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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."
As nice and progressive as this sounds, the likelihood of a mass migration away from Word is highly unlikely. As an employee at a large tech company I see many daily reports in Powerpoint, Word and Excel. There are thousands upon thousands of these reports archived on network drives. How likely is it that a CEO/CFO/etc.. is going to mandate the transfer of all these documents to OpenOffice/Abiword/Etc.. ?
Where the Music Matters
Firefox should be the "first" browser to full support this.. ..
They are going nuts on it
see the Technology Preview
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
I have a client who has been having intermittent problems with Word2002, namely "abnormal termination" errors. Crash, boom, bang.
/a" -- a word processor with a "safe mode"?), installed the support and troubleshooting document templates, turned off NAV Office virus checking (as per the MS KB article 320475).
.DOC files. I would switch these users to something better, if only there was a clearly superior product on the market. As much as Word sucks, it's become a de facto standard. There's no competition anymore, and I wonder if this situation means that there's no incentive to make this a stable product. I wonder who is in charge of product development in Redmond: engineers or marketdroids? Do I really need the ability to make Word my default HTML editor? Do I really need to know my Fleisch score? Clippy? Hello? Is anyone home?
I've done everything: deleted "NORMAL.DOT" (which had bloated to 710KB), scanned for macro viruses, did a repair install, did an uninstall and a clean re-install, applied all three service packs (service packs for a word processor?), started it up in safe mode ("winword.exe
And still it mocks me.
I'm starting to look at the OS and the network at this point, but none of the other applications have crashed, and both the computers and network are new (under a year old, mostly Dells running XP Pro). The users don't do anything fancy with Word, no pictures, no embedded objects, just plain vanilla legal documents (it's a law office, so I'm thinking that maybe there's a karma thing happening).
I've met every challenge that administration has thrown at me, but the solution for this one has eluded me for a month now. The users are getting impatient and they aren't taking "Well, it is a Microsoft product" for an excuse. Nor do I for that matter. I can't blame Redmond, even though their products are starting to remind me of the US automotive industry back in the 1970s: big, inefficient, prone to crashing, waiting for a nimble competitor (Japan) to eat their lunch.
The automobile:software analogy breaks down, of course. When you bought a Toyota to replace your Ford you didn't have to migrate anything but the contents of your glove compartment and your trunk, not a year's worth of
Just give me a goddamned word processor that doesn't throw a runtime error and my users and I will be happy. Or I swear to God I'll kill this puppy.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
While I generally agree with you, I think automatic translation, if even possible, is not going to be in any version of office in the near future.
I'm ethnically bangladeshi, speak japanese (kinda), and was raised in the u.s. Out of the three languages, I know there are somethings that simply don't translate (even some common phrases) for whatever reasons. Both Bengali and Japanese let you (in fact, encourage) dropping the subject of a sentence if its already understood. That would be hard, if not impossible for a computer to pick up on.
I can think of another set of examples that *could* be translated into something similar if the computer had a person's intuitative abilities; in bengali there's a phrase that literally translates to "If I let you sit, you want to lay down." I know that roughly carries the same meaning as the english idiom "If I give an inch, you'll take a mile," but outside of brute forcing every idiom one by one I don't see a computer being able to make the connection.
Far be it for me to predict the future (watch google come out tomorrow with some brilliant translation tool), but considering the complexity and nuance of human language, I doubt "automatic translation tools" any better than babelfish's garbeledness are anywhere near the horizon.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
I write for a living. I have a license to Office 97, but I've been using OpenOffice for my work for nearly two years now. I've never found Word 97's grammar checker good for much of anything but a good laugh. Maybe things are better now, but I've never been inclined to "upgrade" to a version that seemed like it would need every motherboard change to be registered with Redmond.
The near-universal assumption of Word's dominance can have interesting effects. I once exchanged exported-to-Word copies of a document with a client a couple of times until we discovered that we were both using OpenOffice, both of us importing what we had exported to Word format for the other guy!
A friend of mine with an LCD screen had trouble with the fonts and although his desktop was nicely anti-aliased Open Office stubborny refused to show anti-aliased fonts.
