
Death to MS Word - forkandwait
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/microsoft_word_is_cumbersome_inefficient_and_obsolete_it_s_time_for_it_to_die_.html?google_editors_picks=true
======
kijin
Word is not a program for editing text. If you want to edit text and only
text, there are a hundred different tools that allow you to do that much more
efficiently. Then you have Markdown et al. for formatting your text.

What word actually is, for most people who don't need its advanced features,
is an amateur desktop publishing tool. Word is for making fliers that you
stick to the light pole. Word is for printing out notices that you stick to
the coffee maker. Word is for writing pretty invitations for your 7 year old's
birthday party. The same is true of virtually every "word processor" out
there, including LibreOffice Writer. The switch from text editor to desktop
publishing tool took place right around the time they started displaying page
outlines in wonderful WYSIWYG. You don't need WYSIWYG if all you care about is
the content, right?

But everyone has an inner artist, even though only a few are actually any
good. It's amazing how much people (including myself) care about how their
text appears on a piece of paper or a WYSIWYG editor. Sometimes, this
distracts from the content. But as long as the content isn't being completely
neglected, I think we should forgive people for wanting to control the font in
which their writings appear, or for wanting their quotes to look "smart", or
for spending 20 minutes tweaking the line spacing of their resume. It's human
nature to mix a sense of aesthetics with everything. Word caters to that
desire. In this respect, a PDF file is only marginally better from the point
of view of the unfortunate recipient, and sometimes even worse.

So the problem isn't Word, it's people who abuse Word while performing tasks
to which it is not best suited. For example, when you're sending a story to an
editor, it's obvious that the editor only cares about the ASCII content and
not your choice of fonts and margins.

~~~
wvenable
Tools like PageMaker, InDesign or MS Publisher are tools for fliers, notices,
and invitations. Word is for documents. Essays, contracts, NDAs, memos.
Documents with lots of text but still meant to be formatted for printing.

I think the author's best point isn't so much that it's wrong tool for the job
bur rather the job that Word is for is much less relevant now. Just like
typewriters were obsolete when word processors arrived; word processors are
themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't printed.

~~~
jamesbritt
_word processors are themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't
printed._

I don't see that.

When contracting I am always being sent Word docs for this and that. There's
rarely a need for anyone to print them; the value seems to be in the ability
to control layout and highlighting, embed nicely formatted tables, and include
images or diagrams, all as viewed on a computer.

Even if we assumed no one was ever going to print these documents, only pass
them around to a limited audience, what would be a better tool for the average
person helping out on a project? If not Word then almost certainly something
very much like it.

~~~
buff-a

      * A wiki.
      * Google Docs.
      * Assembla.
    

Passing around a word document via email (or shared folder) makes about as
much sense as passing around a C++ file, or the text of a facebook status.

~~~
jamesbritt
Google Docs I can see, though it's basically "Word, but in your browser."
(Hence "If not Word then almost certainly something very much like it.")

I've had some mild push-back from a few people when trying to get them to
switch from Word, but it has the upside of you always knowing what the current
version is, a problem the Wordists I've dealt with run into often.

A wiki, though, is a lost cause for many. I do not want to be the one having
to teach people how to correctly format tables or embed images with the
correct size and captions.

"Why do I have to learn all this stuff when we already know how to use Word?"
is a common lament.

------
DaveMebs
The author clearly has not spent much time using Word lately, and reading this
I was constantly struck by the blatant inaccuracies throughout this piece.
Some of his biggest complaints just don't align with modern versions of the
software he is criticizing:

1) He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple
releases.

2) He complains about the XML markup when you want to publish something to the
Web through copy-paste. Has the author ever saved a Word document prior to
publishing before? There are a variety of choices when saving a file,
including the options to save as Plain Text (which removes all formatting), or
even as _a web page._ No idea if the save as web page feature works well for
complex documents, but to overlook this when complaining about publishing a
Word doc as a web page demonstrates woeful ignorance of the product being
criticized. This is especially ridiculous considering he highlights 3rd party
programs that convert .docx into .txt. Why not mention that Word does this out
of the box?

