
Why Microsoft Word must die - r721
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html
======
kijin
> _Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative,
> inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer 's use._

Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing,
programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce
business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the
other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever
formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place.
Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they
designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like
EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.

Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts
and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed
automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined?
Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's
consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line
by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished
with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs,
formatting \Syn\\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority
of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design
their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I
don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big
Business.

> _I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother._

At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER>
Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would
fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it
gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to
learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's
thesis-in-progress.

~~~
GuiA
> Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version
> control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.

Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia.
Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if
Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox
from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and
Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")

~~~
iSnow
No offense, but using git for collaborative writing? That's like using nukes
to get rid of mosquitoes. SVN would be a poor but better choice, but you'd
rather use stypi, google docs or something like that.

~~~
Too
I can not think of any scenario where svn would be preferable over a
distributed vcs such as git or mercurial. They can both be used exactly the
same way as svn if you feel for it but come with tons of other benefits. I
even think there's less friction to start with for non techincal people
because you are always working in "everything always checked out"-mode and
there is no need for a common server. Just let them edit in peace and when you
want to merge then pull from their local repo.

I don't know the state of visual tools for git but tortoisehg for mercurial is
quite easy to get started with.

~~~
iSnow
>I can not think of any scenario where svn would be preferable over a
distributed vcs such as git or mercurial.

After forgetting to push after commit and then dropping your laptop, you'll
know.

~~~
phaer
What? The result would be exactly the same, right? You don't have your
unpushed commit if your laptop is broken, neither with svn nor with git. The
only difference is that you still can use your local git repository if your
server burns down, but you can't do that with svn.

~~~
regularfry
With SVN a commit _is_ a push. You can't forget to push after you've
committed.

~~~
jeltz
No but when I used svn I committed way less frequently so it ended up to be
the same thing. With git I forget to push with svn I forgot to commit.

------
jwr
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool,
where the styles are quite easy to work with.

I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to
do. I realize there are people who _absolutely need_ every little feature in
Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software
documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents.
You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and
Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents.

I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools
become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report
with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working
fast than new features.

And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than
Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good
solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the
results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an
unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking
things for no good reason.

~~~
Ralith
So if I use LaTeX and it gives me the results I want and I don't find myself
spending inordinate amounts of time tweaking things, does that make me an
intermediate user? I guess I had better stop learning.

~~~
redacted
I love LaTeX, I wrote a physics PhD thesis in it and many papers as well. It
works phenomenally well up until the point it doesn't work at all. And when
you need to go fix something it is a deep and frustrating rabbit hole in my
experience.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The point where something is unfixable in LaTeX is much more complex than the
point something is unfixable in Word, where I seem to jump down the rabbit
hole on relatively simple documents.

~~~
sinkasapa
That is a matter of opinion. I think the lack of source code is a problem of
incredible complexity, in that overcoming that hurdle would require one to
somehow force MS to fix something.

I think LaTeX starts marginally easy, gets complex and fiddly but then pretty
much just stays at the same level of complex and fiddly. Word starts very
easy, gets complicated quickly and eventually presents un-fixable problems, no
matter what your skill level.

------
nonchalance
The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and
limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates
before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to
Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products
in the office suite

~~~
toomuchtodo
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative?
$100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough
developer time to replace it.

~~~
nonchalance
LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released
in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep
compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that
comprise the most profitable segment of the market.

And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility,
it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page
specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An
incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword):

MS-XLS, MS-CFB, MS-ODRAW, MS-ODRAWXML, MS-OGRAPH, MS-OFFCRYPTO, MS-RMPR, MS-
OVBA, MS-OSHARED, MS-CTXLS, ECMA-376, MS-OLEDS, MS-OLEPS, MS-DTYP, MS-XLSB,
MS-OFORMS, MS-VBAL, MS-OAUT, MS-DCOM, MS-XLSX

But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some
of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good
libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list):

[https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx](https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx) (go, xlsx
read)

[https://poi.apache.org/](https://poi.apache.org/) (java)

[https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx](https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx)
(javascript, xlsx read)

[https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls](https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls)
(javascript, xls read)

[https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/](https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/) (php)

[http://www.python-excel.org/](http://www.python-excel.org/) (python, based on
openoffice )

[https://github.com/randym/axlsx](https://github.com/randym/axlsx) (ruby, xlsx
write)

[https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table](https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table)
(ruby, xls/xlsx read)

~~~
jebblue
>> But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider
some of these reasonably active projects

Anything I've ever needed any of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice tools to do have
worked fine. I don't think it does anyone service to suggest to projects which
keep the proprietary Microsoft Office suite alive.