Searching OpenOffice.org revealed this:
The issue has been classified as "an enhancement", has 3 votes and thus won't be fixed anytime soon!
I suppose everyone running OO on Linux (except for those three persons) is using a traditional monitor and couldn't care less about sub-pixel hinting.
The owls are not what they seem
... back to the keyboard? What, are you kidding?
If they have hen-peck keyboarding skills, then I can understand this statement. However, if you've made it far enough in the business world to require the use of a computer, there's no excuse for not having sufficient typing ability. None. Not only that, but typing is much faster for most people than writing, and the creation of the text usually requires significantly less thought.
Mathematics is another matter entirely, but that's not what handwriting recog is usually used for, anyway.
Tablets are just a fringe/novelty item and have no significantly practical use. My school just made the students pay a shitload of money for Gateway m275s, a combo tablet/laptop machine. They suck as laptops, and nobody uses the handwriting ability because it's awkward writing on a screen - regardless of the handwriting recognition.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I use VBA to automatically create very complex reports. Perhaps this is not the best way since it tends to be slow but I have so much control over the placement of constructs especially tables, text, pictures, page breaks, etc.
... I've never really heard of anyone pushing Word that hard. It certainly doesn't seem to be designed for this kind of work. The programming is awkward. It may be possible to encode my documents in HTML/XML and then send them to Word - very definitive regarding data organization - but how do I specify page breaks? With Word I can query for the results of automatic formatting and in a "second pass" give extra instructions to perfect the formatting - not exactly available with HTML as it would have to be perfect at first specification.
...). I don't like being tied to a technology that can change at the whims of Redmond, but the power! The power!
Does anyone else achieve a like objective but not using Word? What I see is what I print - that is definitely a feature I utilize to the fullest advantage. I've always wondered about the possibilities of Crystal Reports, but never had any way of trying the software. I'm going back to look for an evaluation version, but I fear two things:
(a) inhibited features in an evaluation version
(b) Word offers me all the power I need in terms of programmabile control but will Crystal Reports give me that much control. I'd hate to make a major effort only to come up against a major weakness that requires major hacking or re-planning.
One day I may end up using TeX or LaTeX. I used to write TeX and LaTeX by hand, but how can anyone turn away from the allure of Word's ability to let me compose pages without code?
Programming VBA to control Word is a far cry from TeX code. TeX code is far more definitive. Word code can sometimes be tricky - there are times when I had to really wonder why Word just wouldn't display the page the way I specified in the program. There seeemed to be an incompatibility with certain video card drivers - a problem that fortunately had a programmatic solution. However, TeX to DVI was never 100% guaranteed either, and when I tried DVI generation in Linux I found some strangenesses.
I wonder if my usage of Word is all that reasonable in the eyes of other users
Thus, I say Word is really a powerful tool but so deeply proprietary to Microsoft! Are there open source tools that give the same power? Most people use Word to write documents manually. I generate documents automatically but use poor man's formatting by controlling Word. I can, with a lot of code, produce pages with proper formatting (perhaps Perl
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I think automatic translation would be a great idea though I entirely agree that arbitrary documents, probably couldn't be translated with any sort of accuracy.
I think, however, it would be great for a software program to come out that would enforce writing in simple English sentences so that you could pass ideas to non-English speaking users quickly.
This would be akin to a programming language but the language would be English. For example, when we write documentation for our software, I insist on the language to be simple, direct and non-technical. While, at times, I'll write more complicated documents depending on my target (though I prefer simple, direct and non-technical by default most of the times anyways).
In the same way, we could write English that is simple and direct and the translation software would flag anything it doesn't understand. After a while, you will probably learn its style and you'd have a lot less need to revise.
For example, a sentence the translator couldn't translate easily or a sentence that could be ambiguous could be flagged like bad grammar (or supposed bad grammar) in a Word document is. Then we could just edit it.
