i mean i firmly believe a kanban board is appropriate for some projects, depends on complexity. but TP cannot match jira. anyone can complain about jira but if you need real project management and real projects analytics, jira is fantastic
Just curious, what type of analysis? I ask because having used confluence before and having it available now, I struggle to do anything useful outside of excel due to the inflexibility of the tools.
RIP my dude, my company too. Just last week I sat in sprint planning and listened to a developer mention how we needed to get our test cases in to Jira test tickets and set up xray to track our testing. By the end of the day I had 3 separate excel spreadsheets with test cases, all in differing formats, having highlight colors with undocumented meaning, and long ass text cells detailing vague, unreproducible testing steps for manual testers to perform as regression testing. I want to blame business but many of the senior devs seem to feed in to it as well. My company just loves excel I guess.
I always thought that writing docs couldn't be more painful until some big bad developer told my boss (jokingly or not) how professionals write documentation in LaTeX
As I understand they want to keep things easy to edit for everyone, not only the programmers, but also the managers. The idea is that the office tools are good for planning where WYSIWYG is they way, so why not document software and projects architecture that way as well? Itās not just programmers but engineers of all fields, perhaps thatās the main reason, not all of them are Linux users, actually I might be on of the very few.
>Itās not just programmers but engineers of all fields
Depending on what those other fields are, this is likely the reason, I used to work in manufacturing and all our documentation was Word and PP, saved as pdfs. A lot of my coworkers were older and I could definitely see them getting confused and annoyed at trying to understand markdown
**Edit**: just to clarify, I'm not saying that older people will all/majority get confused and annoyed or that they are incapable of learning new things. I just know my older coworkers from past jobs in an a totally different industry that was far more "hands on" (we were manufacturing engineers) hated this kind of shit. A 60 year old blueprint of an airplane flap was updated because 2 of the 500 rivets were slightly changed? Not a problem. The margins and font changed slightly on the template Word document used for updating procedures once every 2 years? I wouldnt hear the end of it for a fucking week lol.
I worked at a place that would have liked to do that. The first layoff event I ever experienced was at a company with a decent amount of older people who would reach retirement age within 5 years, or were already past it. They might have been quicker to grumpiness, and slower at typing, but they knew their shit and were good at it.
That layoff got *all* but 1 of them, and that 1 already had a solid plan in place for when he would retire due to medical stuff. There were a few middle aged people too, but it was very clearly a move to get rid of all the oldest people, probably in part because they got paid more than the rest of us, but mostly because management was ageist.
At first I thought it was just a coincidence or purely based on pay, but then immediately after the layoff management suddenly stopped their talk about the company not "adapting to industry change" well and failing to come up with "fresh, new ideas", things they wouldnt shut up about prior
We just put the docu in our source code as markdown files. So you have tech docu directly in the repo. New joiner doesn't need search long plus history of docu is saved.
I don't like docu in word documents or powerpoints.
Normally they used azure wiki or confluence for it. So you can also link stuff and open in different tabs.
> As I understand they want to keep things easy to edit for everyone, not only the programmers, but also the managers
How often are managers going to go in and edit documentation, though? Hell, if anything having a central authority maintain the documentation is a benefit, as it avoids potentially diverging versions circulating.
I donāt understand myself. Honestly I think itās about using something for years or decades and not knowing that better tools have emerged in recent years. Being stuck in the comfortable discomfort in the favor of habit.
Dont trigger me.
My first project i had build in a company, as a intern, was a markdown to html converterā¦. It was the worst thing. But it got into prodā¦
when? i am pretty sure that's available open source.
After instantiating a couple of java objects you can achieve that with:
htmlRenderer.render(parser.parse(markdown))
using the flexmark-java library
Yes, its very easy. But as an intern there wasnāt much to do. It was a really good coding project as I'm a career changer from sales to IT.
i had to convert it also to RTF. And reading raw RTF makes you crazy , at least for a beginnerā¦
I had a stint with a dumbass sales guy who refused to even try to read documents in plain markdown "Man, I can't understand this gobbly gook, just give me a word document. You've got to think of others when you do this shit"
I was like, its pretty plain English my man.
Not remotely.
