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Time to Kill Microsoft Word?
Allnighterking writes "Apparently the frustration with another Windows Product is starting to reach increasingly visible users. John Dvorak over at ABC News is starting to question if it's time to kill Word With Viable options like Open Office.org available for Windows as well as AbiWord and others. Since they are both using XML as a way to create the documents. Or perhaps dropping a separate application altogether and going with something like X Forms to create a browser based office suite."
One thing that Microsoft Word continues to have are some features very useful for the average user.
For example, a Grammar checker. The Word grammar checker isn't perfect, and no professional should use it as a crutch, but it is a nice tool for most people to quickly check for mistakes.
There is continually talk that OO.org will eventually include a Grammar checker module... but I've never seen any evidence of that.
Until OO.org offers such features, I can't imagine them gaining dominance. Anyone migrating will ask "How do I check my grammar (or another basic function)?" And when they're told that they can't... they'll switch back to Word.
Don't get me wrong-- I'm an avid Debian user. But Word is still a better program for the average user.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
Any talk about the importance of a single office application really should revolve around the question: "Is there a viable alternative to office?"
The first question any manager will ask when given the OOo option as a replacement for word is if there is an alternative to Excel, Powerpoint, etc. Although OOo does have those options, some of the features, namely creating charts and graphs, do not port well. Just try making a chart in Excel, and open it in OOo. Usually quite an experience.
Although I believe OOo's got a great suite of products, MS does have the upper hand, and until a comparable spreadsheet product is available, I don't see OOo making headway. At least not the way Mozilla is on the IE market.
I don't think I'm alone in saying that the constant battle between the outliner and the autoformatting engine just got to be way too problematic. OpenOffice seems to have been able to come up with a more elegant solution; I, for one, haven't had nearly the frustrating experiences with it as I have with Word.
But I think fundamentally this is another example of why MS is continuing to decline in some key areas: backwards compatibility and entrenched interests within Microsoft itself. The MS Office group is still powerful in Redmond, and the shareholders would also be resistant to such a move: Office has been a cash cow for so long that tinkering with it fundamentally like this would be scary insofar as future revenues are concerned.
So I don't think there is any possible way this will happen in the forseeable future, although for once I think Dvorak is right: it probably should. Word sucks.
(Offtopic: Tool's version of "No Quarter" is fairly nifty.)
Word has plenty of problems, especially in the realm of lists and numbering (I can never seem to get my lists to number correctly, or consistently, or indent properly, if I'm working on a sufficiently large file). However, the complaint that makes up nearly half of Dvorak's article is his own damned fault. Why? He obviously doesn't understand the Office installer. When you install, you're given several choices for how to install the feature:
It's pretty obvious that Dvorak chose #3 for one or more features that he uses frequently. He can remedy this by re-running the Office setup and choosing to actually install the feature (notice he never says what feature it actually is
His other points are trivial, or have already been addressed.
If Dvorak wants to be taken seriously, he should pick on some of the real problems instead.
Average crack user, maybe.
Did you read Dvorak's article? He had a laundry list of stupid features and plaid bugs that made the program difficult to use. From the usual format insanity and inability to do so much as ASCI, to new, confounding bugs and dialog boxes no user should suffer through. His biggest complaint was from malfunctioning VBA, which was proably a virus or worm (also something that's been around Work for ever). The "average" user should never be pestered by scripting. The average person's editor should have a few common options that just work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Something is wrong with Word, as currently installed on Dvorak's computer. He would rather describe the symptoms in detail than fix it by, say, reinstalling Word. Direct quote: "I suppose I should reinstall Word, but other people have told me they have the same problems. So why bother?" Is Word really any worse than any other Microsoft applications under Windows? Don't they all suffer from Registry rot?
Various versions of Word aren't 100% compatible. Dvorak and some editors tried to use the change-tracking markup, and "we had a huge mess." What was this mess? He didn't specify.
He doesn't like the warning when you save to an older .DOC file format.
HTML files created by Word are full of useless junk. (Absolutely true, of course.) He says something hand-waving-ish about if the HTML is bad, the XML is probably bad, so he's never tried the XML. (If I write about how I've never tried something, can I be a famous pundit too?)
When you save a plain text file, there are too many options in the dialog box.
Based on his conclusions, Dvorak (who is not a software developer himself) has figured out that the Word code base (which he has never seen) should be scrapped. Quote: "There are many more issues than these. It's clear the program is in decline, with too many patches and teams of coders passing in the night. It's about time that it's junked and we get something new. This code can no longer be fixed." How the heck is he qualified to judge whether the code can any longer be fixed?
