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Bob Morales posted:Just an example - Excel on Windows is fast. Really fast. Open a huge spreadhseet? 150,000 lines opens in 3 seconds. It can open stuff fairly quick (although the sheets I worked with could take several minutes) but manipulating that data it's a dog, and throwing hardware at it doesn't resolve this. When you get past a certain point, every new line seems to drag it even further behind.
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Jun 3, 2016 17:34
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EL BROMANCE posted:It can open stuff fairly quick (although the sheets I worked with could take several minutes) but manipulating that data it's a dog, and throwing hardware at it doesn't resolve this. When you get past a certain point, every new line seems to drag it even further behind. That's the threading in Excel, actually. If your system uses hyper threading, then once you max the number of threads equal to the physical cores in your machine, then it actually slows down calculations because the threads start fighting with each other to monopolize single cores. To make Excel run the most effectively on Windows (which is great advice in the Mac software thread  ) set the number of threads to Physical Cores - 1.
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Jun 3, 2016 21:10
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I remember when Office 2011 came out, we were all so happy it was such a huge improvement over Office 2008.
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Jun 3, 2016 21:15
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I can't be the only one who misses iWork 09
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Jun 3, 2016 21:15
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Mu Zeta posted:Office for Mac has been so painful for years that seeing Google Docs was drat near a revolution. I feel sorry for people that were forced to use Office 2011. The current version seems to be a bit better but it's still bloated and slow. There's a whole generation of people that are growing up only using Google Docs because of schools practically giving out Chromebooks. I really don't see MS Office being dominant 5-10 years from now in many places. Office 2011 for Mac was great. I especially preferred Outlook to the Mail app for it's more robust features. I still prefer Word over Google Docs when writing more professional stuff. Google docs is terrible unless you're writing up simple documents. Word just has more formatting features and stuff. I can write my cover letter or resume in Google Docs but I can make it better in Word. Rabid Snake fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jun 4, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 15:47
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Rabid Snake posted:Office 2011 for Mac was great. I especially preferred Outlook to the Mail app for it's more robust features. I still prefer Word over Google Docs when writing more professional stuff. Google docs is terrible unless you're writing up simple documents. Word just has more formatting features and stuff. I can write my cover letter or resume in Google Docs but I can make it better in Word. Yeah, draft in docs, format in word.
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Jun 4, 2016 17:30
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Mu Zeta posted:I don't know anyone who still uses Office when Google Docs exists. gdocs is steaming poo poo compared to office online
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Jun 4, 2016 17:54
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I try to use things for what they're good at: Google docs is great for collaboration on a mildly formatted doc without having to negotiate with "but I only have Office 2000" wet blanket queefs. You've got a web browser, you can collaborate. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are great when it's just me and I don't want some licensing bullshit because I'm working on too many different devices or something. Office is great when other people use Office and it would be a fool's errand to convince them otherwise. Adobe Indesign is great for precise formatting by myself. TeX is great for precise formatting and collaboration with people who aren't all going to bet Indesign. And on, and on, and on. Juvenile statements like "hahah XYZ sucks" or "I only use X for all situations" disqualify the other person as a serious person who is able to select the correct tool for a job. In that case they're the tool, and they're probably not that great at the job.
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Jun 5, 2016 02:16
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Well gently caress me in the rear end, I had no idea something like Indesign existed. What's the neatest thing you've done with it, flavor?
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Jun 5, 2016 04:23
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Butt Savage posted:Well gently caress me in the rear end, I had no idea something like Indesign existed. What's the neatest thing you've done with it, flavor? Your point being ... ? What does it matter what I've done with it? All that matters is that there tend to be several candidate tools for any given job, and that it makes sense to consider all of them. Some opinions here were the equivalent of bumper stickers. Indesign was just an example, replace it with whatever you like. But, out of curiosity, Is something the matter with InDesign? It just helps to reevaluate some things from time to time. While I still prefer Preview to the clunky Adobe Acrobat (and the standalone reader), it turns out that Preview chokes on PDFs that go beyond a certain level of complexity, while Acrobat can open and manipulate them just fine on the same machine. Not something I would have found out if I'd taken some kind of "hahaha look at that clunky Acrobat poo poo app, let's delete it" approach.