3) "The fundamental unit of Word is the single, proprietary file, anchored to
one computer. Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it
switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and
new Word customers out of each other's files." As far as I can tell, the
author pulled this one out of his ass. The 2nd Google search result for
".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack released by MSFT allowing
earlier versions of Word to open .docx files. The 3rd result is the Wikipedia
page for "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format that all
Office documents are saved in. (The 1st result is a free online 3rd party
.docx to .doc conversion service.)

And these were just the things that immediately jumped out at me....

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Word and ways in which the software
can be improved (apparently feature discovery...), but by not understanding
how to use even the most basic features such as "Save to Plain Text," I have
difficulty putting much stock in this individuals personal gripes.

(Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but not within the Office division. The above is
my own personal opinion, etc., etc.)

~~~
RandallBrown
The one thing that he got completely right though, is that Word is for putting
text to paper. Most people's writing never sees paper anymore, and I think
that's why the tool isn't working for them.

As far as saving to plain text and copying plain text, those are two different
things. Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just
to paste the text is just plain terrible. I've never had that happen to me
though, so maybe he's doing something wrong.

I find Word very frustrating to use. I don't feel like I'm using it, I feel
like I'm tricking it and at any moment my text will simply change fonts or tab
depth or something weird.

~~~
dylan62
> Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another > application just to
> paste the text is just plain terrible.

That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great
workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text.
<http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/>

~~~
tjoff
Just as much a feature. Right click ->paste-as-plain-text is available in
chrome, notepad++, Word (don't know if it is available during a right click
though) and many many others.

~~~
baq
word 2010 (actually, all of office 2010) is better than right-click: you paste
normally, tap ctrl and then t.

------
kooshball
This whole article is basically about using the wrong tool for the job which
the author mentions directly:

> Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing.

Well yea. I dont think anyone will argue with that.

> Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my
> document was carrying. Here's a snippet:

The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really
a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come
out clean when converted?

>Word's idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which
makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument
between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and
passive-aggressive copy editor.

First of all, this is incorrect. In the latest version of Word, if you have
files stored at a shared location you can collaborate by both editing the file
directly like in Google Docs. Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome. It
does exactly what it's meant to do. Any changes you make while tracking is the
displayed. I dont understand what "world most pedantic and passive-aggressive
copy editor" has anything to do with the tool, rather than the editor himself.

> When I was writing a book, which required lots of alone time with a giant
> file—and lots of word-counting, which Microsoft is good at—I stuck with
> Word.

Good for you.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting
doesn't come out clean when converted?"

No, but it's a huge surprise to users that copying and pasting from Word into
a completely different program (say, a rich text editor in a web browser)
brings all that crap along. Unless it's pasting into another Word window, it
should paste the plain text. There is absolutely no situation where pasting
Word's pseudo-HTML into a non-Microsoft program is the right thing to do. As
you mention, Word's formatting is hideously complex, so why even bother? It
isn't going to work. Just paste the text.

~~~
mappu
OLE, or whatever it's called these days, is magic - the other day, i set up a
label printer and all the bundled programs it came with. I right-clicked to
copy a jpeg in Chrome, hit paste in the label editor, without knowing if it
would work - and _it did_. This is an image, going between a cross-platform
Skia program and contracted fixed-function bundleware i'll never use twice,
made by two completely different companies, and it... blew my mind a little. I
have a resolved respect for the native platform capabilities. I mean, sure,
it's just a tag in the clipboard code somewhere, but... fascinating.

Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest
format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste
formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste
word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)

~~~
Turing_Machine
What's actually impressive is the amount of work the TinyMCE folks have gone
to in order to clean up the mess. Check out the source tree.

------
tylermenezes
Wait, you mean your document layout program isn't good at generating web
pages?!

I don't understand how people can write articles like this. I remember reading
something similar a few years back where someone criticized Wordpress because,
"it is designed as a blogging platform from the ground up, it doesn’t lend
itself to people who want to build a website without a blog."

When I wrote an article on it at the time, I compared this line of thinking to
"because this car was build to drive on the road, it doesn't lend itself well
to serving as a boat".

