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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."
Isn't there a kill utility for Windows that'll let you kill -9 Word. That certainly would be handy.
I imagine if there was a "reveal hidden codes" feature in Word, it might be a lot easier to use
If I stop repairing, I get another dialog that says, "The document contains macros. Macro language support for this application is disabled. Features requiring VBA are not available. Would you like to open this document read-only?" Whether I click Yes or Cancel makes absolutely no difference, as there is no document involved! I merely started the program. After bypassing these roadblocks, the program runs fine.
Isn't that the normal.dot file that's causing that? It's kinda funny that Word considers it's own default file as a potential problem.
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.
NO!
Are you crazy? That piece of software alone will keep me employed for years to come!
Seriously, you lost. YOu didn't get the first post AND you forgot to to post AC. You, my friend, are a 2 time loser.
that Microsoft cannot win on file formats alone. In order to sell more office suites, they are going to have to provide better ways of making documents. Clippy and very annoying auto-formtating that never works when you need it to and always kicks in when you don't do not count.
Now what features should be added? Maybe voice recognition/OCR, or automatic translation tools, since we are in the "global economy". If there is anyone with the resources to pull some of this stuff out it's Microsoft, whether or not they have the management and the insight to do it is a whole other can of worms.
Monstar L
First of all, I'd like to say that from what I've read of this man's writing, it's just random words thrown together to almost form a story of some kind.
In PCMag, he has two pages. One where he spends about 3 lines talking about random shit that he doesn't know about. The other page is where he reports on the "new trend" in tech.. Or it would be new. If the article came out 4 months previously.
If I had mod points to use on him, I'd go right for the flamebait.
Now, to his article:
It sounds like he didn't know how to install Word properly.
He goes on to complain about the HTML creation. I don't know what his problem is. If you just "save as" HTML, and do your tagging correctly, there's no problems. But why use WORD to create HTML documents? That's what notepad is for.
His prediction of the death of Word is meaningless. It's carries about the same weight as the claims that BSD is dying (as comfirmed by Netcraft).
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
MS has declared that due to the poisonous, corrupting nature of the Clippit virus, all of MS Word must be wiped. Oh wait ... it's not a virus?
Bored? Visit my exciting counter page!
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.
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
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.)
I put Lotus SmartSuite on my box in '93 and used 2 versions through '02. OO is now the only way to go.
I was worried about the old Macro virus problem and avoided it by never owning a copy of Word or Office. I have never regretted that decision.
In the last 2 years, getting a programming degree at the local CC, I have to use Word at school. At home, OO opens and edits those documents just fine. I have not been impressed with Word at all, too much fluff (cute by mostly useless 'features'). It seems like a large waste of resources.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
....when he/she does any of the following:
1. Types in numbers and spaces to make numbered lists instead of using the bullet/number function.
2. Uses spaces and tabs instead of margins, alignment, justification, etc. to format text layout.
3. Uses 57 different font or section styles.
4. Writes a web page, especially ones that use a complicated, eyeball-scarring background image for the body.
5. USES MULTIPLE FONT STYLES AND CAP. LETTERS FOR SECTION HEADERS
Now that's a word processor I'd like to see.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Remember, this is the same John that predicted Apple would switch to the Itanium.
Still, at least I didn't think it was Antonin Dvorak...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The fact is (and this is the only MS product I can say this about) that Word is the best product in its class. All the alternatives blow to a greater or lesser extent.
Although I use LaTeX for the creation of serious documents, and I hate Word in principle, I still find myself firing it up whenever I have to create a document with some low-level formatting. It's simply the easiest and best choice. Surely that's the mark of a useful product -- when you hate it, and yet you still use it.
What I seriously object too, however, are those evil .doc files. While I generally use AntiWord to view Word attachments, and it does a very good job, it is only a matter of time before the format is changed again. It is just criminal that the de facto standard for document propagation is proprietary and closed. I recently got into a fight with a non-techy friend about this. She just couldn't understand why I got all worked up about it.
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.
You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.
:)
Wonderfully appropriate.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
If you are using Microsoft Word 97, write:
"I'd like to see Bill Gates dead".
Make sure language is set to English (United States), then check the entire phrase in the Thesaurus to see what comes up.
The reply in the thesaurus is: "I'll drink to that".
As well, there is another one...if you type:
"unable to follow direction"
the Thesaurus shoots back:
"unable to get an erection".
Obviously Microsoft programmers need to have a little fun while working with Bill.
Originally from alt.rants about five years ago..
For reasons which are completely beyond my control, I've spent half a week writing a document in Word 98.
