logoalt Hacker News

trinix912last Thursday at 9:43 PM1 replyview on HN

It's also not nearly as scriptable as Word is. Word has had macros ("fields") since its first Windows versions, VBA for over 20 years now, it's easy to develop complex add-ons - where I live we've had one for grammar checking for decades now (speaking of that, Google Docs' language features for less popular languages are far behind Word's). Various software supports export to Word and some programs even import from it. You'd be surprised what levels of automation has been achieved with Word.

Files are also easily shared (on physical media, email, no need for anyone to have a Google account to edit and send them back), encrypted, burned onto a CD for storage. DOC/DOCX are ubiquitous and stable file formats. No worries about data leaks in the cloud as it's all local by default...


Replies

jpbryanlast Thursday at 9:50 PM

Correct. Lawyers load their Word instances up with many add-ins specific to their practice. Microsoft Word add-ins are the entire product surface for many legal tech companies.

It's somewhat analogous to how coders use add-ins in their IDE but if only one IDE could run them.

show 2 replies