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Jun 5, 2016 08:00
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flavor posted:Your point being ... ?
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Jun 5, 2016 08:11
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Vulture Culture posted:Are you confusing Butt Savage with someone who's posted in this thread in the past few days or are you this weirdly defensive all the time? On the last two pages, there have been at least four posts that amounted to "A is poo poo, use B" without any substantial explanation. That's very nice if you want to poll people, but I think it's more interesting if people give verifiable reasons. And I don't know about you, but if I mention that I use X and then somebody gets sarcastic about the existence of X and asks me what the neatest thing I've you done with X, then it doesn't look like that person is looking for some mutually enjoyable conversation. If you're assuming that I'm defensive about InDesign, I'm not. Adobe is actually terrible at integrating their tools into OS X, and I wouldn't mind if they'd be replaced by someone or something better.
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Jun 5, 2016 08:34
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Keep an eye out for Affinity Publisher
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Jun 5, 2016 12:23
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flavor posted:On the last two pages, there have been at least four posts that amounted to "A is poo poo, use B" without any substantial explanation. That's very nice if you want to poll people, but I think it's more interesting if people give verifiable reasons. So give us some about InDesign or shut the gently caress up
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Jun 5, 2016 12:39
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I'm writing my dissertation in InCopy/InDesign because every other tool (except maybe TeX) would instantly and catastrophically choke on the number of pages, references, index marks, footnotes, direct and indirect formatting, tables, figures, and other assorted junk that has to go into it.
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Jun 5, 2016 13:48
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You can't beat TeX for math and making pretty documents, but it's quite a bit of work. You have to set it up properly, learn the kinda gnarly syntax of the language (and of any plugins you use), set up your templates... It does typeset beautifully though, better than anything else I've seen. I've only really seen it used in academia though. At work I work with a bunch of data scientists and they give me their spec documents that are just full of mathematical notation but they just do it in Word. It probably takes more time, it's nowhere near as pretty, but it works for them. In academia, when I was studying Mathematics, I noticed I got considerably higher grades when I typeset everything with TeX. I could be JUST AS WRONG but they'd give me more 'part marks' because it was pretty. TeX is the bomb-diggity. But, it takes a while to set up and get used to it. Also.... it's something you forget very quickly lol I couldn't even tell you the basics of the syntax anymore because it's so weird.
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Jun 5, 2016 13:57
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Pivo posted:You can't beat TeX for math and making pretty documents, but it's quite a bit of work. You have to set it up properly, learn the kinda gnarly syntax of the language (and of any plugins you use), set up your templates... It does typeset beautifully though, better than anything else I've seen. I've found that OSX's grapher can actually produce fairly good output while also beating easier to work with than Word (but that's not saying much). The main problem is getting it into a useful format that can be put into the final document without any loss of quality. But yes, TeX does what it does better than almost anything else, but the set-up and maintenance costs become too much after a while. It's what I used before switching to ID, and I don't even want to think about how much time I spent on setting up my templates and document settings. Brrr.