I have never in my life seen, heard of, or even imagined a more malodorous piece of steaming shit than this little slice of Microsoft. Words fail me, and all that follows is the faintest Platonist shadow-on- a-wall of what is, in my heart, the Ideal Peeve, perfect in its sincerity, bottomless in its depth, and unassailable in its accuracy.
This bloated, pestilent gigabyte-swamping piece of ordure takes up enough computational resources to accurately model the world's weather for the next billion years, and what do you get for it? Something that will format and display text? Don't make me fucking laugh. What you do get is a profusion of bells and whistles thrown in a careless heap, each bauble lovingly designed to make the straight path crooked, the intuitive arcane, the simple impossible.
Take the ``Help'' for example. It's not just help, it's a new friend!
I don't want a new friend, you shit-slurping choad-munching bunch of retards; I've all too many as it is. What I want is something simple where I can find a technical detail with a minimum of fuss and interruption. I don't want animation. I don't want natural-language interpretation. I don't want to be led by the fucking nose. Give me a fucking index and get the hell out of my damn face. If I dismiss a window, I want it gone. I don't want it to wave goodbye, or hesitate, or sneeze. I want it gone.
The document I was working on was very simple. No images, no tables, no nothing. One font, one style, that's it. It would be perfectly simple in other system, even earlier versions of Word, but, oh no, not in this latest magnum opus of the word processing world.
This helpless, hapless, hopeless, buggy piece of offal insisted on changing my fonts every couple of minutes for no reason. Random chunks of text, at random times. And bullet points, don't talk to me about fucking bullet points. It's a little known fact that in the bullet-point mode of Word 98 every single button on every single toolbar is the ``Fuck Me Over Now'' button. I've got bullet points going left, I've got 'em going right, and down and up, I've got 'em changing indentation, and style, you name it.
You'd think in 20 or so megabytes of RAM there'd be room for one scenario in which it doesn't actively do anything wrong, but for that you'll have to wait for Word 2023, which will have a user interface like a retarded version of ``I have no mouth, and I must scream.''
And don't try telling me that one need only configure the options to avoid these problems; I'm not a fucking moron. I quickly configured the preferences so as to minimize all this bullshit, at which point Word promptly changed them back. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you don't want fast saves, then fuck off, you're gunna have 'em. Don't want your grammar constantly corrected by some shitty little subprogram that doesn't know the first goddamn thing about grammar? Tough shit. Empty your wallet and move off to the side.
How did this come about? It can't be incompetence, at least not the usual mundane sort one is constantly immersed in simply by having to share a planet with a bunch of fucking primates. This is either some transcendent type of incompetence, or active malevolence.
My money's on malevolence. This software was obviously created by a company who's motto is ``We're Microsoft, and you, the customer, aren't worth fuck to us.'' It matters not one iota what their official motto is, watch the hands, not the mouth. Well, Microsoft, your time will come. It may not be Linux that does you in, it may not be the DoJ, it may not be this decade, but you're going to go the way of the dodo, and I for one will cavort naked on your grave, pissing effusively on your memory, and screaming, ``Animate this, you bastards!'' to the sky.
But in the here-and-now, I shall finish this document with the quiet dignity with which I have always comported myself, and then I shall un-install Word, and swear a terrible oath that I would rather daub dung on paper with a stick than write a document using a Microsoft product.
http://www.weird.com/~woods/ms-word.sucks.html
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Reguarding MS Word itself... I've worked with word for about 10 years now. In the time I've recieved 2 documents that *required* anything better than a text editor to get their point across.
.doc file.
They were both bitmap files embeded in a word
I also recieve the bulk of these files as attachments to e-mail. (cut to exploding head)
I'm all for seeing Word die a horrible, painful death, but let look at the source for this article. John Dvorak made a living for a good portion of the late eighties and nineties predicting the demise of Apple. I'm not sure his prediction that Word is on its way out means a thing.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
StarOffice is downloadable for free (not evaluation) to those affiliated with educational institutions. It takes a bit of navigation around the sun site but for students like myself it isnt a bad deal.
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.
I also used a great word processor called 'Q&A Write for Windows 2.0' for a number of years which (IMHO) was much better than the early versions of Word for Windows. Anyone else remember these or other popular alternatives to Word?
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
But why use WORD to create HTML documents? That's what notepad is for.
Notepad has a serious size limit. It's ok for a couple pages, but falls flat when doing a full document. There is just too much stuff that notepad can't open because it's too large. I quickly move on to other text based editors.
The truth shall set you free!
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 $500 for a text editor.
A good compromise, I think, is to do those features that are easy to program after you build an initial editor - things like word counts, reading level checks (there are canned algorithms for this), spell checking, output writers, etc.
I would not include a syntax checker on this list. That means classifying every word in our language based upon part of speech and doing some context-based searches to figure out ambiguous words.