Yes, you could use a boat as a car, and yes there are better boats than a car,
but that doesn't mean it's a valid point against cars.

~~~
PakG1
The thing is, for a lot of non-technical people, it IS easier, just because
they know how to use it. My friend was asked to make a website with CMS
capabilities for his church. They were putting up Drupal or Joomla or
something like that, demoing all the features, saying "isn't this so cool and
great?"

The church committee stared at them blankly and asked, "Can we have something
simple like write something up in MS Word?" Even with WYSIWYG features, they
didn't get it at all, but they did get MS Word. My friend tried to protest
saying, "But actually, you don't want MS Word. This is so much better for
technical reasons, and you can format text exactly the same, blahblahblah."

The fear that non-technical people have to try to use a brand new system
they've never seen before is not something with which I'd ever be able to
empathize. But I am able to sympathize, especially after the day I tried to
teach my dad how to use gmail to attach photos (using gmail's drag and drop
feature no less!). It was so frustrating to see he didn't get drag and drop,
but he finally did manage to click some buttons, after a LOT of hesitation.

Non-technical users don't care that Word adds on all that garbage. They don't
even notice. They do care that their experience is that Word just works. And
they're afraid of changing.

I know that none of this really matters. More and more people seem to be
getting more technically savvy every day. New technologies will leave old
technologies behind, whether late adopters like it or not. Heck, even my dad
can use gmail now. But part of me feels mean and guilty for making these non-
technical people suffer through the transition. Not that I have any solution
for that issue.

~~~
tylermenezes
I don't think people who use Word were ever going to produce nice-looking web
pages anyway, and I'm _sure_ they won't care about how ridiculous the code is.
If they're satisfied with it, fine; if they're not, shouldn't they just be
looking for a tool which is actually meant for the job?

Because I like analogies: I'm really bad with woodworking. Everything I do
ends out being really hacky because (I'm usually told this after) I don't use
the right tools. Even if I _can_ use a saw for something other than its
intended purpose, is it really the saw's fault if it performs worse than the
right tool for the job?

~~~
PakG1
I gotta say, you have a knack for good analogies.

------
pagekalisedown
I would miss a world without Word. Word is how I know whether to apply for a
job or not.

If you only accept resumes in Word format, you're not the dinosaur I want to
work for.

~~~
hub_
"Sorry I can't read PDF, do you have MS-Word"

True story.

Today I sent a link to my CV online, in HTML.

~~~
rrreese
When I arrived in London I sent my CV as a PDf to a number of recruiters. Each
one requested that I send a word copy, something that was difficult as I had
written it in Latex.

I found out later that they want it in word so they can edit it, incorporate
the cover letter, their own notes etc. Not a system that instilled me with
confidence.

~~~
dredmorbius
A fair number of recruiters have, or had, resume uptake systems that are/were
based on VBA macros and required Word docs. I'm not sure if some remnant of
these systems remain, but essentially, yes, they want an editable version of
your resume.

Hrm. I may need to knock the "Word" format output option off my resume
generator.

------
tptacek
Word "Track Changes" is still the industry standard for legal documents.

~~~
homosaur
So there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's
advanced functionality?

Not being facetious, let's name em.

~~~
dagw
My girlfriend is an academic and uses the track changes feature all the time
when writing or editing papers and articles. When you add Endnote integration
and the fact that most journals outside of the hard math heavy sciences want
Word documents, Word is clearly the best choice.

Does she NEED Word? Technically not I suppose, but Word is the tool that makes
her job the easiest. That being said she still curses Word and Endnote all the
time, so there is no doubt room for improvement.

~~~
singingfish
I am so hanging out to ditch word for academic writing.

------
chimeracoder
Honestly, I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about Word as a
program. I just wish .odf would replace the open-in-name-only .docx/.xlsx/etc
formats in public use.

If that were the case, then what do I care if people are using a different
program to open them?

------
jmpeax
I've been happily doing my postgrad in compsci, using the excellent LaTeX for
all my papers and thesis. I got a job in medical research... holy shit... all
the publishers require Word documents. Moving from LaTeX to Word is like
moving from Python to Fortran on punch cards.

~~~
kooshball
I agree with you, LaTeX is awesome for what it is commonly used for. No
question there. However the learning curve is much higher than that of Word.
So I think complexity and readability wise to an average worker, LaTeX to Word
is more like Fortran to English.

------
ramses
I was about to retweet this news while honestly adding, "Who still uses Word?"
... then I remembered that less than one year ago, while still working at
Xerox Research, Word was the standard and I was the only weirdo forwarding
documents in PDF (because I had not authored them in Word).