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Jun 5, 2016 14:32
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flavor posted:On the last two pages, there have been at least four posts that amounted to "A is poo poo, use B" without any substantial explanation. That's very nice if you want to poll people, but I think it's more interesting if people give verifiable reasons. I wasn't being sarcastic, I was genuinely curious, what with you listing a bunch of apps for different scenarios and I thought I'd add another to my toolbox. Not everyone is out to get you. Tippis posted:But yes, TeX does what it does better than almost anything else, but the set-up and maintenance costs become too much after a while. It's what I used before switching to ID, and I don't even want to think about how much time I spent on setting up my templates and document settings. Brrr. I remember looking into TeX a few months ago when it came up in another thread and couldn't believe what I was looking at. I wasn't sure if I wanted to learn all that, especially since I knew I wasn't going to be using it that much. I kinda dropped the idea of using such programs until InDesign was mentioned. I'll give it a shot when I get a chance. Butt Savage fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 16:43
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Thanks Ants posted:Keep an eye out for Affinity Publisher https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/about/ quote:Expected to be in beta around the end of 2016 with a launch in 2017
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Jun 5, 2016 17:11
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Butt Savage posted:I wasn't being sarcastic, I was genuinely curious, what with you listing a bunch of apps for different scenarios and I thought I'd add another to my toolbox. Not everyone is out to get you. I'm sorry then, but I'll have to say the way you phrased it was a little ambiguous, particularly so in the context of these forums. About 10-20% of the responses I get on anything here are just unmitigated rear end, like the one from user Kaizoku. Anyway, I have InDesign as part of the Creative Cloud (so I didn't buy it by itself), and I've used it for an issue of a fanzine (just for fun) and for a poster. I hear it's also good for academic publications. Butt Savage posted:I remember looking into TeX a few months ago when it came up in another thread and couldn't believe what I was looking at. I wasn't sure if I wanted to learn all that, especially since I knew I wasn't going to be using it that much. I kinda dropped the idea of using such programs until InDesign was mentioned. I'll give it a shot when I get a chance. TeXstudio seems to be a good front end. I have worked with it, but it's all a little cumbersome compared to things like InDesign, because the tool itself will be your main focus for a while if you're new to TeX.
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Jun 5, 2016 21:16
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No hard feelings man, I get what you mean. TeXstudio: Yeah, I'll admit I'm a bit too lazy / impatient to deal with what you mentioned, having to focus on the tool for a while before I can make anything decent. I don't mind a learning curve, but InDesign seems a bit more user friendly and I think I'll have more fun learning how to use it than the complexity that is TeX. I've recently had so many ideas for small projects (like posters) that I'd like to do on my own. They're relatively simple designs that I've always felt like I could do myself if I had the right tools. Definitely gonna give it a go when I get the chance.
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Jun 5, 2016 21:57
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I use Sublime Text 2 with some LaTeX plugins for my TeX needs on OS X and Windows now, FWIW -- works out pretty well. Use Skim as the PDF viewer. Question -- accountsd and Mail.app are murdering my CPU on El Capitan. Internet seems to suggest this is due to a lot of Google account fuckery -- I'd like to be able to check my Google mail in Mail.app, but it's not strictly necessary. Anyone run into this? Some folks suggest deleting / remaking some kind of accounts.sqlite file as well. Seriously sitting around 65%-70% CPU usage even with Mail.app closed and accountsd happily murdering my battery life. It's a 2010 MBP which is still good for basically everything I need, minus the battery-murdering system processes.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:05
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Second stupid question that's been bugging me for awhile, 'hostname' -- my hostname appears to change based on the network I'm on (at least in terminal and the output of the hostname command) -- my Mac is still named what I expect it to be, I just forget if this some kind of WINS/NetBIOS/Bonjour/etc thing that's trying to 'help'.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:07
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With regards to TeX chat, Lyx is a good front end. It acts a lot like a standard word processor, but formats nicely using Latex. When it has problems it can be a bit of a nightmare to get working again, but these days it's been pretty reliable for me. I use it for academic writing mostly.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:45
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If I can inject another dissenting opinion, using a tool to do WYSIWYG TeX editing is the wrong way to learn it, in my opinion. It's best to start at the base level, write the actual code. You can use a tool for that! As long as you're writing the actual code. So you understand how it's interpreting your stuff. If you jump straight into Lyx, you might want to do something complex and suddenly realize you have no loving idea how any of it works. If you want to use TeX, and I recommend you do if you want to prepare academic documents or mathematical papers or pretty resumes, MacTex is pretty great, but really it's such a popular thing you can just google 'LaTeX Mac' and get all the help you need (LaTeX is a popular extension to the TeX core - almost more popular than the core itself)
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Jun 5, 2016 23:33
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Pivo posted:If I can inject another dissenting opinion, using a tool to do WYSIWYG TeX editing is the wrong way to learn it, in my opinion. It's best to start at the base level, write the actual code. You can use a tool for that! As long as you're writing the actual code. So you understand how it's interpreting your stuff. If you jump straight into Lyx, you might want to do something complex and suddenly realize you have no loving idea how any of it works. If you want to use TeX, and I recommend you do if you want to prepare academic documents or mathematical papers or pretty resumes, MacTex is pretty great, but really it's such a popular thing you can just google 'LaTeX Mac' and get all the help you need (LaTeX is a popular extension to the TeX core - almost more popular than the core itself) I go back and forth on this point myself, and I wrote my phd thesis in TextMate using the LaTeX plug-in, so I know a bit about the dirty details. But now I can use Lyx to get students comfortable with the idea of Latex, and once they have an idea of what they want, it's easy to get them using Google to do more complicated things in Lyx without ever having to write any actual Tex. I think it's a good compromise for the most part.