If you actually stick with basic functions (meaning functions that are less than 500 lines of code long), I think you'll be quite happy with OO.org. I am.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Most companies are already archiving those as Portable Document Format (pdf) files. This preserves print format much better than Word ever did. IBM would be happy to show you how and yes, you can search the text.
If your company was dumb enough to archive things in Word format and is not looking for reliable methods to get the information out, you might as well throw the things away. New Word itself has a hard time opening older Word documents, especially "complicated" ones with OLE from visio and other programs that your company might not have anymore.
Hopefully, people will learn and use reasonable text editors and type setters for future work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've suffered more frustration at the hands of Microsoft Office than I care to remember, but I'm still not seeing OO.o as a viable alternative--mainly because it's soooo frigging sloooooow. I have Win2k installed under VMware for the sole purpose of running Excel 95: it takes OO.o about 8x as long to load my ~4MB finance spreadsheet as Excel, and every time I try to make a change in OO.o the thing locks up for about 20 seconds(!).
I'm very much in favor of open source beating MSOffice, but it looks to me like the developers still need to do something about that "we write what we want, not what you want" mentality.
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
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
If you want to know how badly bloated Word is, check out this unbelievable screen shot.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
A couple years back, a professor of mine gave a talk entitled 'Is Microsoft Word Inherently Evil?' in which he outlined why the assumption of peoples' use of MS Word creates problems and what we can do about it. It's probably nothing that most /.'ers don't already know, but he presented this at an instructional technology fair for faculty and staff, so he's helping to make the issues known outside the Computer Science populace.
... 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.
Extraplolating, I can easily see Windows itself being replaced by a future knoptix-like system, just as soon as it runs the latest games.
You know, you're not *that* far away from the truth... i have countless friends who would ditch Windows in a second if they could play their games just fine. No, Wine is good, but's not good enough, and probably never will (not Wines' team fault - it's impossible to keep up with a moving target).
Today, open source gives useable alternatives to almost anything you'd need in a desktop / workstation PC. And games are still the number #1 force behind after all computer / software / hardware upgrades. I don't think Microsoft came with DirectX just because it wanted to be friendly with developers; it's another platform lock-down tool. Much like Office cryptic file formats.
Bullshit. Stop using Win9x. Notepad on NT has always been able to handle large files. Notepad on win3.x had something like a 64K limit. Win95's notepad had the same problem, and so I would assume win98 and winme did as well (don't have any of those hanging around to check, though I wouldn't be surprised if that was changed in later versions of win9x). It's never had that limitation on an NT-based OS.
Notepad does suffer for lack of features, but it does what it's supposed to do -- it's a simple, lightweight text editor. If you need more power in your text editing, install Vim, emacs, EditPad, TextPad, or one of the many other more fully-featured free and not-so-free text editors available for the win32 platform.
surviving in a word world:
When installing word or any office program ALWAYS run a "custom" installation and get to the screen with all the grey boxes that turn white when selected for installation. Select the top-most box and click "run from installed location". All the lower boxes should turn white - that means they will all be installed on the HD.
After the installation is complete, the installer will ask if you want to delete the installation files or leave them on the hard disk. LEAVE THE FILES ON THE DISK. While this only applies to Office 2003, it does make patching or servicing the installation later a breeze.
-ted
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
Not until there's clippy for Open Office. How else would I know when I'm writing a letter?
Read reviews of shopping cart software
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!
FP? You mean Failed Profoundly?
;)
Dude, I've seen so many massive screwups today - some dweebus knocked his lunch tray and coke into his lap with his elbow...some hotshot struttin around like a tough guy tripped on uneven sidewalk and fell on his face...this is icing on the cake!
Ok, we need a cherry......got it!...... the GNAA weenie gets signed up for hourly pornvertisments, g'day
The real path to male liberation
After: You're fucking wonderfully.
skribe
Blog
Notice how "Time to kill Microsoft Word" and "Time to kill a Mocking Bird" sound somewhat alike.
Maybe Slashdot could include this feature for people who don't use the OL tag to make ordered lists. ;-)
irb(main):001:0>
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
. . . overworked.
As another helpdesk slave, I must say that we can stand to lose MS Offie. Windows XP and IE are all the job security we need.
Only when they allow CSS to make them look nice...;^)
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
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.
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."
I at least hope it has a kill -9 me
...no other program so far (and yes, I mean OpenOffice.org, too) does not even come close in speed and usability to Microsoft Word. I am sorry to admit that, and I try to avoid using Microsoft stuff as much as possible, but so far I can't imagine my life without Word.
I am a scientist, not a professional hacker, and mainly use Word for writing (chemical) papers.
