to plug in other languages for richer things. Rendered tables and graphs feed into the vector tool, where they can be used in the DTP model for print or the animation model for presentation. Provide a rich templating layer here, so companies can build the kind of data-processing that they want and have employees just fill in the data without touching (or being able to easily accidentally modify) the formulae, then have that feed directly into the rendering flow to produce reports.Notice how little this looks like LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, and so on?