
A writer leaves Microsoft Word - gw666
http://stevenpoole.net/blog/goodbye-cruel-word/
======
latch
I know this is in a different league..but I wrote Foundations of Programming
in Word, and then The Little MongoDB Book in Markdown + Textile (in Textmate).
Writing in Markdown was a much more liberating experience as it was much
quicker and let me focus more on the content rather than the document.

I've always really liked Word, it's a great product, but for 99% of people it
just does way too much and is thus way too expensive. Office is worse...gmail
is better than outlook, anything is better than powerpoint or access.

My last two jobs have shown me that Excel is really what you need to kill if
you want to break the Office stronghold.

~~~
dereg
You're right about Excel. It is the corporate behemoth that may never be
slayed.

I'm thinking of getting a Mac, but can the Mac version of Excel do keyboard
shortcuts like on Windows? (E.g. "alt, o, h, r" to rename a sheet, or "alt, i,
w" to insert a sheet). From my experience, it doesn't. Losing shortcuts would
put a heavy drag on my productivity.

~~~
2arrs2ells
Excel is 99% of the reason I run virtualized windows.

~~~
pstephens
Excel's basic math errors are 99% of the reason I do my stats with python.

~~~
Volpe
Care to elaborate?

~~~
tedunangst
[http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-
excel/archive/2007/09/25...](http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-
excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx)

~~~
SoftwareMaven
That's not a math error, that's a display error. I'm no fan of Office, but
that would not be a reason to fear Excel's ability to calculate correctly.

~~~
nitrogen
During the whole OOXML debacle, there were many examples discovered of
ambiguous or flat-out wrong behavior in various versions of Excel over the
years, the kind of wrong behavior that could easily have altered the outcome
of financial transactions that were managed using spreadsheets. You can
probably find some if you hunt for them on Groklaw. I seem to remember one
related to a date basis parameter, so that might be a good first keyword set
to try.

~~~
chokma
Rob Weir has pointed out a lot of OOXML-problems over the years:
<http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html>
[http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/fractured-yearfrac-
and-d...](http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/fractured-yearfrac-and-
discounted-disc.html)

------
cstross
TL;DR -- another book-writer discovers the thing of beauty that is Scrivener.
I've written one book 100% in it, and used it to refactor three others (when
their multiple plot threads were threatening to get out of hand). It's not
that it does anything magical at the _word processing_ level, but it makes the
structure of a book-length work transparent.

(If you don't write books for a living, the best metaphor I can give you is
this: imagine you've been writing code for years using just a text editor. (If
your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors --
kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot
of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE. That's Scrivener: it's
basically an IDE for books.)

~~~
irahul
> If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors
> -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a
> lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE.

That analogy doesn't stand at all. Most of the people whose _editor of choice_
is Emacs(mine is Vim) have known about IDEs all along, have used them at some
point of time, or may be still use it for languages which are too verbose to
do without IDE code generation. They chose not to use it, or use it sparcely.
There is no _someone showing you an IDE_.

~~~
singular
The beauty of emacs/vim is that they are a. highly optimised to enable quick
editing of _any_ text document, not just a specific subset of languages, and
b. highly customisable - the customisation isn't an annoying overhead, rather
it lets you define exactly how you want the environment to be whereas an ide
tends to be harder to customise to that degree.

Horses for courses.

As an aside - I think the analogy fails purely in terms of quality, word is a
horrible mess and a nightmare to work with, emacs is a (sometimes clunky)
thing of beauty.

------
jseliger
Ah: I wish I could leave Word for good. But my family's business does grant
writing for nonprofit and public agencies (see <http://blog.seliger.com> if
you're curious), which means we routinely have to exchange documents with
other people. In that world, Word still rules, especially for complexly
formatted documents.

~~~
yariang
How so? You can open Word docs in LibreOffice and save them as well...

~~~
russellallen
Every day I open, edit and share legal contracts and other Word documents.
They're usually up to about 120 pages long, with reasonably simply formatting.
They usually have marked up changes from about 2 to a dozen people.

Every six months or so I check out OpenOffice/LibreOffice to see whether the
documents I'm being sent survive the open/edit/save cycle.

Every time so far I end up with a document with widely differing formatting
from the original.

So at least for me, LibreOffice isn't suitable for my usage patterns.