... so, besides being aware that your microcosm is not representative ... I
don't see how can word die (as it should). There are too many people that
cannot drop it due to all the required learning to move away (e.g., most
people do not even know there are alternatives to Word).

------
politician
tldr-quotes-edition:

> <img id="obligatory-clippy-joke" />

> "[MS Word] has become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work.
> Part of this is Microsoft's more-is-more approach to adding capabilities,
> and leaving all of them in the "on" position."

> "Publishing a two-word sentence as a Web Page, then pasting the source code
> back into MS Word yields an eight-page document. Egads!"

> "Track Changes ... makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded
> transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and
> the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor."

> "A tool that's lost its purpose makes a great toy."

------
ghshephard
I've been using MS word for at least 15 years - but 99% of the time when
crafting documents, I do not use MS-Word. Much of the time I simply use my web
browser (as I am now.) A lot of the time I use mail.app.

For the 3-5 pages of notes, I switch to textedit - which I love, and is
awesome but does have a bad habit of steadily increasing the number of open
documents I have (Quitting doesn't close them - next time you restart they all
come back - I understand why, but it doesn't change the fact that I have to,
about once a week, manually do some garbage-collection to keep the number of
open docs down to a reasonable number)

But - when I'm putting together a 50-100 page technical specification, in
which I'm embedding PDFs, figures, captions, cleaver headers/footers,
carefully watermarked "DRAFT", Auto-updating table of contents, section breaks
for multi-column sections, nicely crafted tables, and, most important of all
for me - the ability to send this 75 page document to six reviewers, and get
their comments nicely organized in electronic accept/reject mode - I am happy
that MS Word is available during that 1% of my workflow.

I agree with the author for the other 99% though. Text, or one of its markdown
variants is a helluva lot more 2012 friendly.

~~~
farnsworth
> next time you restart they all come back

I assume you're talking about how Lion apps reopen the last open docs by
default - you can disable this (for all OS X apps) in System Preferences >
General > Restore windows when quitting/reopening apps

~~~
frou_dh
Some apps annoyingly don't seem to respect that setting. For example TextEdit
and Xcode.

------
zachrose
The raw contents of an empty Microsoft Word document, pasted into an empty
Microsoft word document.

63.6 KB / 124 pages

<http://document1.docx.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/>

------
CurtHagenlocher
"Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its
default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word
customers out of each other's files."

Wait, what?

In any event, he's clearly not the right customer for the product. Neither am
I; my pathological hatred of Word has dimmed over the years and settled into a
mild perpetual annoyance. An itch, if you will, that you dare not scratch too
long or it will likely draw blood. And I got to that point even before I got
hired at Microsoft four years ago.

But I've also seen times when some of Word's abilities (like the "Track
Changes" feature being dissed in the article) are not only useful but
essential. Example: a language spec being worked on by several people and
actively reviewed by several dozen more.

Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-
large business who's using it to churn out various types of paperwork -- not
for the person who's just trying to write some text.

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
Also, no thread about Word would be complete without that mix of grimace and
dismissive smirk we reserve for people who paste screen shots into a Word
document, then attach it onto an email in order to send them to us.

~~~
politician
We should also include Microsoft's obnoxious tendancy to release read-only
documentation as mutable docx files instead of portable PDFs or even in its
own not-invented-here PDF format, XPS.

------
pastaking
I consider Word to be one of the greatest programs on Windows. It has always
did well what it was meant to do - a noob friendly professional publishing
tool.

Heck, I use it on my Mac as well. A major flaw mentioned in this article (to
edit web documents in word) is like editing vector graphics in Photoshop - it
wasn't built for that.

------
ckpwong
If you think the ungodly hidden XML embedded in text copied from Word is its
most hideous crime, try working with living, breathing 500-page "documents"
(specifications, test plans, policies, manuals, procedures, what-have-you)
which are simultaneously edited by multiple people all the time. Oh, and the
document needs to be conformed to some "company standard formatting" which are
meant to look good on paper but nobody really prints the whole thing out in
real life.

THAT is probably a use case which happens more often in corporate America than
the author's more specialized world of online publishing.

I don't think Word is the ideal tool for this case neither (I hear cursing
directed at Word all the time), but it is the de facto standard.

As much as I want believe LaTeX is better suited for this task, nobody will
use it. (Disclaimer: I last used LaTeX 12 years ago.)

------
jwallaceparker
This article is silly.

If you want to write only text, use a text editor.

If you want a publishing tool, use Word or Pages or whatever.