~~~
nonchalance
To successfully replace the office suite, in the beginning you must be able to
interact with office files.

Joel Spolsky (member of the office development team) attributed their success
to this:

> Microsoft Office ended up beating its competitors because it was able to
> read and write to file formats other than its own. For example, Excel was
> able to read files from Lotus, and was able to save the file without losing
> any information. The important lesson in order to gain market share was that
> in order for new users to try Microsoft Excel, they had to be able to work
> with the files their coworkers were creating.

> Lesson: You don’t want your customers to feel locked into using your
> software. It helps with sales cycles because customers know that they can
> switch away if they so choose. While customers will be willing to try your
> product, they think two steps ahead. They want to ensure they can easily
> migrate to a new system.

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/07/spolsky-on-
sof...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/07/spolsky-on-software-on-
both-sides-of-the-table/)

------
6cxs2hd6
> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical
> style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both
> formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you
> can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a
> style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design,
> from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.

Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is
claiming?

Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet
and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil
flowed.

------
psn
"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the
in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and
[usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident "

They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The
folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as
fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going
for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest
possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.

~~~
tanzam75
Indeed, disk transfer speed mattered a great deal in the early days. People
used to save all their data to floppy disks, and use their hard disks only to
load programs.

Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45
KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might
save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of
losing data.

The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections,"
with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If
you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append
the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document.

Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.

------
joosters
Word is IMO just fine for most uses. It has lots of features and lots of ways
of writing and designing documents because users wanted them. You can't blame
a product on its users.

And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't
like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop
using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use
the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other
people's choices.

~~~
thuuuomas
> The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going
> to have to live with other people's choices.

Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is
its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards
interoperability.

~~~
joosters
Just read the rest of the comments, there are plenty of alternatives. The
author isn't complaining about a lack of choices, either. Instead, he is
moaning that other people have made a different choice from him.

~~~
pseut
No. Look, I'll read the last paragraph for you:

"The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do
not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from
Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large
compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer's
integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to
classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been
browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production
systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using
Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file
format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to
integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an
inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply,
unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the
possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has
held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better
to take its place soon."

\--TFA

So, you can disagree, but the "why" of your first comment is pretty directly
addressed by the author.

------
zerovox
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy,
happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other
format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format
and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and
only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication.

I do feel that this is one of those cases where you should be able to write in
the way you feel best for you, and if the publisher insist on having the final
document in a word format, it should be straightforward to convert your chosen
representation to theirs. It's hard to say without knowing precisely how the
publisher expects the file to be formatted, but if it's fairly
straightforward, there are libraries that will write to doc files for you, or
there are open formats that MS Word already knows how to convert into .doc
files that you could target instead.

~~~
sounds
Arguing this is the exceptional case misses his point, I think.

He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.

In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous
talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament:
"the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the
sine qua non of document production systems."

Some examples:

∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens
daily

∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word
drudgery

∙ Engineering research

∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)

∙ Law

Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw
their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.

The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron
Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.

~~~
pseingatl
Wordperfect still is very popular in law offices. Lawyers love the "make it
fit" feature, which word doesn't have. Lawyers are always trying to put 17
ounces into a 16 ounce glass.

~~~
tanzam75
> _Wordperfect still is very popular in law offices. Lawyers love the "make it
> fit" feature, which word doesn't have. Lawyers are always trying to put 17
> ounces into a 16 ounce glass._

Word does not have a "Make it Fit" feature, but it does have a shrink-to-fit
feature. You do have to shrink it one page at a time. You start with 13 pages
and shrink it to 12, then shrink 12 to 11, etc.

However, the feature has been removed from the default Ribbon UI -- probably
because only lawyers were using it. (College students tend to want to _expand_
their documents rather than shrink them.)

[http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2664217](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2664217)

WordPerfect has clung to a niche in law offices because lawyers are inherently
conservative. Even then, Word still has a majority share in law offices.