I imagine other people are the same.

~~~
jseliger
This.

In addition, many funders require that submitted proposals be .doc files.
Sure, one could play roulette with other programs, but when thousands to
millions of dollars are on the line, it's easier to simply use Word.

~~~
billybob
Is there any good reason for this requirement, or is it just inertia?

If I'm submitting something read-only, PDF seems like the obvious choice. If
you're going to edit it, maybe .doc is the solution, but really, Google Docs
would make collaboration easier.

What does a Word file have that other solutions don't, other than mindshare?

------
jrico
Word is still a great Word processor. It actually has a full screen mode that
eliminates all the distractions just as the programs used by the author.
Word's biggest problem is that all its power increases its complexity and
there really isn't a good user manual or resource to train people. I find that
most people that switch to something like GoogleDocs don't use the advanced
features of Word and probably would have been just as happy using WordPad.

~~~
slowpoke
What would be 'advanced features' of Word that are neither completely
unnecessary nor could be replaced by (more or less) simple LaTeX macros?

I'm actually curious - I've heard a lot of people raving about the 'power of
MS Word', yet no one was really able to name any meaningful features that
would justify calling it 'powerful'.

~~~
tincholio
I use LaTeX for most of my writing, and I'm not a big fan of Word. That being
said, I think the advantage probably is that it significantly lowers the
barrier of entry to those advanced features. Hence, you'll get 'secretaries'
doing fancy stuff, who might not be otherwise inclined to learn LaTeX (and
let's admit it, writing TeX macros is not particularly nice).

~~~
slowpoke
I have to admit I haven't learned LaTeX myself yet, but I've been using LyX
for a while now, which basically spits out compilable TeX. Processors like LyX
(are there even any processors like it?) take care of exactly that barrier of
entry.

I agree fully that advanced features in LaTeX are most likely more difficult
to learn, but if the argument in the first place is the 'power' of the
features, then LaTeX will win out regardless. It's like comparing vim/emacs to
nano (in terms of 'power').

------
onedognight
Emacs users intrigued by the idea of an always centered cursor might like to
try this mode out. <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/centered-cursor-mode.el>

~~~
kleiba
On a similar note, I'm always a bit amused whenever WriteRoom gets lots of
praise, because it's actually not so much different from good old Emacs
running in a terminal (no X). Back to the future!

~~~
shabble
I've not used WriteRoom, so I don't know just how configurable it is, but I
often find myself in Emacs getting distracted from my original task by
accidentally discovering new features, or deciding to automate something in
elisp.

 _"The art of spending 3 hours to complete a 1 hour job in 5 minutes"_

And this is after using it for nearly a decade already :)

~~~
tincholio
Don't worry... it'll pay off in only three times using it :)

------
mathattack
Two interesting thoughts here, that are general to application development.

1 - The reason Windows lost it's way was a lack of simplicity. This is a broad
comment about software in general. It is tough to be everything for everyone.
And most software starts this way.

2 - There was a great line hidden in the footnotes. This speaks to the
importance of collaboration amongst great programmers.

"As Scrivener’s creator relates, he emailed Jesse Grosjean, Writeroom’s
author, wondering how he did the block-cursor thing; very generously, Grosjean
just gave him the code, and even recommends Scrivener on his own website."

Very good read!

------
icebraining
For a person working alone, the question of the format is largely irrelevant -
Word support saving in plain text too. The problems exists when we need to
interact with open people, and most of us can't tell them "What the fuck".

~~~
tomjen3
Most people wouldn't know what a .doc file is if their lives depended on it.

So take advantage of it and send them a .rtf file -- nobody has to know and
you get excellent compatibility.

~~~
roel_v
But only for very simple documents - no cross references, working image
formatting/layouting, watermarking, shabby table support, footnotes, embedded
styles, ...

------
sixothree
>WriteRoom has a “typewriter-scrolling mode”, so that the line you are typing
is always centered in the screen, not forever threatening to drop off the
bottom...

That's the one thing I hate most about every modern editor: When I page down,
my cursor appears at the bottom of a page I can't even see. What the hell is
that?