~~~
Turing_Machine
You are confusing what users _should_ do with what they _actually_ do.

------
forkandwait
I think this is the year that LibreOffice actually takes off as a widespread
replacement. No offense to any devs that might be reading, but the last few
times I used it (or Open Office), it was awful in a vague, this is just sucky,
slow, ugly way. 3.4.6, however, is great; I know my office could move over
with barely a hiccup (we are technical bureaucrats -- lots of SAS and Excel
and GIS).

I think it is only if you have some complex workflow dependent on VBA and
links and all that crap that you would have a problem, and I think most people
tried that garbage in the late nineties and never did it again. Mail merge is
the only stupid automated thing that sort of works, and Libre has that.

~~~
jmspring
I'm not sure how a clone that is nearly as complex (minus VBA) will take off
as a "widespread replacement".

The clutter in Word permeates many Windows apps (not just those from MSFT --
take a look at WinZip, for example). Most everyday windows users have become
used to this and are unlikely to change. This doesn't even count businesses
that base their enterprise around MSFT products...

With Microsoft's push towards Windows 8, maybe clean and simple UI will return
to the Office suite. Until then, people will continue to use what they know.

~~~
read_wharf
"maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite"

Laws never disappear from the books, swords are never beaten into plowshares,
and Word never, ever loses a feature, although some of them do get hidden.

~~~
jmspring
Ok, maybe I am dreaming...but...if and when Office shows up for tablets
(iOS/etc), maybe that will transition over to Win8/Metro. It is a dream, maybe
an impossible dream.

I remember Excel 5 being fast and not sucking. Word 2.x wasn't bad either.
However, you have a point, Word has been additive over the years.

------
jmodp
The tools within Word that help with the task of document/story creation are
underapreciated. Outline view, spell checking, comments, and
synonym/dictionary are very useful for my kids and myself. Even the
autocorrect feature that the author decries can be quite useful if you
customize it.

My special needs son uses a program with Word called WordQ. The combination of
the features above plus WordQ have made an enormous difference in his abiity
to express himself through writing. Sure, he won't be writing a Web site with
Word but he _is_ writing his own stories.

------
rmason
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that Bill Gates funded Slate and now it
comes back to bite him?

Sure it's all true what he says about Word, but the delicious irony is that
his very own creation is slinging the arrows.

~~~
Shank
Bill Gates left Microsoft prior to move on to bigger and better things. If it
was his influence that created the design that everyone despised in 2007,
which I'll argue that it wasn't, they'd have changed by now.

Slate would be an example of something that Bill Gates helped create because
of the value it'd bring to the world - not because of anything from an
economic standpoint.

------
tyrmored
I don't hate Microsoft Word, but that's probably because I stopped thinking of
it as an application for composing or editing text more than ten years ago.
Instead I wrote in something like Notepad, and after having converted to the
UNIX-like world, I now write pretty much everything in Vim.

Word and its imitations, therefore, simply became a go-to typesetter and
printer driver for simple tasks that didn't require LaTeX's precision, and a
read-only viewer for documents people emailed to me.

------
andrewfelix
Can someone explain to me how this works? [http://www.smh.com.au/digital-
life/hometech/death-to-microso...](http://www.smh.com.au/digital-
life/hometech/death-to-microsoft-word-20120412-1wta8.html)

It's the same article. So are both SMH and Slate syndicating from the same
source or is Tom Socca employed by both?

~~~
jacques_chester
The _SMH_ syndicated from Slate. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and
you'll see the attribution.

~~~
andrewfelix
Ha! Pretty easy to miss that one word attribution.

Cheers.

------
leeoniya
i'm switching as many clients as possible away from Word to google docs where
it is possible and makes sense. just yesterday i had a client ask me for some
software to write and submit docs on a Mac notebook for her online classes. it
took 3 minutes to set her up with gmail and google docs and show her how to
share.

the interface is clean, no ribbon shit, nothing extra. it's cloud wordpad++.
it's inherently cross-platform and free.

there is a place for word, but that place is small in today's world, and even
smaller for the asking price.

the versioned editing is useful. but i'm fairly confident there is an
automatically git-backed revision/collab cloud editor out there...the name
escapes me.