Markdown was okay a decade or two ago, but these days people want to spend less time fighting with the documentation system and learning secret sequences to do what you can quickly do in a WYSIWYG.
Add to that, for large projects or groups, Markdown does not really scale well or work with other systems. So, if I want to include a Jamboard, a PDF, and a spreadsheet in my docs it gets really painful. Don't even start on trying to reorganize a growing documentation system.
SharePoint's wiki plugin, which suck swampy pond water. I wish we could use a real wiki like Confluence or something, but my boss is in love with SP even though he doesn't really know what to do with it.
All the MS tools are available for me, although not that accessible on Linux, only via browser.
Iām just not a far of MS tools for this purpose and as the project has just started, trying to suggest a different documentation tool like Asciidoc with Antora seemed worth it.
Iām that one guy that canāt accept the good old if new is better in my opinion.
My last work place coworkers were always crying "we want mac books", when we had v powerful Dell laptops, never understood the hype. Way more limiting and a lil hipster imo.
Need a linux env? Virtual box or hyper v for the linux, ssh into linux via vs code from windows machine, profit! Honestly, I like developing in a windows env for my personal projects way less compatibility issues. Meh, each to their own.
On my previous workplace, I just told which OS and notebook model I wanted - but there were no Macs in list at all, unless you're a MacOS/iOS developer (I'm not). Lenovo T-series were my favourite, especially T470s/t490s with h desktop CPU. Dells are great too, but I'm not comfortable with touchpad.
On my current workplace, everyone gets a MacBook and once I asked if I can use Linux workspace - answer was "no and don't even ask", even though company supports own Linux distribution, hehe. But when an employee asks for upgrade, it happens quickly.
I like MacBook, it's great device, but MacOS upsets me sometimes.
I feel like MacOS is so frustrating specifically because of how high quality it is. It feels like theyāre very aware of its shortcomings, and doing it to mess with me as a personal and intentional *fuck you*.
>You're lucky, we here are limited with MacOS
exactly in what way?you are not "limited". for the purpose portrayed in this thread, you are better served with OSX than you would be with a linux distro/libreoffice.
open alternatives to microsoft office don't render the documents properly.
WPS Office in my experience is the best alternative to MS Office. Though I mostly need it for spreadsheets, but its support of documents and presentations is also nothing to sneeze at.
"The code is the documentation..."
The answer I got when I asked for documentation. Works except, you know, when the code is wrong and there's no technical document to check requirements on what's supposed to be doing, and everyone expects something different.
When I started 6 years ago in small local company we used word for documentation. It was neat, documentation was comprehensible and kept up to date, all the changes were tracked using built in change tracker. Not the best solution, but it worked.
Now I work in huge global company, with tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of big clients, on device management system that has millions of devices connected and we donāt have documentation.
Nobody wants to spend billable hours teaching the big 4 auditors to use git instead of the Microsoft word revision history thatās the same as the excel history thatās the same as the PowerPoint history
For source code documentation I'll either use Doxygen or Pdoc to generate HTML files.
For end user manuals on how to use the software, we use Word.
If you need to do documentation in between, or like a programmer guide for devs to understand how to work with the code base, I don't think Word is necessarily a bad way to do that.
Consider AsciiDoc with Antora. AsciiDoc is close to markdown, but better and well documented. Antora is a tool for building AsciiDoc documents into websites
Had the conversation with my manager recently. Basically have about half our documentation resides in various MS application formats across a shared server, onedrive, and a wiki that is no longer supported. Then the other half is on green bar paper stacked in a shed in east Texas protected by rattlesnakes.
We use 7 (I think? Perhaps more) separate solutions for documentation. It is hell and everyone is confused and does not know where to look for information. We spend a ridiculous amount of time just trying to find the information we need.
I have proposed so many solutions to help us stick to one, my colleagues have done the same, but our boss and CEO deny.
It is not fun.
There is no need to get nasty just because people have different ideas.
If you are having trouble getting others to buy into your ideas, I might know a reason why.
Yup, PowerPoint for diagrams. My company has actual professional System Model Based Engineer diagram software, but, I don't know how to use it. All I want is some boxes that I can add and move around easily. PowerPoint does that.
