Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 February 5

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February 5

What can MS Word do that no free word processor can?

Looking at this, I see, for instance, that Word alone costs $109.99. I clicked "Learn more" and then looked at what the tabs had to say, but I don't see what feature set this application contains that absolutely cannot be found in any other free word processor such as Open Office Writer. In this comparison (which I can tell doesn't cover all features, LibreOffice writer has more Yeses than Word with the one exception I can see between those two in particular being exporting to WordPerfect format). But I don't see that itself being worth $109.99. What feature(s) does the latest version of Word have that no current free word processor has? 67.163.109.173 (talk) 03:03, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't think people buy it because they think it has more features. There is the perception, wrong IMHO, that software products put out by large companies are more reliable than free products. There is an analogy with Wikipedia (free) and non-free encyclopedias. StuRat (talk) 03:10, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Comparison of word processors has side-by-side feature listings. Microsoft's promotional website also lists key software features. One key feature that Microsoft Word can do is PDF reflow, or dynamic editing of content that was originally stored in a PDF document. I am not aware of any free software word-processor that can edit and re-layout PDF documents. Nimur (talk) 04:32, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Another (perceived) bonus is the network effect. Open Office/Libre Office/NeoOffice are about as compatible with Word as Word is with its previous release. But the small incompatibilities are perceived as failures of the competing product, while incompatibilities within the Word family are perceived as necessary results of progress. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:22, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Or put another way it is more compatible with Microsoft Word than any of the non Microsoft Word products are. And when you consider the enormous amount of time people spend learning to cope with Word's various quirks that is a big perceived advantage to them. They don't want to go though all that again. Divide your $109.99 by $ per hour - they know they wouldn't be proficient with another Word processor in that time. Dmcq (talk) 10:47, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

One thing that should be mentioned is that it's not only about features but also about how easy it is to use all those features - I use OpenOffice exclusively at home and support MS Word for a bunch of attorneys (who use every last feature of Word for contracts and stuff) at work, so I guess I have a fair basis for comparison - and I have to say that over time I have really come to hate OpenOffice because everything that goes beyond the most basic editing features is so incredibly convoluted and complicated. Sure, it's possible to have varying page headers in different sections of a document, and it's also possible to insert a single landscape page in an otherwise portrait document, but it's no fun to do so in OpenOffice - and that's not even getting into stuff like paragraph numbering and formatting tables of content (which is just painful to the point of being impossible in OO). In a simple feature comparison, OpenOffice will look as good as MS Word, and for standard home-use features it may even be more or less user friendly, but once you get into more complex editing stuff (with several users working on a document, numbering schemes having to be changed, tracking changes for formatting changes etc) , you really notice the differences in usability. As much as I love the idea of free/open software in general, OpenOffice is still one of the worst offenders in the "we don't care about user friendliness" category, at least as soon as you move beyond writing a simple letter -- Ferkelparade π 11:01, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Lawyers and word processors ... they certainly are exacting in their requirements, I pity you. My impression of Word is that it has accretions of loads of different ways of doing almost the same thing, all slightly different and incompatible and not quite doing what one wants. Whenever I use it I feel like I'm fighting it. I do think though OpenOffice needs to improve its macro language, not that Word is much fun, and it isn't up to scratch for multi user stuff. Dmcq (talk) 11:30, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

BTW I often use LibreOffice, which is OpenOffice but shifted around, for various things when I'm not worried about it being exactly the same. Its spreadsheet however is still nowhere as fast as Excel which is a big disadvantage - though they have being going in opposite directions in that respect recently. I have a couple of large spreadsheets where I've had to invest time to stop even Excel being sluggish so this is a big thing for me. Dmcq (talk) 13:15, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

I personally feel that word processors have too many features these days. That is, they are bloatware. To take just one case, I am fine with only having a single dash. Having multiple, ever-so-slightly-different dashes just causes problems, IMHO. For example, if you want to do a search-and-replace on a phrase containing a dash, now you have to worry if the phrase will have exactly the same dash in each location. Now multiply the multiple dashes problem by a thousand, to account for all the similar issues, and you get a very cumbersome product to use. StuRat (talk) 16:03, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

