Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.

I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.

Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.

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DanielHB 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?

Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?

I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...

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hgoel 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

My experience has been that there's somewhat of an age divide. I've noticed that fellow junior academics are far more likely to prefer LaTeX, while all senior collaborators I have ever had, preferred Word. So I end up using Word for everything to ensure that it is easy for them to edit/review the paper.

Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.

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xattt 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I thought everyone on academia used LaTex…

LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.

If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.

Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.

For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.

	▲	johanvts a few seconds ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t. Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration. You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext. I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.
	▲	quacktopia 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.

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johanvts 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if you write your thesis in latex, all interaction with the administration, grant applications etc. still happens in word documents. Thank God/John MacFarlane for pandoc.

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lmz 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Not everything is papers and theses. Not an academic but I can imagine Excel being quite useful.

	▲	mcv 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I can imagine Excel being quite useful. As long as they use it for actual calculations, and not to maintain tables full of data.

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valeena an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I took online classes in both Zoom and Teams. I prefer Zoom for that because I can hide most of the UI (and the other people) to focus on the teacher and their shared screen