------
mrcharles
I used Scrivener to write my 2010 Nanowrimo entry. It's a great piece of
software, and I can't recommend it enough.

~~~
jseliger
I'm not sure it will be useful to most people, for reasons tangentially
related to this post: [http://jseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-
pro-w...](http://jseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pro-with-a-
side-of-james-joyces-ulysses) on Scrivener and Joyce.

The main reason I say is because I think a lot of people, based on the amateur
writing I've seen, don't need a fancier way of arranging words so much as they
need to focus on 1) the quality of their sentences and 2) how one event drives
another in their plots. I worry especially regarding point 2) that Scrivener
lets people work in parallel when they should be working in serial, with one
event driving another organically. Too much amateur writing I see is, for lack
of a better term, plotless: meandering around feelings, or random encounters,
or designed to show how _deep_ the author is—instead of telling a story.

Scrivener will help with some things, as I've written elsewhere, but I'm not
sure it's really enough for the vast majority of what writers and would-be
writers are working on.

~~~
officemonkey
In other words:

If you want to be a good writer, concentrate on your craft instead of your
tools.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is a silly dichotomy. A craftsman's skill lies in using his tools, so
tool choice is important. it's important for a chef to have a high quality
knife that they feel comfortable using, but a high quality knife will no more
make a person a good chef than a good text editor, build and language tools,
etc. will make someone a good programmer. But good programmers, like good
chefs or good writers, will nevertheless spend a goodly amount of money and
effort ensuring they have the highest quality tools they feel they need.

~~~
visural
I think the more important tools in this case though are language, grammar,
and punctuation.

~~~
jseliger
Agreed. In the case of computer tools, I think the difference between someone
productive using Word and someone using Scrivener is going to be pretty small
in most instances. For the novel I'm working on now, multiple people are
speaking (like Tom Perrotta's Election or Anita Shreve's Testimony), for which
Scrivener is pretty useful. But for anything else I've written, I don't think
Scrivener would've been a huge advantage. I'm not even sure it would've been a
small advantage.

Still, if you're curious about this sort of thing, I wrote in more depth about
it here: [http://jseliger.com/2011/08/11/how-to-be-a-faster-writer-
don...](http://jseliger.com/2011/08/11/how-to-be-a-faster-writer-dont) .

------
siphr
I can honestly recommend Scrivener for both technical and non-technical
writing. I use that application regularly and have nothing but respect for the
developer. From an engineering point of view, it is a great example that
demonstrates the developer's understanding of the problem domain. Little
things that make all the difference.

------
gallerytungsten
re: "Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version
of Word that Microsoft has ever shipped."

Fortunately, my Ancient Powerbook still runs version 5.1. Eminently usable,
and far less annoying than the Office 2008 version. Among other travesties,
the current version will often refuse to select a single word, obstinately
selecting another word, next to the word you want to select (and delete) and
thus deprecating one's deletion experience to repeated tapping of the Delete
key.

As a side benefit, the Powerbook won't load almost all web sites, thus
removing one obvious procrastination temptation.

~~~
epochwolf
alt + delete doesn't work?

~~~
gallerytungsten
Ahhh! I wasn't aware of that shortcut, thanks. But the selection snafu
remains. Blast you, Office 2008!

(Note: that's option + delete for Mac.)

------
fiddly_bits
The author really sets his screen to yellow text on a black background? Makes
my eyes tired just thinking about it. Anywayz... on a Mac you can flip the
colors of your monitor by holding down ctrl-option-command and pressing 8, if
you like that sort of thing.

~~~
_frog
Or even better, use something like Flux[1] to subdue the tones of that glaring
white screen just enough to reduce eye strain.

[1]: <http://stereopsis.com/flux/>

~~~
airlabam
Oh wow, thanks for this one. Immediately noticed a reduction in eyestrain. If
you're found the GUI buggy (as I did), try the command line interface (xflux).
The CLI app works fine for me.

~~~
mitchty
I need to try out the linux version of flux, but the mac version is seriously
awesome.

Has helped fix me off of getting off the computer at night with the
color/gamma changes.

~~~
rtg
F.lux is indispensable on Mac and PC (when I still had a PC.) Absolutely
required if you code at all during evening/nighttime.

Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work* on my Ubuntu box and found another
app, Redshift, that seems to jive better with Linux:
<http://jonls.dk/redshift/>

\-----

* Ran without errors, but didn't tint my screen. I chalked it up to oddities of video card drivers on Linux.

