
Escape from Microsoft Word - samclemens
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/oct/21/escape-microsoft-word/
======
zzalpha
"Word’s intellectual model is effectively timeless: you paint the text with
its attributes. WordPerfect’s is active and progressive: you change a setting,
continue typing, and then change some other setting"

Umm... those are the same basic model.

WordPerfect's model is simply more primitive markup. The only difference is,
unlike a structural document editor, the markup isn't containers, they're just
control directives. In essence you "paint" a region of text with a directive
by changing a setting, then changing it back.

Word fails for a very simple reason: they've shoehorned structural editing
functions, with styles and sections and so forth, into an editor that
traditionally worked like WordPerfect. The result is a complex mishmash of ad
hoc and structural document markup, and you end up with confusing rules in
order to reconcile the models.

Personally, I prefer LyX: powered by LaTeX, it's purely structural, while
providing a rich editing environment with a visual approximation of the
output, where the final document is typeset to the desired format. The result
is simple and freeing: I concern myself with the content and the structure,
let LyX manage the underlying markup, and let the typesetter decide how to lay
it out.

~~~
jvdh
Consider the layout that he applied to the citation sentence, where Word waves
a magic wand and leaves some of them italic and some not. The simplicity of
WordPerfect and LyX does not do that.

The underlying problem is that Word tries to be smart and tries to guess what
you are trying to achieve. He argues that most of the times it is wrong. But
even if it were right some of the time, it's very annoying when wrong, very
hard to correct, and indistinguishable from magic.

And I don't want to have some unpredictable tool run on the text that I
painstakingly created.

~~~
transpy
>The underlying problem is that Word tries to be smart and tries to guess what
you are trying to achieve.

The same could be said about most Microsoft products.

------
jasode
The author is writing for a non-technical audience so he uses terms like "
_active & progressive_" to describe WordPerfect and " _Platonism_ " to
describe Microsoft Word.

For the HN crowd, I think it's clearer to explain the difference between
WordPerfect vs MSWord as " _stream oriented_ " vs " _object containers_ ". See
links describing and contrasting the mental models: [1],[2]

In other words, WordPerfect formatting was more like HTML inserting <b> and
</b> tags to toggle things like bold font on & off. That's why WordPerfect's
"reveal codes" was prominently assigned to a function key.

MSWord formatting is more analogous to CSS where "styles" and "templates" are
more heavily relied on. There is more conceptual separation between text and
its formatting.

So yes, if you carry WordPefect's mental model into MS Word, it will seem like
the software is fighting you.

[1][http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/wordvswordperfect.htm](http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/wordvswordperfect.htm)

[2][http://wptoolbox.com/tips/MSWordToWP.html](http://wptoolbox.com/tips/MSWordToWP.html)

~~~
toyg
_> MSWord formatting is more analogous to CSS where "styles" and "templates"
are more heavily relied on._

... and this model scales _much_ better. Once you assign a style to 250
different headers and you want to change its font, is _one change_ versus
_250_. This is never addressed by what is, at times, a very erudite UI
critique, but unfortunately smells like the usual sour grapes of somebody who
refuses to learn new tools.

~~~
ska
Except it doesn't, really, scale well in practice. Even now, writing and
maintaining large documents in Word is typically an exercise in frustration.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things it does well. Books aren't one of
them, and neither is technical content (e.g. math) or other complicate
typesetting and structuring.

This may just be an implication of mixing typesetting and writing tasks.

~~~
ams6110
Are there any platforms where writing and maintaing large documents is not an
exercise in frustration? LaTeX is great but it's not what most people would
consider "easy." From my observations, non-technical people don't get
Markdown, reST, or other markup-based formatting at all.

Is maintenance of large documents just an "essentially" complex problem, to
use Brooks' classification?

~~~
ska
I think it probably is "essentially" complex, but that doesn't mean that all
tools are equivalent. Sometimes the issue isn't making something "easy", it's
making it possible. Sometimes with Word you end up working your project around
the tool because anything else is impractical - but that's exactly backwards
from how it should be done.