As it happens, I agree that Word ought to get a major overhaul. Instead of pasting more layers of features onto Word, Microsoft ought to spend a bunch of man-years cleaning it up and making it faster. They won't, because that is not considered a profitable approach. (They actually tried something like this once. Eventually, they terminated that project, and just made the Windows code base the baseline for all future versions of Word. I didn't work on that project, but I heard that it was just taking too long and costing too much to clean it up, and people were worried about how long it might take to debug the final result.)
If Dvorak had wanted to do some actual research, and write an essay that would actually be of some value, he could have installed OpenOffice and tested its compatibility with his documents, and then written about that. This essay is awfully light on facts; I think he must have about 20 columns to write every month, and he just needed to bang something out to meet a deadline. (Note that I have no proof and did no research before making that statement. Just like Dvorak! But no one is paying me anything to write this, so I don't feel too bad.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yeah, it's a buzzword. Get over it. There is a theory that while people use only 10% of the features of applications such as Word, they each use a different 10%. This seems to be true because there aren't really a lot of examples of applications that lose features because they aren't used.
So in order to reach everybody - to give everybody what they want, you've got to have a very feature-rich application. When you don't have that what you'll get is people who are willing to make the switch because the missing features are either peripheral for them (I think I used the grammer checker twice - I'm much better at checking my own grammar than Word is), or that they never use (I never use the VBScript in Word, for instance), or they're willing to give it up because they're both honest and unwilling to pay $500 for a text editor.
A good compromise, I think, is to do those features that are easy to program after you build an initial editor - things like word counts, reading level checks (there are canned algorithms for this), spell checking, output writers, etc.
I would not include a syntax checker on this list. That means classifying every word in our language based upon part of speech and doing some context-based searches to figure out ambiguous words.
If you actually stick with basic functions (meaning functions that are less than 500 lines of code long), I think you'll be quite happy with OO.org. I am.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Seriously, all the managers sit around making PP presentations and they have Clippy to help them get it done. They have all the spiffy canned art to make it look slick. They even can make it talk with Agent characters so the bored victims will have something to laugh at.
/dev/null if it reaches me!
Where is creativity in word processing? Certainly not in m$word because it is still a pile and has always been inferior to WordPerfect. But these days most communication is done via e-mail.
That means that talented communicators will express themselves with only text. Un-talented people will resort to HTML or RTF to try to get their point across. Comes across usually to
Very true, but there are often still mystery changes (especially those involving changing the margins with the ruler up top) which seem to kick in almost at random...
This is why I train my users to find other ways to hit ctrl-z whenever something goes wrong and your document gets eaten by Word.
Apple commercials aside, I still have a Word document which had the center of it *eaten* and random gibberish inserted for completely unknown reasons (and no, the gibberish wasn't pasted/typed in--the people involved have fought with Word for years now). There are no traces of a virus, it's more like the computer confused which inodes belonged to the file...
... but the main reason I use Word over OO is startup speed - when I click on the Word icon, it's up and running in less than a second. OO takes what, four or five seconds? Ridiculous, I know, but that's pretty much the only reason I stick to Word. I like the integration with the rest of the office suite, sure, but I'm also familiar with Office, having used it for the past ten years or so, and would much rather stick to something I know rather than spend the time and effort to switch to something that might not be around in a year. Microsoft products might be expensive, but the company's not going anywhere.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The problem is that even with the reveal formatting option, there is some stuff you just can't edit. For instance, if you have the replace-as-you-type thing turned on and type a row of underscores (or was it hyphens, I've habitually turned off the auto-crap on every Word installation I've used for years now), Word helpfully replaces it with a line. Which you can't delete, move, or otherwise interact with. It can't be clicked on. If you highlight starting above it to somewhere below it and hit delete, it deletes everything but the line. For years, the only way I knew of to get rid of the line was to undo past where you typed it and then turn off all the auto-crap and try again. I finally found out that Word creates the line by formatting the previous paragraph with a bottom border line, and the answer is to highlight the previous paragraph and edit its formatting to remove it.
How about a development platform that smacks a word processor designer in the head when they design features that do things without being asked (such as automatically making lists when none are wanted, auto-indenting, etc.)? I'd pay for that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I just want to crank out a quick letter or memo. I doubt I'm far removed from the typical word user who could give a rats about XML.
It's simple really. Send the document to someone with a MAC or who does not have MS software. They may write back complaining they can't read your propritory file format document. Could you send it as text or XML instead?
That's when you care about your file format. Don't assume everybody is running MS software and can read your quick letter or memo. They care even more when it contains a worm macro and Norton bounces it. Memos and letters should not contain executable code.