While Word indeed has some annoying features (Office Assistant and "personalized menus" in the Windows version, Autocorrect in both windows and Mac versions, "antipiracy" checking on Mac), they can easily be killed. Properly configured Word is reasonably fast (on both Mac and Windows), annoyance-free, and has all the features I want.
For example, install ChemDraw (a de-facto standard chemical graphics package), draw a structure, and paste it in OpenOffice and in Word. Then double click it. Word preserves the structure intact, and it can be post-edited in ChemDraw. Not so in OpenOffice! It converts the .cdx object to a useless picture, which makes me store and track more files!
In addition, such features as tables, multi-column text, and foot/end notes are implemented almost flawlessly in Word. Not so in OpenOffice. Just try to grab a .pdf of any paper from, say, pubs.acs.org , and try to duplicate the formatting in OpenOffice.org. Good luck! Trust me, I have tried it - and got terrible results. The only two programs that succeed for me are Word (in its various incarnations from 2000/Windows to 2004/Mac), and LyX.
My affair with OpenOffice.org has started and ended tragically twice, and I am not entering that boat again. The first time I tried installing it (under Red Hat 8) was around the times of version 1.02, if I am not mistaken. What was immediately evident to me is that the program was sluggish (on a P4 mobile 2.4GHz laptop with 512M RAM). The disaster stroke me on the third day of using it. That day I have been working on a long document and saved it in the native OpenOffice format before going home. And when I tried to open it later that night, it won't open! OpenOffice corrupted the document while saving it, and nothing could be done to restore the whole day of work (and the document was due next day!). What added insult to injury was that no error message has been displayed when saving the document. The program did not crash. It just killed my document.
The second time I have tried installing OpenOffice was on my girlfriend's Fedora Core 2 laptop about a month ago. This time, the gremlins stole the ability of OpenOffice to write good .pdf files. The .pdf save feature worked the first 3 times. After that, the .pdfs were still being produced, but they were containing only gibberish. I was amazed - mainly by the fact that this impressive feat of self-destructive programming has been achieved on registry-less Linux. Bravo!
Needless to say, since then I have bought Crossover from Codeweavers and have been using my trusty Office 2000 on all my Linux machines.
As for other alternatives, don't even get me started. I still remember with horror the first time I tried to compile Abiword (I think, 0.96 at the time). That was on my SGI Octane with Irix 6.5. Abiword would not compile with SGI's native cc - there was just too much gcc specific... "features" in the code, and SGI's compiler was correctly treating all this "exxtreme programming" crap as bugs (no, I am not making this up). So gave up and compiled it with gcc. The resulting executable was showing the splash screen and immediately dumping core. I have investigated this behavior (took about half an hour with Google) and found out that is a known problem. Finally I got it to run from shell with a command line option to turn off splash. Great. I was happy. Until the moment I tried to actually edit text. Typing was fine, but Abiword dumped core as soon as I tried to switch font. Well, at this point I gave up, and I don't think I am to blame here. A week ago I've be
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"
link plz ahha i have to read this. problems with this are just jumping out at me. 1. word is a monster. 1500kbit adsl would bearly cut it 2. privacy what guantees do i have that they aren't logging what i type so the feds can come arrest me when i type up a document on how to make a bomb - thats my business not theirs. 3. again privacy, if i'm a smaller competing company how do i know MS isn't stealing my ideas as i type them? don't be fools it happens. 4. what if my connection drops out? i won't be able to save what i have on my screen?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Once upon a time, I was a young(er) programmer who saw the creations coming out of Wirth's group at ETH.
/bold /unbold /deeplymeaningfulbutconfusing something .. in the text...
My friend and colleague (Mr. P.C) (yes really, but I won't name him) ported their Modula-2 compiler and a strange entity called "Andra" which was a document processor to that wondrous new home computer beast the Atari-ST. Nobody at the UK
company (who older folks may recognize) understood
Andra. I sure didn't.
Sigh. I didn't understand what it was then. Words were things that you processed with meaningful commands like
no WYSIWYG. What you saw was what you deserved.
(There is a good reason why Don Knuth is a hero
amongst most of us. Playing with fonts and stuff
appeals to our taste for the bizarre...)
Now, Andra was really a distant ancestor of AmiPro (remember that?) and Wurd. But, all these years later I want to know precisely what is so difficult about making something with at least few
enough bugs that the bug log doesn't implode and create a local black hole...
I'd like a black hole. It would be useful. I'd really like a "word processor". Until we actually
get one I'll stick with VI (Elvis or VIM) for programs and Emacs for pure text.
Boo. My own primitive attempts at writing shrink wrap apps blow away the crud coming out of the N.W
U.S. (or else someone explain why one man's feeble
attempt at a windoze app scores 100% in terms of
a language he doesn't understand too well despite
living in said country almost 20 years...)