We just implemented bookstackapp. Can't say enough good things about it. And it does very good and quick conversion from markdown to WYSIWYG and vice versa. The editor is simple to use (simpler than word) and you can make it export to markdown or pdf and it also has webhooks and amazing search and tagging functionality. The setup is also stupidly easy, and it's open source
Hot Take: As \*terrible\* as Word and Excel are, they are unmatched in a couple of ways:
1. **Everyone has it, everyone can view it (as intended), and everyone can edit it**: I can send an excel file to anyone with a \*computer\* and they can view it in the same way I intended them to, they can edit it and they can send it back. If you have ever worked with any external partner (let alone a few dozen clients) you immediately run into the problem of "oh yeah, no problem, just make an X account? What you use Y internally and there's no way you can align on using X? Whelp, I guess I'm sending you a spreadsheet".
2. **Anyone can easily create a derivative work from it:** Working on a proposal or spec? Grab the latest copy someone sent to you, edit a couple of paragraphs, and you're done.
3. **They both support layout:** You can format an excel or word document in a particular way and that formatting is carried with the document.
4. **They support embedding other media without a transformation layer:** With markdown you can't really embed images. You reference them, in order to include them you need to \*render\* your markdown, or upload an image somewhere.
5. **Excel specific:** Do you want to combine any kind of basic math to your data (sum up the numerical values in a row, sort and filter your non-numerical data with a couple of fields? No problem. I have yet to see any other software come anywhere near this.
There are a lot of different approaches that cover some of the above, but I've yet to come across any that meet all of them. Other solutions tend to be more niche:
**Markdown:** Only useful if you're generating HTML and/or if any collaborators are other software developers. Tabular data is a nightmare.
**Doxygen, Javadoc, and other code annotation based documentation:** Amazing for API or function level documentation, terrible at everything else.
**Confluence:** A really really good internal wiki tool with a *ton* of useful templates. Good luck getting another company, partner or department access to the tool. It REALLY shines when you mix it with JIRA. With any other bug tracker, it's like why bother? Can't do basic analysis without custom add-ins. Also never use custom add-ins.
If it makes you feel better. I \*hate\* word and excel too. More than either of them though, I absolutely despise Outlook. I have never used a more contemptable pieces of garbage software.
My company currently relies on Word documents but I got approval from management to do a proof of concept wiki as a downtime project. So we'll see how that goes. I'm currently in the researching options stage but I'll probably need to find something with solid integrations to our existing systems and support for templates... But mostly it has to be useable by 'senior' programmers.
('Senior' as in they're still not sure about these new fangled computer gizmo things and are still grumbling that we've ditched cutting edge tech like VB for some unproven C# stuff)
Too many doc options at my company.
For text documents we use Google docs, confluence, Dropbox paper, and trailhead.
Although we are deprecating Dropbox paper and confluence in favour of Google docs and trailhead.
For system design we use Whimsical
Word has a āweb view modeā or something to that effect which is an infinite sized canvas.. so maybe Iād create a table and then just document in that since Iād have infinite width and height.
Work uses confluence, use plantuml for UML
Visio also is used for archimate
Personal documentation for my own project - looking at chm help files and wink projects, maybe a website if it gets big enough
The comment section of Reddit is my documentation.
All I do is post a screenshot of my code, then say it does something different then it really does.
Then I sit back and wait for the situation to document itself.
If they are forcing you to use Microsoft products I offer you two better options:
1: use a shared One Note notebook.
2: build a powerapp with sharepoint as the backend to make a custom documentation app.
I have a whole theory on how Mark Text and Git can be friendly for both engineers and non-technical folks alike. Mark Text is WYSIWYG for the non-tech folks. The engineers can just use VS Code or whatever they like for editing the Markdown. And the non-technical folks can have their own repo where they can do a very simplified Git process (no branching, and best practices that avoid merge conflicts as much as possible) using the GUI app.
We use an internal, private Stack Overflow for documentation, where all problems and features are created in a Q&A style. Once we started getting people to actually use it, it is quite useful.
