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A comment on Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by maksimum on Sunday February 04, 2018 @12:59PM (#16303850)
Having made multiple presentations in beamer, it's definitely not better at everything than WYSWYG presentation editors; some things like non-standard slide layouts are more laborious than they need to be.

I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by tomsmeding on Sunday February 04, 2018 @02:22PM (#16304331)
Having a visual frontend for a textual format sounds nice but is always dangerous, in my experience. Before you know, you have some subtle features in the textual format that the GUI can't represent, and as a result, any modifications in the GUI will break your usage of the feature.
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by maksimum on Sunday February 11, 2018 @04:16PM (#16354854)
Very interesting point. Any chance you can recall a specific example? I'm not doubting you; simply curious since the above seems like a good idea to me and I want to understand the pitfalls.
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