Keen eyed watchers know which country I'm in...
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?
He went to MacWorld. He thought he saw the end of the road for Apple. He unequivocally stated that the Mac was not destined for, but already in, the scrap heap of history.
I really would like to put together a site that keeps tabs on industry pundits and prognosticators. Wouldn't it be useful when reading the latest predictions from industry windbags? You could look up that windbag's track record. My goodness, it might even force some accountability among tech journalists.
Hell, you could even use the principle on regular ol' journalists and opinion-makers of all stripes. It seems to me that although politicians lie and make excuses for the votes they made in earlier years, media hacks don't get called to the table often enough because until quite recently they controlled the information flow.
My guess is there are hundreds if not thousands of regular Slashdot readers who are much better at predicting tech trends than many of the journalists who are paid to prognosticate.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"... For instance, if you have the replace-as-you-type thing turned on and type a row of underscores (or was it hyphens..." "...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..."
:) and many others. Enjoy.
After an undesired auto format occurs in your document just hit back space, it will only undo the undesired auto format without touching what you typed. It works with your example of a line, with the asterisks who change into a doted line, with emoticons after you type
Now do some one know what do I have to do or to deactivate if I want to paste some text that I just copied from the internet to my word document without having word wanting to connect to the internet and then applying some lame undesired formating. I just want to past clean text that's all. Right now what I do is pasting my stuff in notepad and then I copy it again in word but the process is a pain in the ass.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
You're thinking about the 3.1/95/98/ME notepad, which is limited to 32kb. The Windows 2000/XP notepad has no problems opening documents several megabytes in size.
Besides, if your web page is over 32kb, you need to fire your web designer. Seriously. 32kb is 6.5 seconds on 56k - with a good connection. And that's before you add in all the graphics, stylesheets, scripts, and other external jazz.
The US Constitution is less than 28kb. Why should your web page be any longer?
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.
This is all well and good and does make Word immediately available but, on the other hand, there's a whole heap of memory other programs cannot use as a result.
Personally, I'd rather have the system memory available because then the overall speed of my PC should be better, rather than just the load-up time of Word.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Personally, I take anything Mr. Dvorak has to say with a grain of salt. Most of his articles read almost as delusions and have very little to do with the lives of people who use the technologies he often gripes about.
Word, for instance, is used by millions of office workers around the globe. I am one of those people who use it for writing technical documentation. While I agree it is not perfect, I do not see a need for an immediate replacement. Really, it does what it was intended to do.
Now, if you are using Word to do layout for magazines and newspapers, perhaps you should invest into more appropriate packages for your task. I hear Adobe has a great lineup of software for advanced layout and design. But, if you plan on typing up manuals, legal papers, and doing the things people buy word to do, then I don't see the big deal.
I guess Dvorak is out to just get people talking and mentioning his name. What better way is there to trick people into thinking you are smart?
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.
I know enough about computers to not blame the software when the system has been junkified with conflicting software, but this does not seem like one of those situations. I see a product breaking down in "out-of-the-box" configuration. Why does it crash when loading or manipulating its own files? Perhaps they put so much work into crash recovery that they think they don't need to prevent crashes anymore.
If I'm way off here, please tell me. Maybe i have to set "thip-croinkle-spoit" (dilbert reference) to OFF? Maybe this is indicative of some other problem?
So don't capitalize the whole thing!
it's supposed to read:
Time to kill Microsoft? Word!
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
But you can create clean html with Word. Just save as Web Page, Filtered, and you get this:
/* Style Definitions */ /style>
/head>
/div>
/body>
/html>
< html>
< head>
< meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
< meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10 (filtered)">
< title>Hello Word</title>
< style>
< !--
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0cm;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:21.0cm 842.0pt;
margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
<
<
< body lang=EN-US>
< div class=Section1>
< p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-IE>Hello Word</span></p>
<
<
<
The main reason I'm not using Open Office.org is that it doesn't print envelopes properly. I run my own small business and I have envelopes that need to be printed off. My handwriting is also atrocious, so handwriting them is out of the question. Open Office did not print out standard envelopes properly on my setup, and the bug tracker said that this problem wouldn't be fixed until the next major version, whenever that will be. After all this, I uninstalled it and reinstalled Word.
.rtf files. The program also insisted on moving the images external to the document, meaning that I had to copy a number of files over if I wanted to show the document to someone else. Since I'm a game developer, screenshots are an important part of many documents. Being unable to handle images in the most portable format available did not instill me with confidence.
There's also lots of other little annoyances. For example, Open Office did not properly display inline graphics properly in my
I really would like a free alternative to Office. Unfortunately, the main alternative doesn't fit my needs so I am stuck with Word for now.