While I agree that MS Office in particular is an egregious example of bloatware, I would disagree strongly that the fact of different dashes is an example of that. The differences between a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash are old typographical distinctions. They are not extra "features" added by word processors — they vastly predate them, and the differences between them are not arbitrarily interchangeable. (We use them on Wikipedia too, you know — if you put two hyphens in, some poor bot will replace them with an em dash. If you use a hyphen where an en dash is appropriate, the same thing will eventually occur, though it is less obvious.) It is certainly true that most people do not know how to use them correctly and you will get quite a lot of difference in practice, but that's not really the word processor's fault (any more than people not knowing how to use commas is), and it is certainly not a bloated feature (I doubt there is any significant additional overhead in terms of memory or processing power). --Mr.98 (talk) 16:13, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Yeah what he said - Mr.98 beat me to it by a few seconds there :) I'd only add there is often a very useful feature - wildcard searching (more features is not necessarily more 'bloat') if you are unsure which hyphen or dash is the appropriate one, but in the middle of a word it should be a hyphen ---- _nonsense ferret 16:22, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

To me, this is an unnecessary distinction between dashes. Early word processors just supported one dash, and that worked just fine. I'm also using a wider def of "bloatware" to include "unneeded features which decrease user productivity, rather than increasing it". StuRat (talk) 16:19, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

sounds like you'd be happier with a typewriter, why not? nothing wrong with that. I'll personally stick with MS Word and its handling of multiple styles, tables, object imbedding, mathematical text rendering et al ---- _nonsense ferret 16:25, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

No, I haven't used a typewriter in decades. They decrease productivity, relative to word processors, as fixing mistakes and making changes is time-consuming. I tend to use very simple word processors, like Notepad. StuRat (talk) 16:40, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

It's absolutely horrible for mathematical text. If you want to make decent documents with any serious amount of mathematics, you have one choice: LaTeX. --Trovatore (talk) 00:49, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I emphatically disagree; I have produced many fine looking mathematical documents in Microsoft Word, that were easy to update and maintain. TeX has a legacy community; many people prefer TeX; but it is not the only reasonable choice. If you summed up all the hours you spent to learn TeX, and instead spent those hours learning how to properly and correctly manage mathematical formatting in Microsoft Word, you probably would recognize how powerful a feature-rich word-processor can be for composing and publishing mathematical papers. The most common argument I hear in favor of TeX is that the author can focus on content and worry about format later; but this is a fairly silly critique. In a word-processor, you can easily disable and re-enable formatting as often or as infrequently as suits your needs. If you feel so inclined, you can edit a document in Word using a fixed-width font with word-wrap disabled; and apply a style template after the text entry is complete, automatically stylizing based on document context. And regarding equation entry: Microsoft Word can accept equations in TeX markup language. So the claim that word processors are "unable" to handle mathematical formatting is a faulty argument. If the concern is price, or if you have an aversion proprietary non-free software, those critiques at least hold water: but if the concern is that word processors are unsuitable for mathematical documents, that concern is easily addressed by learning the basic operation of the software. Incompetence is a flimsy defense, and not one that a respectable mathematician should hide behind! (See also, our discussion from a few months ago, in which I challenged anyone to identify the specific advantage of TeX over an alternative typesetting or word-processing program). Nimur (talk) 06:06, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Can you use TikZ and packages built on it like circuiTikZ and chemfig in Word? 67.163.109.173 (talk) 22:32, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with those tools. Categorically, it can be done. You can use VBA in Word to run arbitrarily complex workflows and call out to external tools. Should it be done? That's an entirely different question. There are plenty of more ...parsimonious ways to embed technical graphics into a Word document, using tools that will be familiar to a wider audience, and will very likely be more robust and easier to maintain. And to preempt any "security risk" argument against VBA, remember that when you execute a TeX build, you are compiling program-code to render and lay out the document, which, as a workflow, is more susceptible to hidden malware than any modern, sandboxed Office tool! Nimur (talk) 06:35, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

circuiTikZ is for making electrical/electronic schematics and chemfig is for drawing 2d chemical structures. 20.137.2.50 (talk) 18:11, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Word's equation editor just flat-out sucks. You shouldn't have to do these things with the mouse. It should all be in text, as it is with TeX. --Trovatore (talk) 08:30, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