~~~
pseingatl
I didn't know about this feature. The documentation says it just reduces font
size. WP did that but also increased kerning, reduced linespacing as well as a
few other tricks.

------
raverbashing
(about stylesheets and codes) "Word was in fact broken by design, from the
outset -- and it only got worse from there."

No. That's the "developers" point of view (and a false dichotomy)

Word is focused on the user. If the user wants to italicise one letter, it's
_OK_ to let him do it. Sometimes it's a _requirement_

Of course, the problem with Word is that you can't debug the mess it creates
when it doesn't work the way you wanted.

~~~
Dylan16807
You can italicize one letter with styles. It's not a requirement to have two
completely different methods of doing so.

~~~
tanzam75
Imagine looking for a style every time you needed to italicize a letter. Body
text, italicized. Header, italicized. Subtitle, italicized.

Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style?
Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2
text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some
more Header 2 text, Word will _reuse the existing style_.

You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 +
Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized.

Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting
you do gets turned into an anonymous style.

~~~
Dylan16807
Sounds like a UI problem then, rather than a core logic problem.

------
dkuebric
Monopoly or not, it's the only wsywyg text editor I've ever found truly
usable. I now prefer Google docs for convenience but it's not quite there yet
for composition/edit experience. Hoping for more good alternatives, if anyone
has suggestions.

~~~
telephonetemp
LyX isn't WYSIWYG but rather WYSIWYM (the "M" stands for "mean"), but I found
it the most usable visual editor for word processing.

Edit: Why the downvote?

~~~
emiliobumachar
The concept of WYSIWYM, which you casually tossed around, is really hard to
grasp at a glance, which is mildly frustrating.

(I did not downvote nor think there's reason enough for it. Just speculating)

I took a look at the LyX web page, and it really didn't shed much light on the
issue. "writing based on the _structure_ of your document" added zero
information to me. The screenshots look like a weird middle ground between
WYSIWYG and TeX.

------
mikro2nd
Long have I said, " Word processors are to words as food processors are to
food,"

The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of
writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office
memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else.

That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing
comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that refuses to
swear!

~~~
teleclimber
> The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of
> writing and the task of formatting.

I completely agree. Software developers and even physical product developers
have (or attempt to have) development workflows that separate the content
creation from the style.

There is a good reason for that: it is far easier to focus on these things
separately than all at once.

You would think Word and other tools for writers would adopt the same ideas in
an effort to make their users more productive.

------
michaelpinto
I didn't really appreciated MS Word until I started using Apple Pages: Pages
has no draft mode! Suddenly clunky Word seemed to have a better interface. The
problem is that over the years Word has become a poster child for feature
creep, but that said for each feature that you detest there is someone else
who is fan.

------
tszming
I still have Word 2003 (and Excel 2003) installed on my PC, still very useful
when I need it, and it is still my first choice when I need to prepare some
serious documents, otherwise, I will use Google Docs. It is quite amazing as
they are software written 10 years ago, providing all the features I need as
of today.

In general, for office suite, I still can't find any opensource alternatives
that can compare with these 10 years old software. Yes, they are proprietary,
they are not open, blah blah blah, but when you have used other latest
alternatives like LibreOffice (Mac), they even can't make the basic Cmd+F
search work as expected [1], can you tolerate? This is the question you need
to ask.

[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853)

------
skue
I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers.
Back in 1999 I authored a web programming book for O'Reilly. At the time,
their technical folks would begrudgingly accept Word files, but they strongly
preferred FrameMaker.[1] Some of that probably had to do with the propensity
for large Word files to become corrupted, but it's also because FrameMaker
helped authors generate documents with much cleaner styling than Word. It's a
shame that Adobe let FrameMaker languish.

FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a
stylesheet approach. The difference is analogous to creating a web page and
declaring styles inline (how most folks use Word) vs. using a stylesheet (how
most folks used FrameMaker). It is possible to pop open a style inspector in
Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought.

Pages also has a style inspector, which is my favorite feature (despite the
old-school NeXT-style drawer). For a reason that I can't easily articulate,
using styles in Pages feels cleaner than Word and more like using FrameMaker.
So if I have to create a large Word document I will typically do so in Pages,
then export to Word.