My view,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Nobody in their right mind uses Word to create plain text files. You use Word to create Word docs and really that's it. It doesn't create HTML very well either. Absolutely true, but so what? That's not it's primary purpose either, and not a reason to scrap it.
I use OO at home, but it's not ready from prime-time. In a corporate environment, people use Word because you can automate it. VB/VBA is a security meltdown waiting to happen (thus the annoying "disable macros?" prompt), but it's the main reason for using MS Office in the first place -- you can programmatically get at the vast majority of the features of *all* the MSO apps using it. And you can suck data in from a variety of sources including SQL.
One thing he's right about is the annoyance of the MSI re-installing features over and over. Home user? Yeah absolutely, what a pain in the butt. Corporate User? Make the IT guy fix it :)
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?
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
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.
From what I've read from a variety of sources, a Word file is actually a serialized dump of Word memory. Which is horribly stupid, as a document format. Or horribly brilliant, I guess, from a business standpoint.
So no, the horror of Word may not be representable by rational codes ...
It looks like you're writing a death threat!
Would you like to:
- chrish
As the title says. Windows, Linux, whatever, I find Oo.o's font rendering to be completely crap.
;)
For starters, yes, it doesn't seem to do any anti-aliasing. Even under Windows. And since it has nothing to do with sub-pixel hinting, it's just as crap looking on a CRT as on an LCD. Probably worse looking on a CRT, actually.
Second, when you scale a document (yes, I like to have the page scaled to fit the window width), instead of getting the fonts simply rendered at the new size, it looks like something that got first rendered and then unevenly scaled.
I.e., to quote MacHall, "Hey, it doesn't look like OLD ass. It's CLASSIC ass." If you want that CLASSIC look you used to have in Windows 3.0 with a non-accelerated Trident graphics card and non-scalable fonts, you can't beat OOo for that.
Third, and most annoying, I'd like it to just fscking use whatever fonts are already installed on that machine. X and all normal X application can already use them. Nah, for OOo you have to explicitly install the fonts _again_ in OOo.
Once for each user, too. Whoppee.
Presumably because, for all the crack talk about how standards are great, OOo still does its very own font rendering. And if it at least did it better than Windows or X, I could see the point. But a hack that actually is _worse_ than using the standard libraries? Well, that's gotta count as cool.
Add other OOo "features" like the highly annoying nagging. E.g., daily I _have_ to edit one excel file: the hours I've worked in that day. Sometimes more than once a day. Every fscking time I have to click "yes" on not one, but _two_ nag dialogs.
You'd think it would be able to get the idea that _yes_, I do want to save it back as Excel. I know it's mind boggling that after loading a file, I'd want to save the changes back in the same file. Probably noone in the OOo team ever save their changes to the exact same file they loaded
And that _yes_, I still want to exit the program nevertheless.
At least, you know, give me a "don't ask this again" checkbox. It's not like it's that new and unheard of idea. But nah, some cretin probably felt a Holy Duty to nag the users to death to completely switch to OOo formats. Probably is even proud of that idiocy.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically IMHO OOo is a substitute for Office in much the same way as a bullet to the head is a cure for headache. I.e., not really, other than in the "well, technically speaking..." way.
It's getting sorta in the right direction, but it has a looong way to go.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
More power to you for using vi, but that's completely irrelevent.
MS Word isn't popular because it's useful to the individual user or the home user market. It's MS's cash cow because it's useful to the corporate universe.
VBA and Group Policy templates are the main things that make it worthwhile to corpAmerica.
Word's grammar checker actually pretty much likes my work. I've always tried to speak in active-voice sentences; they really do sound better to me.
But a faintly amusing story: a few years ago I wrote a book using Word, around 500 pages long (technical book, not fiction). Word liked it, except for my habit of using "which" where technically "that" is called for: "Press the button which is labelled xxx" should really be "Press the button that is labelled xxx", according to Strunk & White and a bunch of other style guides. Something about restrictive clauses.
Personally, I prefer "which" in those cases, so I ignored Word's suggestion. That is, until I got the book back from the professional copy editor, whose job is to know such things, and all of the restrictive clauses were corrected.
I know many of you will probably fault both Word and the copy editor for their grammar naziism, but I try to follow the rules as much as possible, if only to avoid distracting readers with potential grammar problems, which are not the point of the book. That's especially true in professional writing: I do the technically correct thing as long as it's not obviously worse than the natural thing.
If the natural thing and the technically correct thing conflict, I'll often rewrite sentences. For example, another change the copy editor had me make was to never start a sentence with a variable from the code, which would necessitate either mis-capitalizing a piece of code or distracting the reader with a sentence that doesn't begin with a capital letter.