------
dangerlibrary
I _love_ the user experience description, here. This is an intelligent user of
software describing their mental model of what is going on. It doesn't map
cleanly to the discussions about software among software developers, because
of course it doesn't, but it's also not just plain wrong or misguided.

This is the kind of feedback I would kill for on a product.

~~~
eitally
Agreed. When I wrote my master's thesis, I started by trying to use Google
Docs. That lasted about two hours.... Then I tried LibreOffice. That lasted
the rest of the first day. Finally I borrowed my wife's Macbook and switched
to Word. It remained an exercise in frustration, even to do simple things like
set page numbering in the pre-body content (intro, acknowledgements, ToC, etc)
to Roman numerals vs Latin numbers in the body, or correctly setting up
headers & footers, or matching footnote styling to the department's style
guide. As the author states here, all this complex styling crap is a huge
distraction from creating content, but because of how Word works, you can't
just work in the old mode and leave the styling for the end. It has to be
created inline or you're going to have a really bad time trying to fix it
later.

~~~
hackuser
> because of how Word works, you can't just work in the old mode and leave the
> styling for the end. It has to be created inline or you're going to have a
> really bad time trying to fix it later.

Why not? I don't doubt you, but I've never understood why it happens.

------
TheMagicHorsey
Perhaps this is a non-sequitur, but if you want something like an IDE for
writing, Scrivener does a decent job. Its designed to help you marshal
research (links, text, media) as well as to organize your writing. Plus it
appears to be quite customizable. People have made document templates for
screenwriting, research proposals, comicbook scripts, novel writing, etc. Its
my preferred tool for longer prose.

~~~
stephenaturner
Finally I'm glad someone mentioned Scrivener here! Very surprised the article
didn't even passingly mention it.

~~~
transpy
I'm downloading the trial. Very intrigued. Thanks!

------
bbayer
As a longtime employee of big corporation I am still thinking why we are still
using Word. Day to day documentation need doesn't require that big set of
features. Even core expectations don't get satisfied and always need support
from third party plugins. Other products like requirement analysis tools are
built on top of Word which leads more buggy and bloat setup.

I think that's because it became an industrial standard that nobody choose to
unfollow. I saw some people choose to attach word documents to email instead
of pasting actual text to email body. Word will be on stage for a while unless
we don't get rid of this mindset.

~~~
userbinator
I've used Word before and I will if I'm _required_ to, but otherwise I prefer
to use a text editor and have gotten some strange looks from others for doing
that/sending them a document as a plaintext file. I don't understand why
people seem to always reach for it even when they're writing short unformatted
pieces of text; it's rather overkill for that, and if you've ever seen things
like RFCs, it is possible to create some very readably formatted plaintext
documents too.

If I'm doing something that needs fancy formatting, then my tool of choice if
TeX; but I still focus on the content first, and the formatting afterwards.

~~~
DanBC
Wait until you get the people using spreadsheets as word processors.

I knew someone who used the spreadsheet of Microsoft Works (incompatible with
Word or Excel) for almost all work - fax cover sheets; letters to clients;
posters and notes.

~~~
bediger4000
Hmmm... my experience differs: management/business types will use Excel to
organize columnar data. They'd rather use Word for everything, but almost
nobody thinks that Word's tables and formatting of text in tables, is sane, or
even looks good. So: Word for text, almost always with no styles applied, and
Excel for everything else. You want to give someone a subset of your columnar
data? Take a screenshot and send a picture.

~~~
collyw
This does my head in at word. I write the database that the place runs on and
the solution to anything to interact with the database is "another Excel
to...". They don't seem to appreciate what a backward way of doing thing s
this is, when you could have a proper web form, with half of the data filled
automatically and proper data validation and error messages.

------
M4v3R
The problem is, if you try too hard to mimic the real world example
(typewriter in this case), you will end up with some constraints or weird
bugs. For example, if the indentation were to be applied on per-line basis,
what would happen if you later added some text in the previous line? would
just the same amount of words be indented, or would the indented line not
change at all, and the excess words pushed to a new line? This is exactly why
some things in Word (and other word processors for that matter) are done the
way they are done.

