After a few months using Notion at work, I feel such a relief when I get directed to a regular office-style doc (Google docs in our case, but Office would be just as fine).
This week I formally proposed my team move out of Notion for all internal documentation and back to google docs.
Notion is the best and easiest to use wiki there's ever been, I guess, but the reasons I tried wikis before and never stuck with them still apply to it.
Right there with you. I got relatively used to Notion, then a co-worker and I started collaborating on a Google Doc and it felt refreshingly...serious? I'm not sure how to describe it other than I took it more seriously than I do Notion and all its emoji nonsense. It feels like Notion isn't the place where real work gets done.
Fwiw I came from a law background so might value the 'seriousness' of an app more than others.
I’d love to hear why you prefer word processor docs over a Wiki?
For me, Wikis solve the big problem with word processor documents: It’s hard to define the relationships between documents. But I’d also love to hear other perspectives, e.g., what people dislike about them.
Some quick thoughts, they may be incomplete or ambiguous but hopefully will provide some idea:
- A wiki combines content and organization of that content. This is a strength (documents know about each other) but also a weakness (the organization system must understand and support the types of documents it contains). I'll expand in the next points.
- When I use a filesystem to organize, it doesn't need to care what types of documents I throw in there. In a wiki you are typically led to keep copies, not originals, of such alien document types, as attachments to a wiki-supported document.
- If you are willing to commit to a certain organization filesystem (this is not optional in a wiki), you can usually hyperlink documents using your filesystem's url format (e.g. gdrive urls).
- I have found repeatedly over time that the very ease of use of multiple documents across a wiki leads to people spreading information across multiple items "because it's so easy to navigate". But, similar to my impressions with codebases where functionality is heavily spread and atomized across a multitude of files and small functions/classes, this can hinder the ability to grasp or comprehend the compete intended contents of a document. (see http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm... for more about atomized code)
- As outlined in the article, wikis tend to have to duplicate a lot of existing document editing, layout and rendering technology and standards, and very rarely reach the level of power and quality that dedicated tools have. In keeping with the intent to make them easy to use and navigate, they end up making the easy stuff easier (great for non-tech or beginners) but the hard stuff harder. So, for something trivial they are great, for complicated stuff they become a hindrance. I can't remember the last time I wrote or formatted something in Notion and didn't feel like I was fighting a 2-decades-old word processor.
- Extra customizability like Notion offers, make it quite powerful but also exacerbates the above point, because it's not just the basic built-in feature that may work half as good as they could, but the customizations end up in a similar state (because it's not a full app development platform).
Great, thanks for writing this up. I agree with all of these points, these are the trade-offs, I end up preferring Wikis, but I can certainly see how someone can prefer other formats for these reasons.
Two more quick questions if you get a chance: Which document format do you prefer? It sounds like you like to mix different document types, but I'm curious what your bread-and-butter/default choice is? I'm also curious what you mean by "complicated stuff" (in "for something trivial they are great, for complicated stuff they become a hindrance"). I'm assuming you mean things like inline graphs and diagrams? But then this ties into my first question, I'd be really curious to hear what tool you think does do things like that really well? (I've always just exported from other tools.)
For complicated stuff I mean yeah, sometimes tables, sometimes multi-columns, sometimes embedded visuals, sometimes even just some unorthdox layout (like, trying to add a paragraph with my comments in the middle of someone else's bulleted list).
Any of them can be argued, but I've found them useful often. Any of them may be solved by a particular wiki like Notion... but never all of them, because writing a fully featured document editor (or, as seen above, several editors) is a HUGE task.
It would be great if Docs had transclusion across documents.
The best there is now is embedded sections of Sheets and Slides, but being able to link sections across documents would be awesome for complex documentation.
This week I formally proposed my team move out of Notion for all internal documentation and back to google docs.
Notion is the best and easiest to use wiki there's ever been, I guess, but the reasons I tried wikis before and never stuck with them still apply to it.