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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."
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
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.