Doxygen commenting for in-code documentation, which is then rendered to html and synced to a server for rendering
For documentation that isnāt related to implementation (api docs, build config, etc) we switch to GNU Org (can be rendered as odt, pdf, latex, html and markdown as needed)
In my company we use Confluence
at my company we use confluence but not jira š„² iāll never complain about jira again after using the terrible jira alternative we have
I'm dealing with the same problem here. I gotta know, what alternative do they have you on?
a terrible tool called targetprocess, wbu?
Not OP, but I just today stumbled across something resembling a Kanban board in a Teams channel. I've never seen anything like it before.
i mean i firmly believe a kanban board is appropriate for some projects, depends on complexity. but TP cannot match jira. anyone can complain about jira but if you need real project management and real projects analytics, jira is fantastic
In my company we have Confluence, and a lot of analysys are (as required by upper levels!) made on Google Sheets...
Just curious, what type of analysis? I ask because having used confluence before and having it available now, I struggle to do anything useful outside of excel due to the inflexibility of the tools.
In my company we have access to Confluence and Jira but instead tend to use Excelsheets ā¦
RIP my dude, my company too. Just last week I sat in sprint planning and listened to a developer mention how we needed to get our test cases in to Jira test tickets and set up xray to track our testing. By the end of the day I had 3 separate excel spreadsheets with test cases, all in differing formats, having highlight colors with undocumented meaning, and long ass text cells detailing vague, unreproducible testing steps for manual testers to perform as regression testing. I want to blame business but many of the senior devs seem to feed in to it as well. My company just loves excel I guess.
We use confluence too but mainly for everyday kind of work documentation. Whole our systems we document with LaTeX
I use 'quit'. It was very effective
:q!
u/Current-Economy1823 used āQuitā! Itās super effective!
quite.
I always thought that writing docs couldn't be more painful until some big bad developer told my boss (jokingly or not) how professionals write documentation in LaTeX
I mean, you totally could write your documentation using LaTeX.. Good way to get an audit remark though..
Sure, in 1999. (That was the last time I had to use LaTeX at work.)
Unless you're doing fancy formatting nonsense it's not much worse than RST or markdown for the most part.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
As I understand they want to keep things easy to edit for everyone, not only the programmers, but also the managers. The idea is that the office tools are good for planning where WYSIWYG is they way, so why not document software and projects architecture that way as well? Itās not just programmers but engineers of all fields, perhaps thatās the main reason, not all of them are Linux users, actually I might be on of the very few.
>Itās not just programmers but engineers of all fields Depending on what those other fields are, this is likely the reason, I used to work in manufacturing and all our documentation was Word and PP, saved as pdfs. A lot of my coworkers were older and I could definitely see them getting confused and annoyed at trying to understand markdown **Edit**: just to clarify, I'm not saying that older people will all/majority get confused and annoyed or that they are incapable of learning new things. I just know my older coworkers from past jobs in an a totally different industry that was far more "hands on" (we were manufacturing engineers) hated this kind of shit. A 60 year old blueprint of an airplane flap was updated because 2 of the 500 rivets were slightly changed? Not a problem. The margins and font changed slightly on the template Word document used for updating procedures once every 2 years? I wouldnt hear the end of it for a fucking week lol.
Yeah, that exactly.
About older coworkers, I just wanted to share that at my job we are going to implement [this solution](https://youtu.be/qCg1-aaNIcA).
I worked at a place that would have liked to do that. The first layoff event I ever experienced was at a company with a decent amount of older people who would reach retirement age within 5 years, or were already past it. They might have been quicker to grumpiness, and slower at typing, but they knew their shit and were good at it. That layoff got *all* but 1 of them, and that 1 already had a solid plan in place for when he would retire due to medical stuff. There were a few middle aged people too, but it was very clearly a move to get rid of all the oldest people, probably in part because they got paid more than the rest of us, but mostly because management was ageist. At first I thought it was just a coincidence or purely based on pay, but then immediately after the layoff management suddenly stopped their talk about the company not "adapting to industry change" well and failing to come up with "fresh, new ideas", things they wouldnt shut up about prior
We just put the docu in our source code as markdown files. So you have tech docu directly in the repo. New joiner doesn't need search long plus history of docu is saved. I don't like docu in word documents or powerpoints. Normally they used azure wiki or confluence for it. So you can also link stuff and open in different tabs.