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Jun 5, 2016 23:39
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Wouldn't it be easier to tell them to take 20 minutes and flip through lshort? It's more than adequate to get you started. Then again, I never used latex for math-things, just relatively simple text. Certainly nothing that would take more than a few minutes of searching to look up if the end result looked hosed-up. Then again, the scripting is way easier when you're not trying to churn out formulas and the such. FWIW I liked TexShop, which [used to be] the other frontend included in MacTeX. It had handy builtin "macros" for stuff, so you didn't even need to remember how to write a preamble if you couldn't be bothered. And if you really wanted to just play with something, LaTeX-it (or something like that) was the third main tex application they included, for quickly churning out a formula or whatever (presumably so you could then drop the output image into a word file or whatever). Then again, the best part of latex for me (like eight years ago or so) was that I could churn out the files on whatever the hell I wanted (even OS 9!) and get a usuable output (even if it was just a postscript file) plus an editable file if I found a typo or whatever. But I doubt anyone cares about Cmactex or whatever it's called these days.
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Jun 6, 2016 00:18
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Butt Savage posted:No hard feelings man, I get what you mean. I use inDesign daily and it's fantastic. Have you also considered FrameMaker?
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Jun 6, 2016 02:09
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Whoa, FrameMaker's still around? I used to teach classes in it a million years ago.
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Jun 6, 2016 02:32
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XBenedict posted:I use inDesign daily and it's fantastic. Have you also considered FrameMaker? I've never even heard of ID or FrameMaker until now. The deepest I've ever gone in Adobe's website was to grab a trial of PS Elements and those times when I needed to install the hot garbage known as Flash (sure as hell don't do that anymore). I'll check that out too, though ID seems better fit my needs. 
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Jun 6, 2016 04:33
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flavor posted:Your point being ... ? flavor posted:On the last two pages, there have been at least four posts that amounted to "A is poo poo, use B" without any substantial explanation. That's very nice if you want to poll people, but I think it's more interesting if people give verifiable reasons. Your apology isn't an apology and these posts are no-content. Me calling you out on being an rear end in a top hat might not have been polite, but you had two giant posts here showing that we'd be better off not being interested in anything you say because you automatically assume a bad faith response. Then you throw in a "but" in your apology when no one else read the post you were responding to in that light. But yeah, I'm the one poo poo posting for calling you out on it. Edit: To be less of a hypocrite about content, I use macvim and vim with a buncha plugins (spf-13 is a good place to start) for most text formatting, because that's simply what I first learned on and have always been most capable with. That being said, the fact that it can run on p much any machine from the last 30 years helps, and the fact that it isn't WYSIWYG allows me to write it up in there and do most formatting jobs with tags in a markup language, then print that as a PDF. Otherwise, it's plain simple to then move the text to whatever program you need the document formatted in, if you can't reliably convert the document from vim or the cli (like office), but otherwise I'm completely removed from distractions. For quick notes, I use nvalt with the resultant files being in a folder on a server that all my devices can access. It works for me, but I understand that it's not the best workflow for everyone and certainly don't expect anyone to imitate it. Grassy Knowles fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Jun 6, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2016 13:44
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beefnoodle posted:Whoa, FrameMaker's still around? I used to teach classes in it a million years ago. Still the goto for technical writing.
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Jun 6, 2016 23:14
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Sadly I fell into the wrong crowd and have been trapped in a hell of Microsoft Word templates ever since.