[1] I believe O'Reilly also accepted alternative open source formats such as
DocBook and LaTeX. And though these might be great formats, I could never find
an editor that I could stand using for more than a few minutes -- let alone
the months needed to write a book.

~~~
tanzam75
> _I 'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for
> publishers. ... FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was
> designed for a stylesheet approach. ... It is possible to pop open a style
> inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought._

How long has it been since you used Word? The styles are now right on the Home
tab in the Ribbon. On my monitor, it takes up over half the width of the
Ribbon. You don't have to "pop open" anything to use styles, but you do need
to open the styles palette to define and change styles.

A publisher could supply a Word template to its authors, and forbid the author
to make any other formatting changes. They could also enforce this by opening
the styles inspector and checking for any unauthorized formatting.

An author could also apply a different stylesheet to reformat a text to match
a different publisher's stylesheet.

Word is a styles-based word processor, internally. If you boldface some text,
Word will create a new anonymous style that's simply the existing style, plus
boldface. You could even use the styles inspector to change all instances of
that anonymous style back to the original style, or to turn it into a named
style.

You can use Word like Framemaker (sans frames) if you want. It's just that
most people don't.

~~~
skue
I still use Word regularly, and yes there are styles in the ribbon, along with
a panel which can be opened as well. But the ribbon only shows six styles
(until you pop it open), it doesn't do a good job of warning when you have
overridden a style, and it confusingly mixes default styles with user-defined
styles.

There are a couple other big fundamental differences with how Word supports
styles:

1\. Copy/paste behavior. If you copy formatted text into a Word document, it
brings the styles with it. If you pull a lot of styled content into your
document (including HTML), you must constantly work to restyle the imported
content. FrameMaker (IIRC) helps you remap the pasted text to existing
document styles.

2\. Character styles in Word have always seemed like neglected step-children
relative to paragraph styles. Both FrameMaker and Pages treat character styles
as full peers of paragraph styles and give them separate picker lists.

------
AndrewDucker
I've yet to encounter a better method of tracking changes than the one Word
uses. Makes it trivially easy for me to take a document, make a bunch of
changes, and then have the originator see exactly what I've done to it.

~~~
EliRivers
I've found a better method to be creating documents in plain text with some
suitable formatting markup, and then apply a diff tool such as meld to see
changes made. The way word does it, if I recall, involves sort of mashing the
two versions together (or rather, having the change data saved with the
document), with red font and strikethrough and so forth used to indicate
changes, which is far harder to follow than what meld presents (the two
documents side-by-side with coloured sections indicates changes, additions and
deletions, joined with little lines between the documents to show locations,
and a sensible scrolling mechanism to keep them coordinated).

I haven't used word for a few years, though, so if it's changed, disregard :)

~~~
cdcarter
Word can do a side-by-side diff.

And really, a lot of business people are more comfortable with the mashed up
version. We don't say we red-line a contract because Word presents it that
way. Red-lining has worked that way for years prior.

------
skue
This is an interesting article and has generated some good discussion, but
blaming Word for mixing style sheets and control codes seems off to me.

 _> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical
style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both
formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you
can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a
style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from
the outset -- and it only got worse from there._

Back in the 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the market leader - not MS
Word. And WordPerfect 5.0 supported style sheets when it was released in the
80s, alongside the existing control codes that were already a core feature of
WP.[1] Even after it supported WYSIWYG editing, WP still enabled users to
Reveal Codes - essentially toggling from WYSIWYG to the underlying markup.

I'm not defending MS Word as a program - I hate it too. I wish WordPerfect or
something better had won. But I don't see how Microsoft alone can be blamed
for deciding to support both control codes and style sheets.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_li...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_libraries)

------
InclinedPlane
It should.

Word's roots reach back to an era when the primary way to share documents was
by printing them out. And that heritage is deeply ingrained in so much of it.
But that's not the way documents are shared today. I'd be surprised if even 1%
of all documents created in Word in 2013 are printed out, yet all of those
optimizations and compromises are still there. Unfortunately, not many people
have come up with unambiguously superior replacements, yet, so Word continues
to hold on to its position of dominance.

~~~
hydralist
kids printing school papers has to make that number > 1

~~~
MarcScott
My students _never_ print school papers. Submissions are all by email or the
learning platform.