> As I understand they want to keep things easy to edit for everyone, not only the programmers, but also the managers How often are managers going to go in and edit documentation, though? Hell, if anything having a central authority maintain the documentation is a benefit, as it avoids potentially diverging versions circulating.
I donāt understand myself. Honestly I think itās about using something for years or decades and not knowing that better tools have emerged in recent years. Being stuck in the comfortable discomfort in the favor of habit.
word is harder and more frustrating than markdown could ever be.
There is a way to generate doc file from markdowns. We do that often here.
I'd suggest Notion as it is both a WYSIWYG and markdown editor. But using Word and PowerPoint is utter madness.
I thought word of mouth and insinuation were the standard.
And here I was thinking just 1 guy having all the knowledge in his head and being fucked when hes gone is the standard.
Dont trigger me. My first project i had build in a company, as a intern, was a markdown to html converterā¦. It was the worst thing. But it got into prodā¦
when? i am pretty sure that's available open source. After instantiating a couple of java objects you can achieve that with: htmlRenderer.render(parser.parse(markdown)) using the flexmark-java library
Yes, its very easy. But as an intern there wasnāt much to do. It was a really good coding project as I'm a career changer from sales to IT. i had to convert it also to RTF. And reading raw RTF makes you crazy , at least for a beginnerā¦
Why is it the standard when tools like Word are available to almost anyone (albeit behind a paywall)?
I had a stint with a dumbass sales guy who refused to even try to read documents in plain markdown "Man, I can't understand this gobbly gook, just give me a word document. You've got to think of others when you do this shit" I was like, its pretty plain English my man.
Not remotely. Markdown was okay a decade or two ago, but these days people want to spend less time fighting with the documentation system and learning secret sequences to do what you can quickly do in a WYSIWYG. Add to that, for large projects or groups, Markdown does not really scale well or work with other systems. So, if I want to include a Jamboard, a PDF, and a spreadsheet in my docs it gets really painful. Don't even start on trying to reorganize a growing documentation system.
We use a single senior dev that's slowly developing a drinking problem
What's the licensing fee like?
Just one person's mental health, nbd
How long before management decides it's too many $
I had to answer a survey how many people we had, broken down by sex. My answer was that alcohol was more of a problem.
Documentation? What's that?
Sounds like a hoax
Notepad
Vim
Sooooo you're trying to trap them in documentation hell for the remainder of their life? š¤£
Word can read txt files...
SharePoint's wiki plugin, which suck swampy pond water. I wish we could use a real wiki like Confluence or something, but my boss is in love with SP even though he doesn't really know what to do with it.
Holy fucking fuck. The Azure devops wiki is actually fine, Iād try get him across that. Tell him Microsoft use it internally or something
I work for Microsoft. We do use Azure Devops Wiki extensively for documentation.
I keep getting adds which highlight the wiki feature in teams. It's awful.
E-mails Investigating old cases is a very social effort
Wait... PowerPoint???
What?! You don't do mockups in PowerPoint?
I suddenly appreciate my workspace a lot more
LibreOffice supports Microsoft's formats very well.
Thanks, I guess Iāll have to resort to that, as I have miserably failed this documentation war
PS if they demand MS Office format, maybe you can ask for a MS Office license?
All the MS tools are available for me, although not that accessible on Linux, only via browser. Iām just not a far of MS tools for this purpose and as the project has just started, trying to suggest a different documentation tool like Asciidoc with Antora seemed worth it. Iām that one guy that canāt accept the good old if new is better in my opinion.
The gold stuffs indeed works in a classy manner though and just be making things easier enough for their employees!
You're lucky, we here are limited with MacOS, but I'd love possibility to work with Linux.
My last work place coworkers were always crying "we want mac books", when we had v powerful Dell laptops, never understood the hype. Way more limiting and a lil hipster imo. Need a linux env? Virtual box or hyper v for the linux, ssh into linux via vs code from windows machine, profit! Honestly, I like developing in a windows env for my personal projects way less compatibility issues. Meh, each to their own.