The truth shall set you free!
Not sure if you're a troll or not, but I'll feed you nonetheless ;o).
There's a difference between something being doable and something that's "doable and makes sense, too." I haven't ran across the grandfather post's problem, but the solution isn't intuitive. If a word processor converts a line of underscores into what looks like a line, it'd better be a line. Not some wierd formatting quirk.
As a side note, that's one of the reason's I moved away from Microsoft products in general, and towards Linux. Because, most of the time, Linux (or more appropriately, Gentoo) just makes sense to me. If something makes sense to me, it's easier and quicker to use.
It sounds like he didn't know how to install Word properly.
Think about what you just said.
That alone, is quite a damning indictment of the product.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In contrast, "Reveal Code" function in Wordperfect splits the window and reveals most of the formatting options, including font size and tab settings, in command lines. Formatting options show up just like options in an html document, marking the beginning and ending points to which the option applies. I don't know if this goes same in recent versions of WordPerfect, but at least up until version 8 or so the "Reveal Code" function followed what it did in WP 5.x.
It is redundant to say, but this is one of the main reasons many WP users still choose WordPerfect over Word and OpenOffice. I used to use WP until I switched to OpenOffice, but I still feel that it's easier to edit part (or all) of document using the reveal code function than using the mouse highlighting lines or words and apply format change, which often causes unexpected results.
"Yeah, you can't edit this stuff, until I learned how, then you could....this is the typical bs that causes windows programs to get a worse rep then they already deserve."
Which is why Linux is no worse than Windows when it comes to usability.
I hope that's what you meant to say 'cause that's what you actually said...:-)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Dvorak has gotten quite a few people to write him off as a complete idiot
Even a broken clock is correct twice a day...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Just about, yep. I've seen it both ways but it's usually a new linux user complaining about something, then all the linux users chime in and basically say "duh" to them. BUT HERE's the major point. As a linux user...if you can't use word then you need help as linux is by far, a more complex OS to setup/use/configure then windows. I can see windumb users having linux issues such as above, but I find it laughable that the oh so smarter linux crowd doesn't have the first clue on how to USE word, but of course they DO have enough info to debate its worth... That's like me bitching about features on motorcycle just because I've sat on it...
The classic Word vs. OpenOffice faceoff. Happens in our office every few months (substitute other MS vs. open source productivity tools here if you like):
PHB: Hey Jake, can you get me that stuff I need for the proposal. The customer wants it in MS Word form this time - they had a little trouble reading your last piece. I need it this afternoon, big rush.
OSZ (Open Source Zealot): Yeah, sure, I'll do it in OpenOffice and flash it straight to you.
PHB: Look, I've got nothing against open source, I just don't use OpenOffice. I tried it ages ago, and then again a few months ago. No matter what they say, there's always some little incompatibility that ends up costing you hours.
OSZ: No, that was the older versions. The new OpenOffice rocks, its absolutely compatible with Word.
PHB: I don't care, I just don't trust it. Just use Word to write the document, OK?
OSZ: [sullenly] If you say so.
[.. hours pass..]
OSZ: I've got that document you wanted. But I..ahhh.. couldn't use Word, I used OpenOffice. I can't run Word on my machine any more. But look, I can absolutely, 100% guarantee that OpenOffice is 100% compatible with Word, it'll work fine!!!
PHB: [sullenly] Oh shit. OK. Just frigging mail it to me then.
[.. more hours pass..]
PHB: [spitting fire] F*&$! That fricking OpenOffice crap has polluted my Word document! All the tables have got some kind of hidden formatting in them that makes them 6 inches high and I can't edit them. I need to get this to the customer IN SIXTEEN FUCKING MINUTES!! GET THAT FRICKING OPENOFFICE OUT OF THE FRICKING OFFICE YOU FRICKING ASSHOLE!!!!!!
OSZ: I don't know what happened there. That was all fixed up I thought. But look, hey, the next version really does give you absolutely 100% compatibility!!
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
Yes, Word is a pile. I hate it. It can be sorta tamed if you play with the settings to turn most things off. (Really on Windows I use it as a glorified text editor to add spelling and grammar checking that's it. Of course, these days I use KWord for the same thing.) Everyone I support (ie, family) hates it even more than I do.
But the solution is NOT to build everything into the web browser! Please, people, get over it. A web browser is for displaying WEB PAGES. My letter to my senator is NOT a web page. Just because something uses XML doesn't mean that it's a web page, or need have anything to do with the web.