------
oinksoft
Right now the word processor choices are Word or open-source Word clone, so I
don't see the point for the end user. I use Libre/NeoOffice, but it's no
easier to use than Word. I'd like to see a word processor more like old
ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.

~~~
claudius
Or you could just use LaTeX with the text editor of your choice. Yes, you can
write letters in LaTeX, yes, that is easy and yes, it takes me roughly one
minute to get a perfectly-formatted simple letter, which is roughly equivalent
to the time it took Word to start the last time I tried it (~2008?)

~~~
pseingatl
If you're going to work in LaTex you might want to use Lyx. Otherwise, working
in a LaTex compiler is full of problems. Texshop is forgiving, but where is
the Zoom view feature? Other compilers simply halt without letting you know
why. As a word processor, Lyx is not bad at all. Exporting from Word to LaTex
is not easy.

~~~
claudius
If you’re new to LaTeX, I presume that Lyx might be a good start, but
personally I prefer AUCTex with standard Emacs – the zoom feature being in my
PDF viewer (evince-gtk for simplicity).

------
willvarfar
My experience with libreoffice scripting was painful:
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/making-
the-history-of-worlds-religions-map)

~~~
icu
I agree that trying to force open source alternatives on your workflow after
using Microsoft Office for a long time can be difficult. I tried to switch
from Microsoft Office to the other open source alternatives and while I did
like Open Office, I found I couldn't use it beyond 'average' tasks. As soon as
I needed advanced analysis I had to go back to Excel. I find that switching
between R and Excel 2013 works well for me. Also I feel that Microsoft has
done a good job with Office 2013 and I like what they've done with PowerPoint
animations on the ribbon. Frankly though Office is expensive so if you need
the features not available in open source alternatives you've just got to pay.

------
bambax
I agree with the article in general, but this isn't true: _" Each new version
of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by
older copies of the program."_

The first part of the sentence is true, and the second part, _" which could
not be parsed"_ is also technically true, but false in practice, since
Microsoft releases free tools to convert new formats into old formats.

I use Word 2000 on Win XP to exchange documents with my clients and it's fine,
really; they can read what I send them, they send me back .docx files and I
edit them without a problem.

(Not to say that MS Word is not horrible; it is, but the particular problem of
file formats isn't real).

------
keithpeter
_" Word is, I’m told, horrid, but it talks to publishers, which is really all
I use it for."_ [1]

It is the lock-in. We can use our preferred tools (vim/LaTeX or
Gedit/markdown) but collaboration requires capitulation. I can get away with
PDFs a lot as I work as a teacher and my work is consumed on paper in very
small editions.

[1] [http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/](http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/)

------
riffraff
> But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that
> Word is the sine qua non of document production systems.

Is this actually true?

I accidentally checked just a few days ago, and amazon's self publishing
platform allows using a simple html file.

Also I clearly remember that D. Hofstadter's books were typeset with latex,
and at least in my country they are published by one of the biggest publishing
companies.

So, maybe the stranglehold isn't so tight?

~~~
makomk
I think at least some non-fiction authors have to supply a "camera-ready"
manuscript, which is basically typeset and laid out by them and not the
publishing house and so doesn't have to go through the Word-based workflow
fiction publishers like Stross' use.

------
chalst
The reason many publishers prefer MS Word is that it is the best choice at the
editing stage. It is much easier to find copy-editors who will be able work
efficiently with Word than any other system, with Adobe Indesign/Incopy being
a distant second.

It would be possible to grow a tool infrastructure around Latex (and/or
Context) to eliminate the practical problems working with that system, but at
present it does not exist.

Word's support for change tracking is very good. Change-tracking is a very
different thing to version control: version control is about storing and
reconciling difference versions of a file, while change tracking is about
communicating the changes made for the other person to check. If I edit your
text, I can switch change tracking on and off, so that the relevant changes I
have made to your writing are visible for you to step through one-by-one,
while the changes my macros made to make font choices consistent are
untracked, so will not waste your time when you review the text. If version
control and change tracking overlap somewhat in functionality, they have
different uses and fundamentally different semantics.

------
telephonetemp
Government forms served as Word documents with complex table-based formatting
and "fields" made out of underscores are truly the worst.

They are sadly ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe, much like mathematics
typeset using Word and MathType.

~~~
scholia
Which is the fault of the users, not the applications. Microsoft Office offers
much better ways to do that sort of thing.

------
tuananh
I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document
format.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
.docx is an open format,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML)

~~~
cstross
It's a _published_ format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've
basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to
make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.