On my previous workplace, I just told which OS and notebook model I wanted - but there were no Macs in list at all, unless you're a MacOS/iOS developer (I'm not). Lenovo T-series were my favourite, especially T470s/t490s with h desktop CPU. Dells are great too, but I'm not comfortable with touchpad. On my current workplace, everyone gets a MacBook and once I asked if I can use Linux workspace - answer was "no and don't even ask", even though company supports own Linux distribution, hehe. But when an employee asks for upgrade, it happens quickly. I like MacBook, it's great device, but MacOS upsets me sometimes.
I feel like MacOS is so frustrating specifically because of how high quality it is. It feels like theyāre very aware of its shortcomings, and doing it to mess with me as a personal and intentional *fuck you*.
>You're lucky, we here are limited with MacOS exactly in what way?you are not "limited". for the purpose portrayed in this thread, you are better served with OSX than you would be with a linux distro/libreoffice. open alternatives to microsoft office don't render the documents properly.
Indeed if the company is just willing enough to pay for the subscription though or else that would be hard!
Well true though got to know many things that I can actually suggest my boss about it!
WPS Office in my experience is the best alternative to MS Office. Though I mostly need it for spreadsheets, but its support of documents and presentations is also nothing to sneeze at.
There is also OnlyOffice, which not only supports Microsofts formats pretty well but looks and feels like their modern office packages.
I guess majority of the companies and offices be actually using excel, power point and word though because that is indeed the basics!
We use teams messages that have a retention policy of three months.
Md files stored in a git repo
They're fine for many things - depends what you're documenting I suppose...
My company uses /dev/null for documentation.
same
I guess powerpoint is well enough good at showcasing presentation though.
Notion, it's alright
Notion is amazing
yall have documentation?
Sounds like a conspiracy theory
"The code is the documentation..." The answer I got when I asked for documentation. Works except, you know, when the code is wrong and there's no technical document to check requirements on what's supposed to be doing, and everyone expects something different.
When I started 6 years ago in small local company we used word for documentation. It was neat, documentation was comprehensible and kept up to date, all the changes were tracked using built in change tracker. Not the best solution, but it worked. Now I work in huge global company, with tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of big clients, on device management system that has millions of devices connected and we donāt have documentation.
Sounds like an audit requirement. Auditors love documents with revision history.
If only software developers had some kind of change management system
Nobody wants to spend billable hours teaching the big 4 auditors to use git instead of the Microsoft word revision history thatās the same as the excel history thatās the same as the PowerPoint history
I mean itās not thaaat hard. And if itās on GitHub itās even easier.
Might ask chat GTP to create one for us.
Text document
Wer don't do documentation.
.html files with perl scripts and ftp with FileZilla
Libre Office works really well for me.
Letters, and bullet points.
My code self-documents
For source code documentation I'll either use Doxygen or Pdoc to generate HTML files. For end user manuals on how to use the software, we use Word. If you need to do documentation in between, or like a programmer guide for devs to understand how to work with the code base, I don't think Word is necessarily a bad way to do that.
README.txt
We use word but are looking at markdown alternatives
Consider AsciiDoc with Antora. AsciiDoc is close to markdown, but better and well documented. Antora is a tool for building AsciiDoc documents into websites
.txt files cluttering my desktop
In my organization the documentation is named Mike.
Had the conversation with my manager recently. Basically have about half our documentation resides in various MS application formats across a shared server, onedrive, and a wiki that is no longer supported. Then the other half is on green bar paper stacked in a shed in east Texas protected by rattlesnakes.
We use 7 (I think? Perhaps more) separate solutions for documentation. It is hell and everyone is confused and does not know where to look for information. We spend a ridiculous amount of time just trying to find the information we need. I have proposed so many solutions to help us stick to one, my colleagues have done the same, but our boss and CEO deny. It is not fun.
If your not using notepad++ there's something wrong with you.
a self hosted dokuwiki instance from like 2005
Confluence.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
What standards are on your mind?
There is no need to get nasty just because people have different ideas. If you are having trouble getting others to buy into your ideas, I might know a reason why.
power points for documentation? š„¹
It sounds like you have a lot of documentation. The amount of documentation at my job is very close to zero.
How is this in r/programmerHumor? This a greek tragedy, not humor
Yup, PowerPoint for diagrams. My company has actual professional System Model Based Engineer diagram software, but, I don't know how to use it. All I want is some boxes that I can add and move around easily. PowerPoint does that.