Ultimately I've come to bury Word, not to praise it: if I had the book to write over again I swear to God I'd do it in emacs. I'd tried very hard to format the book as it would be published, only to have them do it all over again in professional typesetting software. Then I reviewed a manuscript by a famous design writer who'd written the whole thing in double-spaced Courier with hand-drawn pictures.
To conclude: Word blows! But I've seen far, far worse things than the grammar checker.
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.
I do a lot of writing -- manuscripts for publication, business documents, software documentation -- so I use many different tools for getting words onto paper.
LaTeX is very utilitarian, and the document sources (being pure text) are eminently portable. But for letters, short documents, and many tasks, I prefer a simple, clean WYSIWYG word processor.
Long ago, on a planet far, far away, I took a liking to the original versions of Microsoft Word -- even the non-graphical version that ran from the MS-DOS command line. It seemed cleaner and more logical than Word Perfect.
Up until a couple of years ago, I used Word under Windows -- but as time passed, I enjoyed using it less and less. Microsoft kept piling on feature after feature; the constant upgrade cycle was frustrating in the extreme. Until just recently, though, "free" and "open" software really didn't provide a good and reliable tool. Today, I have several "free" choices -- and that makes me quite happy.
I'm not fond of OpenOffice. OpenOffice is much too slow on start-up, and it feels almost exactly like Word, but "klunkier". And OpenOffice does not, as of this moment, compile for 64-bit AMD64 (yes, I know I can use 32-bit binaries, but I don't want to).
I like Abiword, though it has bitten me several times with crash bugs. I tend to use Abiword for MS Word documents.
For manuscripts, letters, and most word processing, I've settled on KWord. It starts quick, runs reliably (your mileage may vary), isn't overtly complex, and I have yet to try doing anything that KWord couldn't handle.
On the other hand, for spreadsheets, I've found Gnumeric to be more comfortable than KSpread or OpenOffice Calc.
For me, the appeal of "free" software is choice. I don't really care if other people prefer different solutions -- what I care about is that people can do their work comfortably and reliably. I think companies like Microsoft have forgotten this; they're so wrapped up in trying to force people into upgrades and service contracts, they've lost a sense of building products for people. While "free" software certainly has its problems, I at least get the sense that I'm working with software written by people, not marketroids.
All about me
OpenOffice still has problems with limited users and multiple users on XP. And AbiWord last I read requires Administrator access on Win2K to run.
Have these been fixed? And without any voodoo installation that each user has to perform MANUALLY in order to use the thing?
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
Quick course in copy edititing:
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First, I'm sure nobody wants to "kill" word. What would be nice is to simply reduce it's strangle-hold on the market. Second, the key to Microsoft's stranglehold is clearly .doc compatibility. OO has good .doc compatibility, but then who would send their boss a critical memo that got 2% of the formatting wrong?
The way to break .doc's strangle-hold is for corporations and government agencies to establish and adopt a completely open word-processing standard. Call it something like Universal Text Exchange (or whatever acronym isn't taken.) .ute needn't necessarily be "complete". But it could shoot for 95% of .doc's bell's and whistles. Next, corporations and government agencies would require that any used word-processor be capable of reading and writing .ute. Third, corporations would next require routine documents to saved in and distributed in .ute. Finally, work would immediately begin on .ut2
There are any number of existing text formats that could serve as a base for .ute. They just need to be opened up (if they aren't already) and (here's the tricky part) embraced and demanded by corporations and governments.
I hate the spell checker the most. It just says YOU ARE WRONG. Now I'm no expert but let's say I start righting something
"writing."
God is real unless declared integer
My biggest grievance about Word is the way it does styles. If you change a style by actually going into the style and changing it, Word will ask you if you actually want to update the text that's in that style. Um, of course! And trying to get text to actually conform to its style is another exercise in frustration. It means many extra keystrokes for every change of the style, which can be a lot when you're tweaking fine things like paragraph spacing, indents, etc. Styles in Word seem to be an afterthought, rather than the basis of things. Word's clearly designed for people who don't use styles; it pretends to be a good DTP package but isn't.
I was pleasantly surprised when I started using OO.o. Its styles are much more like a professional DTP package. When you change the style, the text of that style just changes. No annoying "Would you like to update the style, update the text or do nothing?" questions. And OO.o has the "Standard" format option, to forcibly make text conform to a style in a couple mouse-clicks. OO.o isn't perfect, but the way it does styles was enough to convert me.
After reading the prior messages on this thread, there is ont other reason I'd like to submit for moving away from MS Word: forced migrations.
Software companies primarily make money two ways: selling copies of software and, once they've saturated their target market, getting current customers to buy new versions or upgrades of the same software.