At the end, we'd have a simple and direct translation to another language that we can almost be guaranteed works because the engine was smart enough to tell us when it doesn't. And by the nature of it flagging it naturally and unobtrusively (because you can go back later to edit, and not while you are in your train of thought) you actually learn to write in a translation safe way.
It's not a translator but it's going to be a whole shitload cheaper than one. Another thing is if you are writing documentation for multiple languages that just happens to be simple and direct, it would facilitate a great first draft. Then your translator only need be paid for the revisions which would probably be much cheaper than doing it from scratch.
Sunny
Be my Friend
There is a misconception about Word's Save as HTML function. It isn't there to generate (clean) HTML.
It is there to save your document in a format that can (somewhat) be read by a browser, but more importantly, that can be read by Word. I found this out when I managed to corner a MicroSerf "evangelist" (or whatever the fark they call their sales/tech dweebs) and ask him what the #$@ SA-HTML was supposed to do.
He told me the extra garbage they embed in the file is for Word's benefit, so it can recreate the document in all its bloated glory if you load the HTML file back into Word.
Let's take a look at a "Hello World" doc, shall we? (spaces added to deal with crak-smoking---sorry---'leet filter/editor)
Note that only a tiny bit of the document is concerned with rendering "Hello world." The rest deals with preserving document styles and properties--stuff you'd find under the "File, Properties" dialog.
Yeah, right.
The best article I have read that summarizes what word got wrong is http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html.
The gyst is that Word, and all word-processors, confuse the distinct tasks of preparing your text logically, and laying it out. This leads to the standard situation that frustrates me when I have to use Word: I am entering text, when I see that it won't fit on a page, so I stop thinking about my text to change paragraph formatting and then, oh, where was I? Later I'll change the text, and probably want to change the paragraph formatting back, but won't be able to remember what it was before. Now my document is inconsistently laid out.
Implementations may vary. Word is often slated as being particularly obnoxious, changing formatting of its own volition. However, the conflation of distinct tasks is a conceptual error of all word-processors.
The alternative suggested by the article, LaTeX, is undoubtedly not to everyone's taste either, but at least if you read the article, you will understand the deeper reason Word is frustrating.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Anyone for whom English ain't no native language
(like myself) occasionally finds good suggestions
from Word grammar checker. It is indeed a feature
I sorely miss when using Linux office products.
That and the inability to get complicated Word
forms with locked tables and precise alignments
to render right. Oh, and VB macros are (pure ass
but) unavoidable when you deal with gov'ment
forms.
I can't agree more with Dvorak's frustration, this has been an ever increasing problem with MS applications in general.
After installing Office on my new Windows workstation, I couldn't do anything without reinserting the original media. The selection to Run Everything from my hard drive was made during the install -- obviously the installer chose to ignore this option. What really interests me is how the install is happening when I am only a lowly user on my local machine. Obviously, the Office installer makes it convenient for anyone to make a modification to the installation. Is this a security risk or is that just my impression?
A quick check of the directory options indicates that lowly users don't have write access. So what exactly is Office installing and where?
Equally signficantly, the user interfaces are complicated and repleat with unnecessary embelishments. I do not want a "Getting Started" box to soak up half my screen every time I launch Word. When I'm ready to write a document a blank page is perfectly acceptable, and the reason I'm launching Word is so that I can write a document. Also, I have no interest in "searching the web" from inside Word, it's perfectly acceptable that I need to start Firefox to do this.
It doesn't help that my company has standardized on MS Word, but I am using OpenOffice for documents whenever possible. It's just easier, my wordprocessor needs are nothing like what MS Word wants to offer me.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Not sure what you are referring to as "simply not true". But if you are referring to using OO as a disaster recovery tool for M$ Word then you are incorrect.
:). The document was in the most recent version of Word.
At work one evening after hours, one of the corporate lawyers came to me frantic saying that he was unable to open the contract that he had been working on for days (and of course he had no recent backups
I simply just asked him to email me the doc, ssh'd into my home Linux machine, opened it *without* difficulty in OO, resaved it in M$ Word format, and mailed it back.
To this day, he still thanks me and thinks of me as some kind of saviour/miracle worker.