Maybe XForms would make a good standardized office file format. Maybe OASIS (aka OO.org's format) would be better. I don't know the technical details well enough to say, but since they're both open XML formats I'm cool with either one.
But dear god I want a SEPARATE PROGRAM for my word processing. I want my web browser to browse the web. I want my file manager to manage my files. I want my word processor to process words. Sure, they can all link to the same XML parser library behind the scenes, but I don't want there to be ANY confusion at the application level about what the program is doing.
Konqueror has started to get confused in KDE 3.x between how it should behave when it's a file browser and when it's a web browser, which is bad enough. I do NOT want my word processor to suffer the same fate. I refuse to open a web browser to do LOCAL work.
If I wanted "one bloated ugly program to do everything even if it's not designed for it", I'd skip X and just install emacs. (*dons flame retardant suit* I don't use vi either, don't worry!)
Bottom line: Use whatever open file format works best for the word processor of tomorrow, but keep the bloody web browser out of it. I'm not interested in pointless bloat and interface methods that don't make any sense in context.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Did you really read that link? I'm not following how a "container" is any different than a "start marker", the "contents", and the "end marker" in Word Perfect.
For every <b> you have a </b> in html, for every [BOLD] you have a [bold] in Word Perfect, so whats so different about Word that you can't show a {container start} and {container end} tag and someplace show a {container properties=bold}?
In fact, I don't think it even matters what the properties of the container are, you could hide that in a right-click menu. As long as you could see where the container started and ended, so you know EXACTLY what text and other containers where in it, you could percisely move text in and out of containers, instead of randomly guessing how certain mouse clicks will mess up your documet.
Morphing Software
From the MVPs Word FAQ
Word, on the other hand, is a series of nesting containers, characters inside words inside paragraphs inside sections inside documents.
Why does that prevent the display of codes, HTML style? HTML is also nothing more than containers in containers.
Nice fairy tale. I send OO docs saved as DOC files to my boss all the time. He has never once complained.
evil is as evil does
>linux is by far, a more complex OS to
>setup/use/configure then windows
Is it? Really? I just poped in a mandrakemove cd, clicked three times and in a couple of minutes i had a perfectly configured linux running on my machine.
>I find it laughable that the oh so smarter linux
>crowd doesn't have the first clue on how to USE word
so the "oh so smarter linux crowd" are windows-using professional journalists now ?
>That's like me bitching about features on
>motorcycle just because I've sat on it
It's safe to say that most linux users are actually users who *used* windows first and *then* migrated to linux. On the contrary i haven't seen any windows user migrating *from* linux yet, they actually are "bitching about features on motorcycle just because they've sat on it".
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
My personal opinion is that they're all EVIL and they're out to RUIN MY GODAMM LIFE.
/a to recover. Love it. Right. Word makes Windows 98 with no virus scanner look fun to support.
I've used Word - various versions of, from Word 5 for Mac to Word XP. I've used OpenOffice from pre-1.0 to 1.9-m47 . I've used kword, I've used Abiword. I HATE THEM ALL.
I swear, word processors are the one type of software that appears doomed to go from bad to worse to awful.
If I had to use a word processor, it'd be Word 5. Even if I had to run it in Basilisk under a virtual MacOS 7. Failing that, prob'ly Abiword.
I absolutely loathe OO.o . It's like a clone of Word done even worse, and the 1.9 alphas literally make me want to reach out and start strangling them. Toolbars popping into existence from nowhere and moving the working frame around; autoformat that's even more overzealous than before, etc. *arrggh*. I've been trying to test it, as we use OO.o at work, but I literally haven't been able to stand it for long enough.
I have to say that Word is evil in a somewhat more competent way. Somewhat. I think the UI is a lot better than OO.o's - mostly because OO.o's UI is a crap clone of Word's, rather than because Word's is good. I do love the way that an accidental keystroke can make seriously freaky shit happen - like making the app hide all its toolbars and menus, but not in a way that can be restored by the normal full-screen key - I eventually had to run it as winword
I seriously question the concept current word processors work on. I hate the way formatting works in every single one of them - it's like you fight the program more often than it helps you. When I seriously begin thinking about using LaTeX for a quick purchase order (and I don't know LaTeX very well at all) I begin to wonder if word processors are even a good idea.
Perhaps I should try out WordPerfect. It seems that it might at least help restore sanity to the formatting task.
I'm going to unclench my teeth and go do something not involving word processors (*twitch* *twitch*) now.
I'm 42, I've been using "vi" for over 20 years - it also "writes words". Other people find "vi" unusable - it's just opinion, nothing more.