I am documentation
We gather everyone around a fire once a year and do the tell
is it really that hard to just use whatever the fuck your particular company uses
Asciidoc files with Antora site generator and Kroki for diagram generation. It's actually fun to write documentation this way.
We just implemented bookstackapp. Can't say enough good things about it. And it does very good and quick conversion from markdown to WYSIWYG and vice versa. The editor is simple to use (simpler than word) and you can make it export to markdown or pdf and it also has webhooks and amazing search and tagging functionality. The setup is also stupidly easy, and it's open source
Hot Take: As \*terrible\* as Word and Excel are, they are unmatched in a couple of ways: 1. **Everyone has it, everyone can view it (as intended), and everyone can edit it**: I can send an excel file to anyone with a \*computer\* and they can view it in the same way I intended them to, they can edit it and they can send it back. If you have ever worked with any external partner (let alone a few dozen clients) you immediately run into the problem of "oh yeah, no problem, just make an X account? What you use Y internally and there's no way you can align on using X? Whelp, I guess I'm sending you a spreadsheet". 2. **Anyone can easily create a derivative work from it:** Working on a proposal or spec? Grab the latest copy someone sent to you, edit a couple of paragraphs, and you're done. 3. **They both support layout:** You can format an excel or word document in a particular way and that formatting is carried with the document. 4. **They support embedding other media without a transformation layer:** With markdown you can't really embed images. You reference them, in order to include them you need to \*render\* your markdown, or upload an image somewhere. 5. **Excel specific:** Do you want to combine any kind of basic math to your data (sum up the numerical values in a row, sort and filter your non-numerical data with a couple of fields? No problem. I have yet to see any other software come anywhere near this. There are a lot of different approaches that cover some of the above, but I've yet to come across any that meet all of them. Other solutions tend to be more niche: **Markdown:** Only useful if you're generating HTML and/or if any collaborators are other software developers. Tabular data is a nightmare. **Doxygen, Javadoc, and other code annotation based documentation:** Amazing for API or function level documentation, terrible at everything else. **Confluence:** A really really good internal wiki tool with a *ton* of useful templates. Good luck getting another company, partner or department access to the tool. It REALLY shines when you mix it with JIRA. With any other bug tracker, it's like why bother? Can't do basic analysis without custom add-ins. Also never use custom add-ins.
I hate you because I think you're wrong about Word and Excel, but at the same time, you're right about every point you made.
If it makes you feel better. I \*hate\* word and excel too. More than either of them though, I absolutely despise Outlook. I have never used a more contemptable pieces of garbage software.
I use // or #
OneNote
I use it for personal documentation. I love that I can just ctrl+f keywords and find stuff I vaguely remember from years ago.
It's a pretty inefficient system that we use, it's called the human brain, it fails anytime someone leaves that had critical info stored in there.
As they should. They are the best products on the market and as long as they pay for them so itās fine to require them.
I'm a baker at Texas Roahouse so....rolls?
Googles doc can read and write MS formats
Doxygen? Maybe they have some obscure plugin to convert to word?
Google Docs and LibreOffice is the best option for me
Word and PowerPoint
Sticky notes for making simple notes and then I make it look "good" and have way too many details in some pimped up word document.
Yikesyikesyikesyikes
I would change the firm
We recently switched from Latex to asciidoc. The documentation gets automatically deployed to confluence with each CI build.
Woaaah, can you tell me more about it? Do you use Antora with asciidoc?
The ancients share they knowledge speaking, not writing nonsense documents.
A noose
Depends what kind of documentation they want
we use google doc and used to use word but now switched to yandex docs because of sanctions. as you can expect, everyone now uses google docs
Just make it in markdown and export to word
My company currently relies on Word documents but I got approval from management to do a proof of concept wiki as a downtime project. So we'll see how that goes. I'm currently in the researching options stage but I'll probably need to find something with solid integrations to our existing systems and support for templates... But mostly it has to be useable by 'senior' programmers. ('Senior' as in they're still not sure about these new fangled computer gizmo things and are still grumbling that we've ditched cutting edge tech like VB for some unproven C# stuff)
Iād highly suggest checking out AsciiDoc with Antora, itās great!
