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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 imagine if there was a "reveal hidden codes" feature in Word, it might be a lot easier to use
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.
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.)
....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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
I hope that utility also allows kill -9 clippy .
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
Something is wrong with Word, as currently installed on Dvorak's computer. He would rather describe the symptoms in detail than fix it by, say, reinstalling Word. Direct quote: "I suppose I should reinstall Word, but other people have told me they have the same problems. So why bother?" Is Word really any worse than any other Microsoft applications under Windows? Don't they all suffer from Registry rot?
Various versions of Word aren't 100% compatible. Dvorak and some editors tried to use the change-tracking markup, and "we had a huge mess." What was this mess? He didn't specify.
He doesn't like the warning when you save to an older .DOC file format.
HTML files created by Word are full of useless junk. (Absolutely true, of course.) He says something hand-waving-ish about if the HTML is bad, the XML is probably bad, so he's never tried the XML. (If I write about how I've never tried something, can I be a famous pundit too?)
When you save a plain text file, there are too many options in the dialog box.
Based on his conclusions, Dvorak (who is not a software developer himself) has figured out that the Word code base (which he has never seen) should be scrapped. Quote: "There are many more issues than these. It's clear the program is in decline, with too many patches and teams of coders passing in the night. It's about time that it's junked and we get something new. This code can no longer be fixed." How the heck is he qualified to judge whether the code can any longer be fixed?
As it happens, I agree that Word ought to get a major overhaul. Instead of pasting more layers of features onto Word, Microsoft ought to spend a bunch of man-years cleaning it up and making it faster. They won't, because that is not considered a profitable approach. (They actually tried something like this once. Eventually, they terminated that project, and just made the Windows code base the baseline for all future versions of Word. I didn't work on that project, but I heard that it was just taking too long and costing too much to clean it up, and people were worried about how long it might take to debug the final result.)
If Dvorak had wanted to do some actual research, and write an essay that would actually be of some value, he could have installed OpenOffice and tested its compatibility with his documents, and then written about that. This essay is awfully light on facts; I think he must have about 20 columns to write every month, and he just needed to bang something out to meet a deadline. (Note that I have no proof and did no research before making that statement. Just like Dvorak! But no one is paying me anything to write this, so I don't feel too bad.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yeah, it's a buzzword. Get over it. There is a theory that while people use only 10% of the features of applications such as Word, they each use a different 10%. This seems to be true because there aren't really a lot of examples of applications that lose features because they aren't used.
So in order to reach everybody - to give everybody what they want, you've got to have a very feature-rich application. When you don't have that what you'll get is people who are willing to make the switch because the missing features are either peripheral for them (I think I used the grammer checker twice - I'm much better at checking my own grammar than Word is), or that they never use (I never use the VBScript in Word, for instance), or they're willing to give it up because they're both honest and unwilling to pay $500 for a text editor.
A good compromise, I think, is to do those features that are easy to program after you build an initial editor - things like word counts, reading level checks (there are canned algorithms for this), spell checking, output writers, etc.
I would not include a syntax checker on this list. That means classifying every word in our language based upon part of speech and doing some context-based searches to figure out ambiguous words.
If you actually stick with basic functions (meaning functions that are less than 500 lines of code long), I think you'll be quite happy with OO.org. I am.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Most companies are already archiving those as Portable Document Format (pdf) files. This preserves print format much better than Word ever did. IBM would be happy to show you how and yes, you can search the text.
If your company was dumb enough to archive things in Word format and is not looking for reliable methods to get the information out, you might as well throw the things away. New Word itself has a hard time opening older Word documents, especially "complicated" ones with OLE from visio and other programs that your company might not have anymore.
Hopefully, people will learn and use reasonable text editors and type setters for future work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I 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
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)
If you want to know how badly bloated Word is, check out this unbelievable screen shot.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
... 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.
But why use WORD to create HTML documents? That's what notepad is for.
No, that's what vi is for.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
I didn't agree with everything he said either, but I can relate to the innumerable bugs in every version of Word that I've used (since it went GUI). I've always been surprised that people use it so much. I used it a lot during college. But over the past 10 years since, I've tried using the latest Word for various things probably 3 or 4 times, and each time I've encountered different show-stopping bugs that made me turn elsewhere (usually latex). This happens after about an hour of using it, and I would typically search the net for help and learn that it's a "well-known" bug, sorry, causing even textbook examples to fail. So I get the impression that Microsoft does less than 1 man-hour of quality-control on every version of Word they release. That's a little unfair to say, but only a little.
So I feel I can relate to Dvorak here. I'm sure that one can deal with Word if they make a career out of it after thoroughly digesting some book like O'Reilly's "Word 97 Annoyances", and learning all the work-arounds. But for the (effectively) novice user like me who will use another program after initial frustrations get too high, Word is just way too buggy to use.
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
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!
After: You're fucking wonderfully.
skribe
Blog
... 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
Maybe Slashdot could include this feature for people who don't use the OL tag to make ordered lists. ;-)
irb(main):001:0>
It sounds like he didn't know how to install Word properly.
Think about what you just said.
That alone, is quite a damning indictment of the product.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
killing MS Word makes sense, killing Clippy is murder!!
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.
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
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"
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?
OpenOffice doesn't hold a candle
Why on earth would anybody design a word processor to hold candles?
Microsoft already implemented every other feature imaginable, so that's all they had left.
"... 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
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.
There is, it's called pskill which is a part of the great pstools package.
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.
Why on earth would anybody design a word processor to hold candles?
So you can read your work at night.
Duh.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
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
As an aside to this comic relief, if you haven't discovered LaTeX, and you write even a fair amount of complex documents, it is worth checking out. I got hooked 4 or 5 years ago and haven't looked back.
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
Mnyesss, I see... I suggest you read Neal Stephenson's excellent essay In the Beginning Was The Command Line and don't express another opinion on the CLI until you do - but this is merely a suggestion.
Your GUI is a subtle lie about what your system is truly up to. Even the author of TFA expresses a distrust about what the dialogs presented him are hiding:
If I am presented with a choice of spending a few minutes learning a command syntax and being in control of my system or an eternity being presented with deceptive (yes, deceptive - what's the last Windows dialog you saw which told you exactly what was happening?), frustrating dialogs I think you'll find me at the bash shell.
It looks like you're writing a death threat!
Would you like to:
- chrish
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.
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.