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The sheets themselves are usually unproblematic, but the charts often don’t render properly when viewed in MSO. This is relevant because the other party usually does not have LO installed.

I don’t use gVim, but for work stuff that I don’t have to share (mosly just notes), I use markdown in Obsidian w/ vi mode :) It’s not FOSS and Electron is bloat, but it is really slick, and my boss approved expensing the $50 seat license for business. I might check out logseq in the future, but Obsidian was a lot more mature back when I was looking around. My only beef is that Markdown doesn’t natively support sub/superscripts, which are kinda important for chemistry. Most editors implement extensions, but they’re not always portable.

Do you have an alternative to suggest?

For the general user? Not really, I’m just venting :) I have the unsubstantiated, possibly irrational belief that MSO UX ought to be far more polished after having existed for so long. Like you said, most of my frustrations have workarounds, even if they are buried or tedious (though the tedium is part of my contention).

For making slides or posters, someone in school recommended to lay out a poster or each slide completely in ChemDraw (basically a specialized, widely used vector-based WYSIWYG editor for organic chemistry) and paste the lot onto a PPT slide. That works reasonably well and makes everything have a consistent look, especially since most slides of mine contain chemdraws of molecules anyway. ChemDraw does have its own warts and somewhat limited functionality beyond drawing molecules and text. Also, since like 2019 the rendering and UI have gotten so much slower. For posters and basic diagraming, I currently use Inkscape, pasting things as needed. Inkscape also has its quirks, but its interface is so much more powerful and the UI so much more responsive than either ChemDraw or PPT that it is the clear winner for me. Though, it is also not winning any startup races.

For Excel, you’re unfortunately correct; there is no suitable WYSIWYG spreadsheet replacement. While I can do essentially all of the typical numerical hacking I do in Excel with (IMO) a better experience in LibreOffice Calc, it falls down when I need to show it to someone else. The charting in Calc is lackluster, and it doesn’t play nice with Office file formats. Also, my workplace (though not me personally) makes heavy use of Excel UI + VBA + fortran (!) DLLs for reactor modeling…

LO Writer is probably the closest to Word in usability, but compatibility with Word files is still subpar, mostly to do with styling and formatting. Both are bloated for probably 50% of my use (e.g., writing up informal procedures or meeting minutes). Wordpad (RIP) is nice in that regard.

it used to be a direct menu item but now it is quite buried…

My colleague swears that UI in MSO before Office 2007 was so much better, but I can’t comment much on that.

I mean, it’s okay… I feel like I run into inconveniences in MSO every day. Off the top of my head (solutions welcome):

• Absurd startup times for opening documents. Worse if there isn’t an instance of the app already open. Part of the blame goes to my company’s antivirus software, but Excel and PowerPoint are easily my slowest-starting apps, and Word is the runner-up. All UI animations are also stupidly slow, though I think that was a design choice.
• A pasted graphic goes to the center of the slide in ppt regardless of the current zoom or view. Annoying for making large posters, exacerbated by delayed rendering of lots of graphics.
• Likewise, zooming occurs relative to slide’s center, not the current zoomed view or from the mouse pointer.
• No easily accessibly horizontal scroll outside of using a touchpad (i.e., scrollbar only). Tilting the mouse wheel (if I even have access to such a mouse) either doesn’t work or only slightly nudges the view. Also makes posters tedious in combination with pasting issue. Something like shift+mousewheel would be nice.
• Dragging a scroll bar does not update the view until you release it.
• Sometimes the amount of space between a bullet point and text in a PPT text box changes when all others are remain the same. Possibly a skill issue related to styles. Still frustrating.
• Dragging objects autoaligns them to seemingly everything except what I want it to. I now run with snapping turned off.
• Pasting charts between documents changes to destination formatting/styling by default.
• Pasting text from external sources keeps formatting by default. Never have I ever wanted to copy a web page’s or email’s font, color, and size into my own docs. I could have sworn that there were also circumstances where ctrl+alt+v doesn’t work properly, but I can’t seem to remember/reproduce that at the moment.
• Dates in Excel. It’s a meme, but also true.
• Excel seems to have a “root” window (the doc opened first), and it does not play nice with virtual desktops. If you try to open a spreadsheet from Windows Explorer or some other app (e.g. web browser) on VD B while the root window is on VD A, you are forcibly switched to VD A, where the doc actually opens (after a complimentary delay, of course). Then I have to find the freaking window in Task View and move it back to VD B. There is a reason I wasn’t adding more windows to VD A to begin with. Incidentally Word and other MSO apps do not have this issue for some reason.
• If one doc window freezes/stops responding, they all do.
• Aligning things in Word
• A few common color palettes are not colorblind-friendly.

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Hard water specically. I suppose that water softening is detrimental, then. I also wonder if this means microplastics can be used to remove lead by a similar mechanism. Maybe not considering that typical Pb levels are a lot lower than Ca in hard water.

So you’re saying that you don’t like trying to relight the thermal oxidizer for the formaldehyde stream that went out due to spillover from another process, with an emergency flare? Got it.

I mean, sure, things like that are super dangerous, but at least they’re obviously, flashily dangerous and for that reason have a lot more attention paid to them. The real nasties are arguably the ones that aren’t so flashy but are much more common amd don’t have immediate effects. Formaldehyde and benzene will give you cancer, and acrylate monomers will make it so you one day wake up allergic to the modern world.

This post made me go try something in clojure again and man I forgot just how fucking good the language is. Everything fits together so nicely.

TIL that influenza virions can be stick-shaped.

This is exactly it. My advisor wanted a word doc to edit, not a PDF. I wasn’t quite snooty enough to think that he should learn latex. Though, if he ever took the time to learn (what time?), I’m sure the writing process would be unbearable for other reasons not entirely related.

A fine assumption given what I wrote. Unfortunately, we did both depending on what he felt like at the time. Yes, for the same doc.

Preaching to the choir. “But Box already supports ‘versioning’, why use a confusing hacker tool instead?”

Counterpoint: advisor said no.

“Just use Word, everyone else does. I have never heard of this latex thing, so must be just some trendy useless overengineered software that does Word’s job but worse. Word can track changes just fine, and you can leave comments.” proceeds to strikethrough, highlight, and inline comment everything instead of using either of those features “I want to read what you wrote, not fight technology” proceeds to email you three separate times after forgetting to attach v28 about how a graphic looks wrong because Word ate it

proper alchemy

Man, fuck hetcat. You put extremely rare metals on special rocks in a very particular way just to burn something juuuuuust the right amount. Or un-burn it, I suppose. How does it work? Well, oxygen adatoms react with the substrate bound to a metal nanoparticle on its 10(-67) face following a formation of an oxygen vacancy-- jk, jk, it’s actually all happening at a tellurium defect in your special rocks, you silly goose. Oh wait, nvm, it’s actually iron contamination from manufacturing defects in the walls of your vessel. Git gud. Oh wait nvm it is actually catalyzed by your precious metal, but that metal needs to be slightly poisoned by lead and nickel from the radioactive decay of trace thorium from the welds and cobalt-60 in the steel, respectively. How could you have forgotten?

“But it works in my reactor!”

Not gonna lie, I thought about your comment multiple times today trying to make sense of it, and only just now did I realize what you meant by it.

Yes, like Alan Turing. Ugh.

Ya “an historic”, when the h is clearly pronounced, strikes the wonderful double blow of being both pretentious and wrong as far as I’m concerned. Looking at you, NPR. Go run up an hill, why donchya?