------
mark_l_watson
Nice article - I downloaded a trial copy of Scrivener to try tomorrow.

A couple of years ago, Apress wanted Word files and I discovered Pages: really
pretty good, good Word compatibility, and fun enough to use.

That said, I really prefer Latex for writing because I spend a very small
amount of time thinking about formatting compared to writing.

------
adamokane
Funny timing for this - a few hours ago, I decided I needed more of a minimal
word processor (although I'm not going as far to delete Word.) I stumbled
across WriteMonkey (<http://writemonkey.com/>) and so far, I love it.

Note: this only runs on Windows

~~~
_frog
I found parts of WM like the giant context menu with icons for every entry,
ability to enable typewriter noises and other little features detracted from
the overall experience but it's still a solid app.

Since switching to OS X I've used Byword but recently tried out iA Writer and
am considering a purchase.

~~~
bahman2000
iA Writer is great! <http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ia-writer-for-
mac/>

------
PeterMcCanney
...and another starts to use it <http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13077>

------
inflatablenerd
I do everything besides screenplays in plain text. Compatibility wins here.
Between Google Docs, Word 2010, Word for Mac, Pages and Open Office, it seems
even basic documents get mangled. RTF is only reasonably better.

------
flocial
MS Word's greatest sin is mixing up content and layout into a strange binary
format. Whether it was a devious scheme to lock in users or bad design is
anyone's guess but it sure crashed a lot when uou mixed tables and diagrams.
Formatting was a nightmare too and sometimes the changes were irreversible. I
wish I saw the light and went with plaintext/markdown earlier.

~~~
shriphani
About the binary file format :
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html>

I'll let you set your own opinions.

------
agavin
Scrivener blows the pants off of monolithic WPs like Word for large structured
writing (books or longer articles). I have a pretty detailed analysis on my
blog as to why:

<http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/25/scrivener/>

------
jbuzbee
I too had been using MS Word for years to write the various articles and
reviews that I do. But for my last article
([http://www.smallcloudbuilder.com/apps/articles/410-crossing-...](http://www.smallcloudbuilder.com/apps/articles/410-crossing-
the-chasm-converting-an-iphone-app-to-android)) I switched over to Google
Docs. For my use, it worked fine. The feature I missed most was the live word
count that like the author, I had come to depend on when writing articles of a
designated length. Google, are you listening? :-)

~~~
redCashion
You can extend the functionality of google apps using apps script. I thought
it was already in use and there were libraries of extensions, but I don't see
any. But I'm guessing they will be coming soon..

------
snoozer
Number one deterrent to me using Word: no support for emacs navigation
keystrokes, which are near-universal on the Mac. I don't use actual emacs, but
I've come to rely heavily on those keystrokes.

~~~
ordinary
I have never tried this, but apparently you can set key binds in Word. See:
[http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-
wor...](http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-word/)

------
starwed
Apparently Steve Brust writes using emacs.

[http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-
em...](http://dreamcafe.com/words/2009/04/11/help-us-dr-internet-emacs-
edition/)

~~~
yariang
I was going to suggest this. Religious themes and issues of learning curve
aside, I find emacs is the perfect text-editor for my needs. (Emphasis on _my_
needs).

I have disabled the scrollbar, menubar, and toolbar. Full screen it and you
have black and white. Nothing else. Combine that with some really great text
manipulation features/shorcuts and you have an awesome text editor for
anything you want.

And it can even do spell-checking and all that other fancy stuff.