You don't have to use a mouse. In addition to the existing default keyboard shortcuts to enter equations, you can also customize your own keyboard shortcuts for any action that would otherwise use mouse clicks. At some point, you will have to concede: "I don't know how to do (task) in Word" is not strictly equivalent to "Word cannot do (task)." Nimur (talk) 16:10, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I tried to save a Word 2010 document with the latest format with a digital signature, and a different document that was encrypted with a password, in the latest format. OpenOffice wouldn't open them. Then I tried saving a password-protected document in the Word 2003 XML format, and OpenOffice wouldn't open it because I have removed Java from my computer. This kind of nonsense would tend to make serious business word processor users view the free word processors as jokes. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:28, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Are you making some sort of joke or something? Word can't import native OpenOffice formats at all. Also when I remove a disk from my computer it doesn't work properly, that's no way to design a computer by that argument. Dmcq (talk) 00:45, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Dmcq, that statement is incorrect. Since at least Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, you can open and save files in the OpenDocument Text (.odt) file format; here is a technical review of differences between OpenDocument and Word document formats. Nimur (talk) 06:22, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that, yes that could help MS Office users I guess. Personally I'll stick to using LibreOffice for conversion. I must have a go at doing some conversions using Google documents as an intermediate and see what happens. Dmcq (talk) 22:34, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Can you import any graphical element into Word and place it at any arbitrary position? If yes, then you can produce whatever document you want with Word, typographically speaking. That doesn't mean that it, as a tool, is equally user-friendly as other tools, tough. OsmanRF34 (talk) 12:55, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Touchpads, printers, and fingerprints

• 1) To begin with, I have long held the admittedly paranoid suspicion, seemingly peculiar to myself, that spy agencies and Synaptics (which seems to make all the laptop touchpads) are able to extract fingerprints from laptop touch pads and load them to a central database. Is there any way to prove this true or false? Has anyone tested?

• 2) If it isn't normally possible with existing software, could it be possible with a custom application?

• 3) Suppose somehow you've acquired a fingerprint pattern to play with. I'll assume there's some way to computer optimize it to be as light/dark as you want (ridges as thick or thin as you want). Can you sign a document like File:Rizana Letter Tamil.JPG by printing the fingerprint onto an inkjet and pressing the ink into the other paper while it's wet, or something simple like that?

• 4) I assume it must be possible with a proper 3D printer, but is it possible, using any common type of printer, to make a program that prints the fingerprint file, waits a moment for it to dry, drags the paper back up into the machine and prints over it again ... and again... and again... and eventually get an actual raised fingerprint that would leave convincing marks on water glasses and murder weapons? Could something like this fool the fingerprint scanner mentioned in [1]?

Wnt (talk) 05:25, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

I added numbers to aid in responding:

1) It's a hardware issue with touch pads. They simply don't have the type of sensors in them which would be needed to record a fingerprint. Now, I suppose they might be able to make something which looks and acts like a touch pad, but also records a fingerprint, but I imagine such a device would cost thousands of dollars. So, I don't expect they're sneaking them into all laptops at that price.

2) As above, software isn't the problem. Having spyware send a fingerprint over the Internet covertly would be fairly trivial in comparison with providing the hardware to capture the fingerprint in the first place. StuRat (talk) 05:42, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

It is surprisingly difficult to disprove these things might be possible, but it is very easy to show that they would be (a) difficult, (b) expensive, and (c) impractical. If a highly capable attacker - like a government or a mafia or a well-organized malicious cabal of technology corporations - wanted to spend so much time and money to surveillance people, or to blackmail them, it would be easier to use more conventional criminal techniques, like bribery and extortion and intimidation. A frightened jury will agree that fingerprints match, whether they match or not! And if you run the legal-system, you can simply eliminate jury-trials, and evidence, and so on. The weak-link isn't the collection of fingerprints; expending lots of effort to surreptitiously collect fingerprints is an inefficient way to oppress a populace.