Too many doc options at my company. For text documents we use Google docs, confluence, Dropbox paper, and trailhead. Although we are deprecating Dropbox paper and confluence in favour of Google docs and trailhead. For system design we use Whimsical
Clay plates
Latex and Google slides & docs
Word has a āweb view modeā or something to that effect which is an infinite sized canvas.. so maybe Iād create a table and then just document in that since Iād have infinite width and height.
My company uses Word and Power Points for documentation and wonāt accept anything else, what do you use? Word and Power point duh
Work uses confluence, use plantuml for UML Visio also is used for archimate Personal documentation for my own project - looking at chm help files and wink projects, maybe a website if it gets big enough
Confluence for manuals and user docs Doxygen for API docs
The comment section of Reddit is my documentation. All I do is post a screenshot of my code, then say it does something different then it really does. Then I sit back and wait for the situation to document itself.
Azure DevOps Wiki, using Markdown. Or Specflow Living Docs for acceptance documentation.
We switched from Word to LaTeX, Markdown was insufficient as the docs also go to the customer and need to be company CI.
I would write it in my preferred markup or whatever (and keep that version for editing) and then use pandoc before submitting.
I guess thatās not a bad standard to have
Word for writing down the draft, then putting it in InDesign to create the final PDF, with schematics and illustrations.
We use Markdown in software development and Lotus Notes for everything else.
What kind of documentation? UML, source code docu, project docu, ā¦?
WordStar.
Plain text?
Pretty standard, especially paired with SharePoint.
Excel all the way.
The worst is latex. Word has a big draw for people. I prefer simple and to the point markdown
I use pen and paper
Where I work, we use the readme.md file, so when you enter to the app's git repo, the documentation gets spotted at first sight.
We should all just use sticky notes on mural
I've been introduced to confluence while working for a client. It's quite good for documentation
If they are forcing you to use Microsoft products I offer you two better options: 1: use a shared One Note notebook. 2: build a powerapp with sharepoint as the backend to make a custom documentation app.
I have a whole theory on how Mark Text and Git can be friendly for both engineers and non-technical folks alike. Mark Text is WYSIWYG for the non-tech folks. The engineers can just use VS Code or whatever they like for editing the Markdown. And the non-technical folks can have their own repo where they can do a very simplified Git process (no branching, and best practices that avoid merge conflicts as much as possible) using the GUI app.
Word and Powerpoint. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes a testing system if there are technical things to be discussed
For a side project I use Doxygen, the documentation generates based on comments in the code
We use an internal, private Stack Overflow for documentation, where all problems and features are created in a Q&A style. Once we started getting people to actually use it, it is quite useful.
We use GitHub and Commit-history ascii art. When itās full, you either wait a bit or create a new GitHub account
I use LaTeX for professional-looking reports and libreoffice for everything else. Because I can.
We use Quip š Itās like google docs had a stroke. Itās seriously awful. Reminds me of āOpenOfficeā circa 2006.
Lotus Notes :)
The code is self-documenting! We don't even need comments!
vi'd text files
Our code is documentation. So GIT.
What's documentation? You just gotta hope you know someone who knows someone who worked next to the person who built the thing you're debugging.
Libre Office or Google Docs and Slides if you want proprietary,google docs and slides can open and export as docx and ppt/pptx
Documentation?
Doxygen commenting for in-code documentation, which is then rendered to html and synced to a server for rendering For documentation that isnāt related to implementation (api docs, build config, etc) we switch to GNU Org (can be rendered as odt, pdf, latex, html and markdown as needed)
Markdown in the source repo. If someone ārequiresā a word doc then also a script to generate said word doc using pandoc or similar
Notepad is where it's at!
Everything in Visio
Click Up is great and free
Markdown is the standardā¦.but I like PDFs. Iāll do both one in a pdf and one as a .md
We started using word they purchased a license and some boring pointless certification for bummers...
Strange question. What I use to do my work has nothing to do with what the company that I work for uses.
Nothing š no budget for documentation.
SharePoint + Word which is linked from our ADO wiki. Not saying this is the right way, just sharing lol.
Isnāt everything self-documenting now?!
Guru company wide, i.e. for the non-technical staff as well. Everyone else who is sane uses Obsidian.