As for the whole "what about sending documents to non techies" issue: It
doesn't seem to apply for this article since he can write the whole thing in
emacs and then send the final copy to his editor after copying and pasting
into Word.

~~~
shabble
copy & pasting only works if you don't have any markup to transfer.

There's usually some intermediate format that you could, say, write in Emacs
and use markdown or asciidoc or latex, compile to html or rtf or whatever, and
then import into Word.

------
bergie
The mention about the Psion PDA is spot on. I also used to do a lot of writing
with those in the 90s. Relatively small device, almost laptop-quality
keyboard, and battery life of several days with AAs that you could buy
anywhere.

I haven't seen devices like that in last ten years or so. Undistracted, small,
great text input.

Back then I'd connect the Psion with infrared to my cell phone to FTP stuff to
our processing system that would eventually convert the document format on the
device to HTML and post it online.

------
brohee
"Eventually the Psion broke, and nothing as good has replaced it as an
ultramobile writing tool. So much for progress."

There is definitely a market for a device with a Psion quality keyboard and
maybe an e-ink based screen (not sure they can react fast enough to feel
snappy actually...) It would make a top notch writing platform... Smartphone
keyboards are a joke when they have one and e-reader are even worse...

------
AlexC04
<http://celtx.com/index.html> is a very good, free and open source writing
package that may be of interest to anyone who wants good writing software.

It has a lot of that sort of index-card functionality like in Scrivener.

It's often listed as a competitor for final draft (the screenplay software).

It's been built for Windows, Mac and Linux

------
jarin
This might be taking a step back toward fluff from programs like WriteRoom,
but I really like typing up blog posts with OmmWriter:
<http://www.ommwriter.com/en/>

It's just relaxing.

Edit: The site makes it look like it's only for iPad at first glance, but it's
also available for Mac/PC

------
vangale
Anyone else fondly remember Interleaf? I now have a love/hate relationship
with OOWriter but expect I would pay a lot for a working clone of Interleaf on
Linux. I used it both on Apollo workstations and on PCDOS.

~~~
cicero
I used Interleaf on a VaxStation in the late 1980s. It was great at handling
the huge (thousands of pages) government documents we had to produce.

------
Gaussian
Love it. He had me at: "Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed,
relieved of a hideous and malign burden."

Could have walked into the sunset right there. But I understand his need to
fully skewer MSFT.

------
PelCasandra
I really like the simplicity idea behind WriteRoom.

I think it would be great for this kind of apps to auto-save directly to
Evernote API or iCloud instead of the file disk.

------
nhangen
Pages has full screen writing mode, can open doc, and can export in doc and/or
PDF. I never understood why it wasn't more popular than.

~~~
andfarm
Pages' full-screen mode is relatively new -- as far as I'm aware, it wasn't
added until the Lion update. Scrivener et. al. have had the market to
themselves up until now.

That being said, the fullscreen mode in Pages actually seems like a pretty
nice compromise between features and non-distraction. Apple's obviously been
taking some notes. :)

~~~
nhangen
Not sure when it was introduced, but I know I had it with iWork 2009 on Snow
Leopard.

------
watmough
I started getting annoyed with Word when it couldn't even force the caret to
black when typing. Watch your caret, it's flashing, now type and it stays
black.

If a "Word Processor" can't even manage such a basic thing, it's lost the
plot. I think this was likely Word 6.0 that did this, and was also about where
they brought the Mac and PC code-bases into alignment, though others may know
better.

Word 2.0 on Windows is for sure my favorite PC version, after the 'just right'
Word 5.1 on the Mac.

------
rbanffy
It can be totally irrelevant to this discussion, but I think the screenshot is
from Word 6. 5, IIRC, had flat controls.

~~~
rbanffy
This is how I remember it:

[http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/soft...](http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/software/mac/word5.gif)

Guess I'll have to fire my Mac SE (and the Word 5 disks) to be sure...

------
gcb
So, people are writing adverts* for discovering full screen editors?

c'mon, i remember my editors of choice doing that since the late 80s. even
under windows. under linux it's not even fair play to mention this.

Those people will have their heads blow away when the find out that /modern/
text-editors not only have full screen but better way to navigate the text and
perform auto correction. ...just let them catch up with the progress made on
the 90s. heck, vim can have word count on the status bar since what? the 70s?

* i consider the article to be an advertisement for the mac editor, even if unintentional

~~~
X-Istence
WriteRoom uses a standard Mac OS X text field IIRC, and as such uses Mac OS
X's built-in auto correction and spell check...

~~~
gcb
exactly my point. the guy makes a living writing, and never bothered to look
for better text editors.

he is chanting about the progress of default text editors when all that was
available from day one of his career.

it's like a developer with 30yr of experience just finding out version control

------
aboodman
The design of this website is uncomfortably close to Khoi Vinh's
subtraction.com.

~~~
spoole
<http://stevenpoole.net/colophon/>

~~~
aboodman
Thanks. I did actually look for something like this, but I was looking for it
under 'about'.

I still personally think the resemblance (not just the monochrome, but the
overall look - the layout, the individual entries, the top nav, the bottom
nav) is pushing the limits of good taste, but oh well.