------
coldtea
> _This post is about word processors, but I got the idea for it from
> something W. H. Auden once said about political philosophers. In 1947,
> talking with his learned young secretary about an anthology he was
> compiling, The Portable Greek Reader, he mentioned Isocrates, a Greek orator
> whose simple-seeming ideas about relations between rich and poor cities were
> sane and practical. Naïve-sounding Isocrates had solved problems for which
> Plato’s grand theories had no answer. “Isocrates reminds me of John Dewey,”
> Auden said. “He’s a mediocrity who’s usually right whereas Plato is a man of
> genius who’s always wrong.” Only a genius could have devised Plato’s theory
> of the forms—the invisible, intangible “ideas” that give shape to every
> visible, tangible thing. But the theory of forms is always wrong when
> applied to political thinking, as every experiment in ideal, utopian
> politics has proved._

This reminds one of the "worse is better" notion.

Though, I would point that, just like with "worse is better", nothing of the
short has been proved or "permanently settled".

It's a common cliche in american political thought to say that "every
experiment in ideal, utopian politics" has failed etc, but the reality much
more nuanced, and there's much ideology involved in the seemingly "non
utopian" politics that's just transparent to their supporters.

------
orbifold
It's too bad that most people are hopelessly computer illiterate, so that a
separation between presentation and content like it is achieved with latex is
out of reach for most. Countless hours wasted on adjusting margins, font sizes
and filling out chain letter templates in Word.

~~~
maximumoverload
I can't agree.

I have written quite a lor of work in LaTeX and I am _still_ perplexed by
floating images and I can _never_ tell where floats (images, tables) will be
or should be, because it _always_ jumps randomly from page to page.

My roommate at college had a thesis with _lots_ of images and tables and he
basically gave up on LaTeX because of that.

Also, installing fonts to MS Word is trivial. Installing fonts to LaTeX ...
well... not so. You need to use XeLaTeX. Which breaks some other things. I
tried to use bibtex with xelatex, and started to do some weird issues, until I
found out that the texlive packages in debian/ubuntu repos are outdated, so I
had to uninstall them and install it again from the website, and then
something else broke.

Meanwhile MS Word just works as it is. And you don't need to learn the weird
table syntax. And the weird floating logic. And the difference between TeX,
LaTeX, XeLaTeX, BibTex, Texlive.

~~~
apricot
Regarding your comment about floats in LaTeX, of course you don't tell LaTeX
where they go. They float. That's why they are called floats. If you don't
want them to float, don't use the float environment. ( Or use the float
package and the [H] option, as explained on
[https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8625/force-figure-
pl...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8625/force-figure-placement-in-
text) ).

------
InclinedPlane
Word has outlasted its original functional spec and is now fighting to retain
relevancy and usefulness in a much different world. WYSIWYG used to be hugely
valuable, making it easy to avoid wasteful reprints of work that didn't look
right, or, worse, using an experiment/print/assess model to experimentally get
markup right.

But that problem has been solved for years, it's no longer interesting, and
it's not how people use editors today. Today word docs are not used for print
media, often they are the primary form of media transmission or are used for
collaboration, uses to which word is almost uniquely poorly suited, but
because word is there it's used. Word is horrible for collaboration because
it's focused on appearance, not content. Editing in word fails the principle
of least surprise and it's generally non-deterministic (you can't see the
markup "under" your cursor that will take effect when you start typing or make
other changes). Too much effort is spent fighting the tool rather than
actually communicating or collaborating. This problem can't be fixed while
maintaining word's compatibility with it's previous functionality so it's
unlikely ms will fix it any time soon.

------
lmg643
what a curious piece of writing. it is really interesting to read a liberal
arts guy critique software interfaces like a piece of literature.
unfortunately, I can't really connect with the critique - too abstract.
sometimes, you just need some good screenshots, and captions...

The first thing that comes to mind when I read something like this is, usually
the issues are a training problem. He clearly knows how to use wordperfect -
therefore it is easier. And if you are an author who never does typesetting,
then most of MS word is a waste. If you are producing documents that routinely
go directly to customers - MS word is a necessity. PDF the document and ship
it out...