------
devs1010
I tried ditching word format for my resume briefly, however I immediately
started receiving replies to please forward a word copy of my resume, so I
gave up. I'm afraid non tech people (recruiters) are still living in the past

~~~
dredmorbius
From resume Makefile:

    
    
        resume.doc : resume.html
                gnuhtml2latex -s resume.html > resume.tex
                latex2rtf resume.tex
                mv resume.rtf resume.doc
    

Also, FWIW:

    
    
        resume.ps : resume.html resume.tidy
                html2ps -Tn resume.html > resume.ps.tmp
                mv resume.ps.tmp resume.ps
    
        resume.pdf : resume.ps
                ps2pdf resume.ps resume.pdf.tmp
                mv resume.pdf.tmp resume.pdf

~~~
devs1010
what it comes down to though is a lot won't accept anything but word, everyone
seems to accept word format, so until people start refusing my resume in word
format I don't see a reason to put any effort into a different format. Its
probably just me being lazy though

~~~
dredmorbius
What you may be missing here: I've got a build system for my resume. It
outputs not only various formats (HTML, text, PDF, Word), but multiple
versions (short abstract, stripped of detail and street address for Web, full-
detailed general resume, specifically tailored for a given job prospect if I'm
interested). Revision controlled. Automatically updated. Changes to global
sections reflected in all versions and output formats.

~~~
devs1010
Its a cool concept, but do you actually send the resume in all these formats
when you apply? I find that some of the non-tech people seem to get confused
if you send them more than 1 format so I just keep it simple, I've also found
they will but absolutely 0 effort into retrieving a resume, so even if I send
them a url where I have it downloadable in a bunch of formats they won't go to
the url and instead will just demand that I send it to them via email

~~~
dredmorbius
My preference is to send PDF (I know what it is, it's not readily editable). I
have HTML posted online. Many recruiters request Word, and I can accomodate
them. For online boards (Monster, Dice, etc.) a textfile I can dump is a
better fit.

I've got all of these at my fingertips.

And yes, I've told plenty of recruiters to grab my resume from my homepage
URL, or sent them the link rather than the document itself.

------
jstalin
Ctl-A, Ctl-C, open notepad, Ctl-V, Ctl-A, Ctl-C

How you have all your text sans any Word formatting. Horribly difficult, I
know. This article's author is just annoyingly ignorant.

------
melling
I think Word is fine. However, we really need to get to that open document
standard so you can use whatever app you happen to prefer.

~~~
swashtm
The problem with trying to make an 'open document standard' is that everyone
thinks they have an 'open document standard', so you end up with 30 'open
document standards' that confuse the less technically inclined users and
infuriate the more inclined.

Personally, until a better (read: equally universal) format comes out, I've
got my document library saved as both .txt (unformatted + UTF-8 encoded) and
.doc (formatted). Everyone uses both, at least.

------
read_wharf
I've never worked anywhere that they didn't use Word.

I've never worked anywhere that they didn't despise Word.

Why won't it die? Why?

Why?

~~~
forrestthewoods
Because it's vastly better than the alternatives.

~~~
dredmorbius
No.

Because no one single alternative is vastly superior to it.

Microsoft won the Office wars in the mid 1990s by bundling all the major
applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, later Outlook and possibly Visio, I
don't recall) in a single package that cost less than buying the alternatives
(WordPerfect, AmiWord, Lotus123, Quattro, etc.) individually. WordPerfect (the
most popular word processing program at the time) got caught flat-footed with
the shift from DOS to Windows 3.1, in part due to illegal monopoly actions as
alleged in a still ongoing suit by Novell
([http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell-
micros...](http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell-microsoft-
wordperfect-trial.html.csp)).

Effectively, Microsoft poisoned the well: individual competitors couldn't
outflank it, were starved for cash, and couldn't collaborate on a single
alternative. Sucks to play in a proprietary world when the racetrack owner's
got a horse in the race.