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Jun 7, 2016 00:05
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Kaizoku posted:But yeah, I'm the one poo poo posting  , not using punctuation (referring to your first post there, the above is just what I'm quoting) is shitposting.Also if you read what I posted, I wasn't trying to evangelize InDesign, so angrily asking me to do so was pointless. Plus, everything was already well between me and the other poster, so your latest post was kinda late. If you want to argue my apology some more, I suggest we take it to PMs. XBenedict posted:Still the goto for technical writing. Right. It's also exclusively available on Windows and not part of the Creative Cloud Suite. It seems to be very good, but it's some kind of weird outlier in Adobe's lineup.
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Jun 7, 2016 00:15
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flavor posted:
Let it go dude. Sorry that The Something Awful Forums don't meet your exacting standards of discourse but jumping down people's throats because you can't tell the difference between an insult and a question isn't improving anything.
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Jun 7, 2016 00:18
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Weedle posted:Let it go dude. Sorry that The Something Awful Forums don't meet your exacting standards of discourse but jumping down people's throats because you can't tell the difference between an insult and a question isn't improving anything. There is simply an atmosphere here where things can come across differently than they're intended to be understood. It doesn't mean the whole forums are bad (the ratio of good information to be gained still makes them worthwhile), but this is not exactly a tolerant place. I don't know why some people here have to insist on that not being the case, particularly after the other guy and I have moved on. If it's really so important to you that I've miscategorized one reply once, PM me. Also, really, if "Your point being...?" counts as "jumping down people's throats", then you must be overly sensitive. I'd rather discuss FrameMaker vs. InDesign. Why would somebody choose one over the other? It seems like Adobe is only keeping FrameMaker around by popular demand and is trying to push InDesign.
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Jun 7, 2016 00:48
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InDesign is a replacement for PageMaker (remember that?) and Quark. It's targeted more towards the artistic graphic design market. Its market is much, much larger than FrameMaker. gently caress, I remember when Adobe was trying to sunset FrameMaker, but it's hung on because the needs of the technical writing market aren't the same as newspapers or average book writers and graphic designers. They have very different needs than people writing science or mathematical papers which lean to FrameMaker. FrameMaker is more in line with a word processor than InDesign, which is more layout focused. The main benefit of FrameMaker is its structured document design, which InDesign doesn't really do, even though Adobe tried to improve ID's document structure tools. I don't do structured document writing, so I can't speak to the pros and cons there, even though I use InDesign on a daily basis. I personally haven't used FrameMaker in 15 years, but that's because I don't write the kind of documentation where FrameMaker would be helpful. If you write highly structured technical documents like, say, aerospace or electrical construction manuals, look at FrameMaker. Since this is the Mac Software thread it bears repeating that FrameMaker hasn't run natively on Macs since 2001. You'd be running it in Parallels or Boot Camp. I will say that working for a print OEM (a company that makes raster image processors) that I've only gotten one problem FrameMaker file from a customer in the past ten years. kefkafloyd fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Jun 7, 2016 |
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Jun 7, 2016 01:49
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flavor posted:
You douche, you were only asked what you did with it.
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Jun 7, 2016 02:39
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beefnoodle posted:You douche, you were only asked what you did with it. I don't get why some people have go on and on and on about this days after this was resolved in a positive way between the other poster and me. It was ambiguous. Don't tell me that "Well gently caress me in the rear end, I had no idea something like Indesign existed. What's the neatest thing you've done with it, flavor?" cannot possibly be meant in a sarcastic way on these forums. It's all fine and completely resolved, but PLEASE, douche, take this to PMs or whatever. And it would be really great if the next hater PM'd me right away.
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Jun 7, 2016 04:33
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kefkafloyd posted:I remember when Adobe was trying to sunset FrameMaker, but it's hung on I remember that time also, I think it was around the early 2000s. I was surprised to hear that it's still around. My wonderful InDesign poster made the world-renowned FoxIt Reader crash when trying to print to a poster printer and I had to go to Kinko's, where they were able to print the exact same document without issues. Something tells me a place that expects people to make their posters in PowerPoint is not very professional...
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Jun 7, 2016 05:36
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