I remember using wordperfect, and I remember when word came along - it was
like something from another planet (WYSIWYG). I'm sure you could improve word
in many ways, but no one seems to be trying. Google Docs is as much of a clone
as i could imagine.

------
shurcooL
I'm so glad Markdown exists; it has replaced Word for me.

~~~
cJ0th
And the wonderful thing is that you can use pandoc to turn your markdown files
into word documents or pdfs if your audience requires that.

------
ghshephard
I couldn't replicate the behavior he was talking about in Word for Mac 2011.
Setting the style on a paragraph, regardless of how much text formatting
you've done (I tried approx. 25%,50%, 75%, 90%+) doesn't touch any direct
formatting.

If you want to clear the direct formatting, and revert to the paragraph style,
you have to manually "Clear formatting" from that Paragraph - which is exactly
the behavior I would expect.

The behavior he described is horrible, and I'm happy that it's not present in
my version of Word. (Note, you can ask word to display the styles applied to
paragraphs in the left side bar, and also ask it to highlight any place direct
formatting has been applied. Very useful when doing style management).

------
robotgrill
Thanks for the article. I think I'll be using Notepad and emacs a little more.

------
radiowave
Back when I used to have to deal with word processors a lot, my perception of
Word (coming to it from WordPerfect) was that it felt like driving a very
sophisticated car, except one that had no brakes - you could always ultimately
get it to where you wanted to be, but there was no point along the journey
where you actually felt like you were in control.

For no particularly good reason, I'm tickled that the author here has such
different a metaphor for the same problem.

------
erkose
WordPerfect is still available [http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/office-
suite/](http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/office-suite/)

------
StartledGoat
I still miss Word 5.1. It was simple and straightforward. Wrote a 100k word
thesis using it in the mid 90s. On a Mac Classic with 9" greyscale screen
(which I still have somewhere).

------
Ollinson
I love that the NYRB is getting a lot of play on Hacker News recently. It's
really a top tier publication and reminds me a lot of the higher quality
conversations on this site.

------
tokai
TL:DR - Microsoft Word is bad; Wordperfect is (still) nice. No discussion of
non-WYSIWYG word processing.

~~~
lstamour
A more precise TL;DR would be "I wrote my document with some parts italicized
and then applied margin formatting which removed my italics if less than 50%
of the selection was italics, but kept it otherwise." Wordperfect didn't have
this "feature," so it's better.

Here's a description of the feature with screenshots:
[http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/stylesoverridedirectforma...](http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/stylesoverridedirectformatting.html)

Here's one workaround:
[http://wordribbon.tips.net/T009594_Retaining_Explicit_Format...](http://wordribbon.tips.net/T009594_Retaining_Explicit_Formatting_after_Applying_Styles.html)

Based on this, I would suggest personally that once you've highlighted all the
italics via Find, you could apply a style that's italic (such as "Subtle
Emphasis" which looks like non-bold italic by default) which should in turn
change the direct formatting to style-based formatting and, in theory, act
like WordPerfect did from then on...

~~~
ygra
A bit strange to call Heading 1 a paragraph style when it's both a paragraph
and character style. But then I tried it out with a pure paragraph style and
was surprised that it removed direct formatting. Things I never even _knew_
because I never used direct formatting if I could help it. Weird. And it's
probably a good idea to continue eschewing direct formatting for that very
reason.

------
rhythmvs
A pompous piece by an author who appears to know little of Plato, and less of
software design, but nevertheless enjoys concocting absurd analogies like
these:

    
    
        "Word’s 50-percent rule for applying styles is a descendent of the Demiurge, and just as much of a kludge."

~~~
quonn
We don't have enough information to know if the author knows much about Plato
or not. What he says is not necessarily particularly deep, but it's not wrong
either.

Generally, I liked the article.

What I don't like is the fact that the obvious advantages of the style-model
are not mentioned. Most people don't grasp these advantages, which is why they
have much more trouble than is necessary - even in Word - when working on a
long text (a thesis, say).