If you're not too paranoid to read the writings of the RAND Corporation, you may find this report very interesting: Influences on the Adoption of Multifactor Authentication - regarding the use of things like biometrics and fingerprints as part of ensemble information-security strategies. The PDF is available for free online. Or perhaps the more sinister-sounding, but altogether more interesting read, Using Biometrics to Achieve Identity Dominance in the Global War on Terrorism Nimur (talk) 06:13, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

The first reference seems pretty straightforward - organizations will adopt these biometric things when they are forced to; consumer resistance is feared to be a problem but has not proved so; (at that time) the Zeus (Trojan horse) was an example of a way around it; and (like all putative security measures) once such a thing is introduced it persists forever and ever. I'm afraid I must have missed the point of the second, which is mostly about trying to get the military to take fingerprints in various situations where it doesn't seem like they have any plausible right ("to collect biometric data from foreign seafarers stopped in international waters as a part of marine interception operations"). Wnt (talk) 14:45, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

MFT corrupted: run chkdsk /f or /r

Hi – I'm trying to image my laptop's 650GB hard drive as a back up using Macrium Reflect but have received the error 'MFT corrupted, run chkdsk /f'

Web searches also suggest that /r could work.

Could someone explain the potential consequences of these approaches (will I lose data?) and roughly how long a chkdsk takes? 80.1.143.5 (talk) 07:55, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

chkdsk doesn't make any changes the way I remember it. Format, partition, scandisk do, I think. Have you tried typing chkdsk/help at a dos prompt?--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:54, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

That's incorrect. The /f symbol means to fix errors so changes will be made. chkdsk does not make changes if the /f is not specified (or anything which implies it like /x) but nor does scandisk if you don't check the box to fix errors. Nil Einne (talk) 08:04, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

• Microsoft how-to page. Seems chkdsk/? has replaced chkdsk/help.--Canoe1967 (talk) 22:15, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

When did any MS-DOS command use /help? From what I recall MS-DOS 4 used /? and Win98SE uses /?. Oh and CHKDSK. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 13:15, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

chkdsk /f will probably tell you it can't operate on a live volume and that it scheduled itself to run on the next boot. It should only take a few minutes but I suppose it could take up to an hour in some cases. It probably won't lose any data, but I can't absolutely guarantee it; it really depends on the nature of the corruption. It won't lose any data that you can currently access, anyway. chkdsk /r should not be needed here since the backup utility didn't complain about bad sectors.

chkdsk without /f on a currently mounted volume tends to report spurious corruption simply because the OS is modifying the volume while chkdsk is reading it. It's possible your backup utility is confused in the same way, but probably not since backup software should be designed to handle that sort of thing. -- BenRG (talk) 19:12, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia edit error

When I made this edit: [2], the "¬" character was accidentally inserted at the start of the section title. How could this have happened ? I don't even have that character on my keyboard. StuRat (talk) 15:57, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Do you use WP:WikiEd? What browser do you use? Ruslik_Zero 18:39, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

I was using Google Chrome. How can I tell if I'm using WikieEd ? StuRat (talk) 00:27, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

What keyboard layout do you have? ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:41, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

QWERTY U.S. (not international): Keyboard_layout#United_States. StuRat (talk) 00:27, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

If you had the "Math and logic" box selected below the edit box then you might have hit the symbol accidentally. ¬ means negation. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:32, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Silly that we have special character insertion toolbars both at the top and bottom of the edit box. ¦ Reisio (talk) 03:39, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

That must be it. It's right by the down arrow on the scroll bar, so I might have hit it accidentally. StuRat (talk) 04:23, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Putting a Signature into a Document

Resolved

I took a photo of my signature at about 10mp with my Canon digital ELPH in order to be able to add it digitally to formal letters that I write. While viewing the photo, I used print screen to copy and then CTRL+V to put it into a PPT 2003 file, where I keep it. I then placed it into Word 2003, and I use Primo PDF to "print" Word documents into PDF files, and even though my signature appears very clear when I viewed it in both the PPT and the Word document, when I make the Word document into a PDF, the signature becomes very fuzzy. What is happening and how can I avoid it -- thanks! DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 21:53, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

see page 11 and page 14 of primo pdf user guide you need to change the conversion settings to stop it from reducing the quality of (compressing or downsampling) images as part of the conversion process. This may however increase the side of the pdf files produced (swings and roundabouts) ---- _nonsense ferret 23:05, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Wonderful -- thanx! DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 23:39, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

PDF actually has a facility to include digital signatures which include the date of the document and you can include a picture of your signature as one of the items in it. Dmcq (talk) 01:05, 6 February 2013 (UTC)