It's hard to fuck up a word processor and while people complain about bloat and all sorts of features never used, in 10 years of consulting, I have used EVERY feature of Word, from mail merge to macros to customizing the toolbar to autolinking graphs to speaking text to grammar check to HTML export and back. Word is the kitchen sink and it's stable. Word never crashes on me.
Word also enforces a proprietary document format. Therefore, unless you use plain text, HTML or RTF, you are limiting the audience for your documents, even to those people who use an older version of Word than you do.
I do not want to install X11 libraries and molest my kernel to make OO load faster.
Just because Windows and the GUI are inseperable, this does not mean that mean that a whole heaps of libraries aren't loaded up when Windows boots - they definitely are.
Please remember (if you know Linux/UNIX) that X is a GUI system that is separate from the OS and is a server/client application. X has its faults but you cannot compare Windows to X, they are completely different things.
I don't want new revisions all the time.
So there you are with Office 2000 and someone sends you an Office 2003 document. What are you going to do? You're still in an upgrade cycle here also...
Hell, I boot up Office 98 on my travel PowerBook and go to town... and that was released seven years ago!
I boot up vi on my Compaq laptop and that was released 20+ years ago. So what?
#1. Bill Gates didn't get rich writing bad software.
No, he got rich marketing bad software. Virtually every piece of software Microsoft release originated from a company they once bought.
#2. Microsoft is made up of some of the smartest people in computing.
Some of them is not all of them. Microsoft is made up of smart people who know how to make money from computing, not necessarily how to write the programs.
#3. No one puts a gun to anyone's head to buy a Windows box.
The situation is improving but it is still very difficult to buy a pre-built PC that does not include a Windows operating system. That's a big gun in my book...
But you can have Microsoft Word back when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands because when I need to write, I write.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
This is like saying "Let's kill off Dremel tools because they are too good. Here have a cheap imitation instead". Or "Let's kill off BMW. Have a Kia instead."
Build me a better (compatible) mousetrap and maybe I'll consider it. I doubt it. Frame was a good choice but Adobe did a Computer Associates to it and neglected it agressively. So Frame is dead, long live Frame.
Until there are actual competitors who are:
a) as good as Word
b) productive as Word
c) has the advanced revisioning and editing features as Word
d) can collaborate with my colleagues as well as Word (say for example, Team Editing features)
e) all my clients have it
f) * just works *
the people who make such suggestions can make sweet love to a chainsaw... sideways.
Andrew van der Stock
Actually, OpenOffice 1.0 "encountered an error" and "needed repair" so often here that I kept the
Like a broken record, I'll get in my standard comment that Word always did look like a text editor that programmer wonks threw "secretary-type stuff" into. In contrast, WordPerfect seemed like model software development. Do the analysis of what people would want to do and how they can do it best, and then start programming. Our department fought like badgers to keep it and were distributing copies of WordPerfect Magazine's article "500 things Word 97 can't do" around the college. To no avail.
So y'all stampeded with the herd, lived in the Microsoft monopoly PR dream -- and are starting to wake up?
Mnyesss, I see... I suggest you read Neal Stephenson's excellent essay In the Beginning Was The Command Line and don't express another opinion on the CLI until you do - but this is merely a suggestion.
Your GUI is a subtle lie about what your system is truly up to. Even the author of TFA expresses a distrust about what the dialogs presented him are hiding:
If I am presented with a choice of spending a few minutes learning a command syntax and being in control of my system or an eternity being presented with deceptive (yes, deceptive - what's the last Windows dialog you saw which told you exactly what was happening?), frustrating dialogs I think you'll find me at the bash shell.
Or just go download OpenOffice. It has almost all the functionality of Word (well at least Word 97, when I decided it was feature complete no matter what MS thinks). OpenOffice has a lot less of the "I know better than you, you mere user" crap, and a much better command organization. It also has its share of quirks and things that Word does better, but at least we can have some reasonable expectation that the problems can be fixed.
On the other hand, I have looked at the code for OpenOffice, and its not pretty. I'd have to be getting a salary from Sun before I got into it to the point where I could post useful changes.
There are also some disturbing comments on openoffice.org concerning the goals for the next major release, which include (paraphrasing) making the UI more like MS Office. Granted I'm comparing an older version of Office, but if this means taking oo's clear, clean command organization and scrambling it to resemble Word's historical structure just to make it easier for people to trasition, then that's a BAD idea.
John Dvorak is a legend in his own mind. He hasn't said anything worth listening to since his old days at PC Magazine. Since then he just writes like a movie critic and hate everything that wasn't his idea.