~~~
triton
That's actually a load or horse shit (excuse my French). I've worked with both
ODF and OOXML extensively as we write document templating software and I'll
pick OOXML over ODF any say. It's less quirky, there are decent COTS tools to
handle it and the output rendering is consistent regardless of which tool you
pick to do the rendering. It's also better documented and way more intuitive.

I really don't know where you are getting these facts from other than the
usual spiel that Microsoft does only evil.

The standards are open, published and free to implement (look for Microsoft
open specifications). The documentation is way better than anything else out
there.

So LibreOffice obviously reimplemented lotus 123, wordperfect and wordstar did
they as well?

~~~
rbanffy
> there are decent COTS tools to handle it

Of course there are - Microsoft's ecosystem is huge. And tools can use Office
as a library

> output rendering is consistent

That's not a format problem

> It's also better documented

Now that's just wrong. It's more extensively documented (the spec is an
impressive stack when printed) but there cannot possibly be a better
specification than freely available source code. If you really want to know
how to read an ODF document, you can always read LibreOffice's source code.
And use it too.

~~~
triton
_there cannot possibly be a better specification than freely available source
code_

That's even more horse shit and a poor excuse if there ever was one for not
documenting something properly.

The source code by nature covers a subset of the standard as it can't cover
every logical edge case and it isn't verified. At least the documentation is
the verification source.

Not only that, I've delved into the LibreOffice source code and it's horrible,
convoluted and a rats nest from hell.

~~~
rbanffy
I think you are not paying attention. In addition to the documentation you
found confusing, ODF comes with a reference implementation. While sometimes
the LibreOffice source code can be daunting, especially if you are not that a
good coder, it's runnable and evidently usable. I'm not advocating not writing
documentation (I take great pains not only to document my code but to also
provide comprehensive tests for it).

I don't know what kind of code you do, but your lack of faith in the clarity
of your code and your tests as a form of documentation is disturbing. I hope
your clients can't identify you from your comments.

------
primelens
LibreOffice is fighting the good fight and for most things it's a great
substitute for word.

But I've always wondered what would happen if something like Latex were to
become truly user friendly - I mean pre-compiled distributions that are easy
to download and work without tweaking, relatively good wysiwyg viewers and a
less obtuse maze of packages.

~~~
clarry
I don't think the fight here is Word vs LibreOffice vs Latex vs whatever, it's
that it sucks when a very specific format (and workflow or tools, when the
format is too complex to be universal like plaintext) is imposed on you even
though the task at hand could be easily completed with dozens of different
tools. I hate when msword .docs are imposed on me, and I'd hate it just as
much if latex or libreoffice was imposed on me the same way.

------
rtfeldman
I came to similar conclusions but didn't like Scrivener, so I scratched my own
itch instead. The result is
[http://dreamwriterapp.com](http://dreamwriterapp.com) \- it only works in
Chrome, but it can handle 100,000+ word novels without performance tanking
like it does in Google Docs.

~~~
alextingle
I get nothing but a spinning icon.

~~~
macmac
Same here.

------
Knacktus
Unfortunately the author clouds the facts and his mostly correct findings with
his emotions. What could have been an interesting reading remains a rant.

------
rypskar
I will not at all say MS Word is perfect, but I still haven’t seen a program
that works better for me. Spelling and grammar is not what I am best at, and
English is not my first language so I take the help I can get. I have used
OpenOffice/LibreOffice and am using Google Docs, but none of them comes close
to Word in helping with my spelling and grammar. I did type this comment in
Word to get rid of the most obvious errors, and I do even type my master
thesis in Word and copy the text to my latex editor for formatting. For me it
was worth it to pay for Office instead of using any of the free alternatives.

------
kabdib
Since I left MS a year ago, to join a small games company, I've used Microsoft
Word only twice; both times, to make signs like

DANGER: ZERO GRAVITY AREA

for the doors of one of the server rooms here. In other words, we don't use
Word.

We use Outlook a lot; I can't imagine not using it (there is quite a bit of
email traffic, and Outlook is pretty good at scaling). I've also used Excel a
fair amount to do analysis and "little database" work.

But Word, PowerPoint, Visio: Nada.

------
seanmcdirmid
MS Word still can't kern very well, and can't really hyphenate for double-
column justified papers. LaTeX is still my tool of choice.

