this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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[โ€“] interolivary@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Git diff will look pretty terrible for docx or similar files. The thing with the builtin change tracking is that it'll actually show you what changed in the document view

[โ€“] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The comment you're replying to was talking about LaTeX, not .docx.

[โ€“] interolivary@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Ah, I took it so that they mentioned beamer / LaTeX as a separate thing from change tracking, which is usually more of a document editor feature than a presentation editor feature.

[โ€“] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But like, using LaTeX as a replacement for microsoft word is NOT really useful advice for the vast majority of people who use Word. I don't need ANY of the special things LaTeX does, and I've been using Word all my life to do the basic stuff I need it for.

I get where people here are coming from, but the whole point of this thread is talking about proprietary software which is better for the average use case than open source stuff, and I think the point still stands that MSOffice products absolutely fit that bill. Yes, open source or free alternatives exist, but they aren't nearly as good, feature-full, and easy to learn and use as the open source alternatives.

The fact that we're here arguing whether LaTeX is a viable alternative to Word and Power Point kinda proves that MSOffice is the best for this IMO, because LaTeX isn't exactly easy to pick up and use and is really intended for industries that need extremely complex formatting on their presentations and papers.

[โ€“] lud@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

No one here is talking about using LaTeX instead of Word. They are talking about making presentations, not documents.

And yeah, I can see how making presentations in LaTeX is faster and easier (for some people) because PowerPoint is so incredibly annoying and slow to use. And the ability to use version tracking is very nice.