MS does the latter very well. They release new versions of MS Office every 18-24 months and bundle them with the new computers your organization buys, essentially "infecting" your organization with software that constantly reminds people that there are old, "obsolete" versions hanging around impeding your computing productivity. You either upgrade or buy an enterprise license and reimage PCs to deal with the document compatibility issues.
About 10 years ago I worked in an organization with over 2,000 people at our location. Our standard word processor was MS Word 2.0 (for Windows, not Mac). Then MS released Word 6.0. (They allegedly skipped 3.x through 5.x so the Windows version would have a higher number than the Mac version and achieve numerical parity with Wordperfect.)
Twelve people in the organization got Word 6.0 and started releasing their documents into the wild. Those of us with Word 2.0 complained that they needed to save in a format we could read. The Gang of Twelve responded that the rest of us were computer Luddites that needed to upgrade so they wouldn't have to change their default settings.
Within a year, we were all on Word 6.0, despite the fact that the new word processor provided no added value for people who were simply using the software as a wysiwyg typewriter.
This system of software migration essentially takes away an organization's ability to decide when its office automation software is obsolete and replaced it with significant pressure to upgrade existing software. Aside from the technical issues, I'd like to be able to decide for myself, and my organization, when my office software no longer meets my needs. Otherwise, we will continue to pay companies like MS for the privilege of upgrading our systems whenever they decide to release a new version through PC OEMs to improve their revenue stream.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
If Corel can find a single marketing executive who can sell his way out of a wet paper bag, with the help of Arnie, it would slaughter Word.
.sxw doc.
On the other hand...TEN YEARS AGO and more, I was reading reviews of word processors in PC Mag pointing out that 90% of all users used only 10% of the features, *ever*, and the 10% that used any of the other features only used them 10% of the time.
They're *supposed* to be word processors, not desktop publishers. How about *word* *processors*, with plugins for desktop publishing?
Alternatives:
- is there a version of Abiword 2 that does *not* break Apache (with aspell)? Abiword came up with a blank page for a new document in under 10 seconds on my 250MHz K-6
- is there *any* chance that OpenOffice.dog developers could be kidnapped, and forced to develop on something *other* than the machine that they play Doom3 on? I mean, for all practical puroses, I notice *zero* difference in how long it take me to bring OO.o up, and get to new text document, one my old 250MHz K-6, my laptop's 450, or my new-to-me 950MHz Athlon: about 30 sec. from file to to new text document. It takes that long, or longer, to open an existing 8k
Ain't my idea of competetive....
mark, ready to run WP 6 under Wine
I agree entirely.
A GUI is, in most cases today, operating at a higher level of abstraction than a CLI. As with all such distinctions, the higher level conceals some of the details, in exchange for providing a simplified picture. As with all such distinctions, for tasks that require an understanding of those details, you must revert to the lower level tools, or choose a different higher level tool. And as with all such distinctions, for most other things Joe User will be much more productive using a suitable higher level tool. The trick is to build a good higher level tool, or range of higher level tools, which minimise the information loss while maximising the usability, and which get in the way as little as possible when you really do need to go lower.
An example close to the subject at hand is LaTeX. For most people, it's faster to produce a nicely formatted document with LaTeX by using a standard document class than it would be by using plain TeX, or by writing their own LaTeX class. OTOH, customising those documents is a bitch, so if you need to follow a house publication style, you're probably going to want to dive into LaTeX's innards and produce a custom class. For a document that doesn't fit any of the classic LaTeX formats, you might be better off developing your own macro set in plain TeX in the first place. It works for Knuth... In any case, you could have produced a quick letter faster using MS Word and a template, but the kind of person who uses a typesetting system instead of a WP finds that today's WPs give up too much control by going to that high a level.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Thursday News. Clippy was burned in an accident. Investigators are looking for a pissed off dog with a grudge. A corporate spokesman reports that new desktop assistant has been auditioned. Crispy will be issued with SP3.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
If you put the time in, you can create fairly useful though basic 3 D plans in Word. There's more to it than meets the eye. Therein lies the problem though.
Jack of all trades master of none sells to the masses. If theres a better way to do something, the average PC user doesn't seem to know about it. Heck, loads of PC users have probably never heard of other word processing software or formats other than *.doc (e.g., WordPerfect or RTF).
How many damn fonts do we need??? Half of them are just plain unuseable in a professional environment. Doesn't stop some people using 12 different fonts in the same paragraph...
Some days I miss simple Amstrad and Cannon Word Processors. They get the job done and don't take 3 weeks to start up and close down.
Ever tried editing Word docs over dial-up.....
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Its just too easy to create 50 Mb Word docs when 1.5 Mb RTF would do...
Think what all that extra data is doing to networks..
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
The context menu doesn't show "paste as unformatted text", however, what's really needed is something like this: Shift+Ctrl+V = "paste as unformatted text"
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