------
gingerlime
I can understand the frustration with publishers who choose to use .doc as
their standard.

This is not as bad as the _government_ adopting it. In Israel, so many online
documents provided by government and public funded organizations are
.doc/.docx format.

(disclaimer: I moved out of Israel in 2002, so things might have changed and I
do so some shift to pdf, but I believe a lot is still .doc based)

------
lispm
My problem with Microsoft Word is, that its core task, formatting text
documents, is completely buggy. Instead to get the core engine right,
Microsoft added tons of less important features. It's really hard to write a
half-complex document of, say, 40 pages and not to run into a multitude of
editing, display and formatting problems.

------
triton
Everything there could be applied to pianos but you don't see people lining up
to rant about them on blogs.

Word is "good enough" which is more than both the macro-driven systems (i.e.
LaTeX, troff) have mustered and the opposite end of the spectrum with the
layout based tools.

To be honest, every time I use Word, I'm relieved it's not HTML.

------
dbot
I'm a litigator who continues to be amazed by the page formatting requirements
in courts around the country. Especially at the appellate level, it can take
hours to find and then implement all of the requirements. Worse, all documents
are then converted to PDF, making them even less useful.

What's crazy is that most briefs are actually just a series of links: cite to
Case A, B; cite to document C; cite to statute C...Sometimes attorneys will
make "e-briefs" to actually link PDFs, but those usually cost thousands of
dollars to manually generate.

I'm working on an open-source court filing project that would let attorneys
and the court write and post everything in an electronic format for easy
linking and search. Think of it as a free, universal ECF/PACER for state
courts. If anyone is interested in helping, feel free to drop me a line.

------
_random_
The reality is that Word is really-really good. That's why it's a monopoly.
Just like Apple products.

------
Ethan_Mick
My personal annoyance with Word is how terrible it works on a Mac. There are
simply things I expect _any_ text box to do (including this one that I am
typing in to post this). Things like:

1: If I highlight text with my cursor and mouse, and I scroll using my
trackpad (MacBook Air), I expect the text to be highlighted with the
scrolling. Word fails at this. 2: I expect different my basic OS X commands to
work, ctrl+e, go to end of line, ctrl+a, front of line, etc. These don't work
in Word. 3: Scrolling is not smooth, typing is not smooth, and many other
small annoyances.

I understand that OS X isn't nearly as big as Windows for a market, but I
would love it if the software crafted for it wasn't so bad.

------
rob05c
> a programmer's text editor (such as ed

YES. Clearly the capricious abregation of Ed was where we went wrong. Let the
faithful return!

[http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt](http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-
msg.txt)

------
tnkd
Without putting too much thought into the subject, the state of Office in the
enterprise upsets me. Over the last six years I've gradually rolled away from
Outlook and Word in favour of Google Apps / Drive. True, it's not perfect, but
for the 'lay user' (students per se?) it is sufficient and the barrier to
entry is low.

My real concern with Office comes from what if in the future I'm not in a
position where the company I work for is still tied to the Office Suite of
products. Productivity wise, switching back to Office (even Office365) is a
real killer for someone that is proceeding efficient at the former.

------
mncolinlee
Oddly enough, when I was a corporate intern technical writer, everything was
being done there in DocBook XML. We were using PTC Arbortext products which
were very expensive per seat.

It's inevitable that the publishing industry will dump Word, but I don't think
it's realistic to expect it all at once. First, they have to offer the ability
to use other formats and they may require that the industry adopts a standard
software package and document flow that does exactly what it needs. This
sounds like an awesome open source project for someone who knows that
industry's exact needs.

------
wildster
Why has google docs stopped being developed?

------
n0on3
Nice piece; unfortunately it's not just about MS Word. It's pretty common for
inferior/hurtful-in-the-long-term products to get leading positions in the
market and become "unavoidable". The first easy guess is that marketing people
are doing a great job for these products; the second one would be that the
majority of us are too stupid/busy/unwilling-to-consider-long-term-
consequences to spot their game and go for smarter choices. TL;DR: Please run
humanity.upgrade(), we would think about their word processors l8r (:

------
unsignedint
Being locked into some vendor is one thing, but I find worse is people
insisting to send something in .doc (or other rich text format) while plain
text or texts in the body of E-mail would just suffice.

~~~
shadowOfShadow
try .docx since it's an open format. It's interesting to see OP and you both
talk about .doc. It shows your familiarity with the details of the topic.