My own history: I'd previously used a few word processing / text editing
tools, including MacWrite, WordPerfect, WordStar, vi, DOS EDIT, EDT, EVE, and
AmiPro. I always found Word to be fussy, and during this period started using
Linux. I recognized the value in learning a single tool that couldn't be
crushed by competition or abandoned by a single vendor, and so returned to vi
(as vim) for virtually all my editing, with some fill-ins from Emacs, Lyx, and
the odd usage of Abiword (quick letters for postal mail) or
OpenOffice/LibreOffice (if I actually have to deal with Microsoft formats).
Occasionally Google Docs. And a lot of web forms (most of which go to a
spawned vi editor via Vimperator, such as this one). Office97 was the first
and last time I really used Microsoft's suite (though I've certainly been
exposed to it since), and the less I have to be exposed to it, the better.

What I've mostly found is that text editing suits my needs far better than
word processing / DTP. And there are very few compatibility issues.

~~~
read_wharf
And I've found that text mostly meets my needs too. But that's partly because
I'm technical and willing/able to deal with formatting codes for things that
should be rendered as more than text: html, restructured text, markdown, etc.
In a sense it's a step backwards to WordPerfect and their split screen.

There's a lot to be said for wysiwyg. Most people are unwilling or unable to
learn or use formatting code in plain text and no immediate rendering of the
result.

But fundamentally there's no reason why anyone should _have to_ deal with
plain text source that produces nicely rendered output (unless we want to).
Computers are really, really good at displaying things nicely, and hiding
details.

The problem is that Word (and the creeping Sharepoint ecosystem) are much too
powerful for almost everyone's needs. My work is typical: all our documents
are a single font, and they have tables. The docs are kept in Sharepoint, and
we do nothing with Sharepoint but keep documents.

That over-engineered solution would be better replaced with a very simple word
processor like WordPad or some similar rtf tool, and the file system.

I don't need to use the truck that takes space shuttles from the vehicle
assembly building to the launch pad just to get to work.

~~~
dredmorbius
The key problem with WYSIWYG is that it doesn't exist any more. The key point
as I read of the original article was that Word is a WYSIWYG tool aimed at
print.

The Slate article could have been a lot better if the author noted the
distinction between WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM. Followed immediately by the standard
observation that WYSIWYM is a tougher nut. Most of the solutions I'm familiar
with rely on either markup (HTML, LaTeX, Wiki parkup, markdown, etc.) or
structural conventions (my text docs strongly resemble 1970s typewritten
documents in line-length, paragraph style, etc. formats).

The great thing about LaTeX is that your document is _entirely_ semantic, and
the style is applied by the stylesheet. With tools such as Lyx, this is
reasonably intuitive, though stylesheet production itself is a nontrivial
task. Similar concepts exist for Web, obviously, with HTML and CSS.

The problem is that for the typical user, print remains a simple conceptual
model to understand, regardless of how brittle it is in a world with mulitple
output formats. There's been a lot of thought put into this area over decades,
and for a good tool to emerge and become prominant is yet another tough nut.

I agree (from a limited and somewhat old exposure) with your assessment of
Sharepoint. I've mostly seen it used as "Christmas Tree" in which individual
document blobs (or other objects) are hung, rather than a Wiki in which
documents are interlinked, readily refactorable, and dynamic.

------
mbylstra
easy way to clean up word html (ckeditor)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831069>

------
cabirum
Ctrl + Shift + C Paste as text (in chrome at least)

------
Uchikoma
"Death to Allegra Geller!"

------
bashzor
Great to read how someone who needs Wordpad instead of Word (try it on
Windows: open Start, type "write" without "", press enter) actually tries to
bash Word on being too good. I agree that features might have an easier way to
get turned off, but aside for that I think Word isn't that bad.

He also complains about the file format. I agree as well that this could be
done better, but they aren't doing a real bad job. In any case, _he_ certainly
has no idea _why_ it's done the way it's done and is in no position to
criticise it.

------
gringomorcego
I would agree with this article especially after it used the word "till". Till
isn't the word you want to be using moron. Till is what a farm uses. Til, as
in the shortening of 'until', is what you want to use. How the fuck does shit
get published where 'til' is the accepted shortcut for a word that doesn't
have an extra til.

Till exists in such popularity simply because spellcheckers won't correct it.
Til brings up the red underline thingy, and people want to assume it knows
what it means. Sadly, most people listen to it.

Till isn't what you mean. Til is. Fuck spellcheck, if that thing actually was
smart you wouldn't have any headaches.

That's the sad thing about technological achievement. Most of the time it
occurs because enough people start following the default behavior.

Don't get me start on how 'referer' became the default spelling for the HTTP
referrer.