~~~
unsignedint
Oh I meant to be more of general statement... I'd be as frustrated if it was
odt if use case wouldn't warrant it.

Though docx has its own problem -- a lot of free implementations do not handle
it correctly and MS implementation of OpenDocument is largely incomplete (as
far as I know from 2007's implementation...) Honestly, using LibreOffice day
to day with other users being MS Office users, ironically doc seems to be most
complete interchangeable format with these users.

I think some of those come from ambiguity of spec so I guess there are mulple
parties to be blamed.

------
jruthers
FrameMaker - or a new, open source ground up rewrite of it - for the win!

------
anuraj
Word is an end user product - not open source - not developer friendly - want
a developer friendly format - work with ODF or similar entities pushing open
standards. Word does its job fairly well.

~~~
gggmaster
There are many better open source alternatives for end users. Being locked
into one product is not a good thing.

------
MarcScott
In my school I'm trying my best to push students away from using Word. If
they're making quick notes, I ask them to do it in a text editor. If they're
presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown. This is only
for my CompSci classes, but it's a start. My next mission is to break the
stranglehold that PowerPoint has on my students.

~~~
keithpeter
_" If they're presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown."_

Perhaps a git repository to track feedback and changes?

Do they need to use diagrams or images at all?

~~~
MarcScott
git is something I'm working towards. Ideally I'd like github to be our
learning platform.

~~~
keithpeter
I thought that might be the direction that you were moving in, and I think
that is a really good idea for your particular students to get used to a
source code repository and version control quickly.

One thing I have not looked at yet but may do in the future is git-annex [1]
and the associated GUI [2]. I'm hoping I can use git-annex to sync folders
between laptops just using an external drive.

[1] [http://git-annex.branchable.com/](http://git-annex.branchable.com/) [2]
[http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/](http://git-
annex.branchable.com/assistant/)

That will allow music/video/images to be synced as well as text.

------
4dl0v3-p34c3
We kinda had this talk, but it proved useless, since most users hardly change
habits (the real reason to µ$ Word stagnation):
[http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1mt8a5/nearly_everyon...](http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1mt8a5/nearly_everyone_who_is_new_to_emacs_hates_it/)

Even IE6.

------
triplesec
There is until now no mention whatsoever in this thread of Openoffice, and I'm
baffled as to why not. Sadly, they use the MX paradigm rather than improve the
UXperience greatly, but, well, it's a start.

------
ajmarsh
For me its MS Word's "outline mode" I'm not sure I could write a document
longer than a few paragraphs without it.

------
markjbrown
This is a pathetic rant. I'm surprised it got as many comments as it did.

Oh wait, this is hacker news. No, I'm not surprised then.

------
sbussard
I bet you could raise money to buy word.ms domain and point it to this post :p

------
nicarus1984
"It's a poor workman who blames his tools."

You may not like Word, but I find it helpful for certain tasks. You want it to
die? A bit dramatic and non-constructive. Basically, "I don't like it, so no
one should use it."

------
dmourati
Why stop at Word?

------
anderslindgaard
try libreoffice.

------
VMG
worse is better

------
NN88
so what should I use?

------
wissler
It's part of the current human condition, where people want instant
gratification and don't want to take the time to figure out or learn a
properly designed editor.

------
vzhang
“The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable.” I
don't know what he would think about air with this hipster mentality.

~~~
clarry
If air was a big, expensive, complex, hard-to-use, proprietary product that we
could perfectly well kill off and do without, I'd loathe it.

~~~
nkhodyunya
The author's argument that Microsoft Word in unavoidable because doc format is
de facto standard in his problem domain seems bullshit to me. You can't
substitute a document editor with document format like that. I mean, you can
totally avoid using Microsoft Word for creating doc files by switching to
latex/markdown/org/... with [pandoc][1] converter, for example, or use any
kind of MSWord-like word processors, e.g. OpenOffice Writer(if this somehow
change something). The author didn't mention any other problem with Word,
except it's local ubiquity, which i don't find a problem at all. So, why hate
so much?

[1]: [http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)

~~~
scholia
You're right, it's bullshit. Apart from anything else, Word saves in a ton of
formats. I use Word all the time but I very rarely use doc/docx. I use rtf
instead.

