20 Years of MS Word and Why It Should Die a Swift Death

Ars writer Jeremy Reimer takes a stroll down memory lane, recalling over 20 years of (almost) constant Microsoft Word use and why, with current and emerging tech trends, he thinks his relationship with the program may be at an end. "So why don't I need Word any more? To figure this out, I tried to go back to basics and think about what Word was originally designed to do. In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out. As a student I needed to print out essays so I could hand them to my instructor. In the office I needed to print out reports so that I could hand them to my supervisor. The end goal was always the same: I printed out something to give to someone more important than me, who would evaluate it and, if I was lucky, give it back to me at some indeterminate time in the future. One didn't question this; it was just the way the world worked. Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much. Maybe it was the rise of office networking. Maybe it was when the printer companies kept raising the price of ink to ridiculous levels. Maybe it was when we realized we couldn't print out the whole Internet. Despite the fact that fewer things were being printed, we kept on using Word to create our documents."

Comments

PDFs?

[Overunderrated]

With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.

Re:PDFs?

[langelgjm]

I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking. If I had been in a different field, I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.

The article does have a point about not printing things out as much anymore (my thesis was actually submitted electronically, the only time I printed it out was to check for errors by hand, and to give personal copies to people). But pages are for more than print-outs. JSTOR made a decision to keep their journal articles in page format, because that's what people are used to and like. Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts. I'm not saying Word is good at typography, but even a mediocre-looking Word document is better looking than someone's crappy blog font.

Re:PDFs?

[MrHanky]

No. Print media, where you need PDFs and not necessarily Word, is alive and well. The Kindle is evil, remember? Printing documents for use at school or at the office is, however, replaced by email.

Re:PDFs?

[DaveGod]

I've never seen a PDF used other than with the intent of creating the equivalent of a printed document that is stored electronically. That is, it can be passed onto others confident in the knowledge that it can be viewed exactly (in all ways that matter) as it was sent, and that it is unlikely to be modified along the way (not that it can't be, but it takes a little effort).

Word documents are printed and mailed to clients or received in the mail from clients. PDF's go by email.

Mind you, all the PDF's were made as a Word document and converted...

Re:PDFs?

[TroyHaskin]

I was thinking the opposite. Since a Word Documents (.doc or .docx) require, by definition, Word to view on a computer, I would assume more people would publish/save to/print to PDFs since the format is highly portable with many free readers.

That is if the intent of the document is to be viewed. If it is to be edited amongst a group, feel free to choose in the group the editor/creator of choice. Word, Abiword, Lotus Symphony, OO Writer, LaTeX, Google Docs (where I mainly created in HTML and CSS when I do) ... There are a ton of document creators out there; no reason to hate on just one because everyone uses it (or just doesn't know about others).

Re:PDFs?

[bostonkarl]

No, his arguement is flawed because Word is part of an office suite. Business folks need email clients, spreadsheet apps, and presentation software. Word is integratal to the Office suite, and therefore will be around for a long time. Not a fan of MSOffice, but it is ubiquitous in the business world.

Re:PDFs?

[Ephemeriis]

With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.

I find myself working with PDFs more often than Word documents.

I seldom have to print anything out these days... But I'm constantly sending stuff to other people. People who might not have the same version of Word that I do, or might not have Word installed at all. People who might be working on a Mac or some kind of *nix box. People I don't necessarily trust with an easily edited document.

So, I turn everything into PDFs and send it out that way. Pretty much anyone on any platform can read a PDF, and there's at least a token attempt to make it read-only.

Re:PDFs?

[SBrach]

I agree that PDFs are more portable but Microsoft does offer free Office document readers. FYI.

Re:PDFs?

[Fizzol]

PDF is only portable for larger screen devices, like desktops and laptops. It's a nightmare for ebooks and smaller devices. As for Word, I'm still plugging along with my ancient copy of Word 2000. It still works, even under Vista 64. I see no reason to change an old work horse at this point.

Re:PDFs?

[BrokenHalo]

I've never really made a serious attempt to get the hang of LaTex, though I recognise that this might be the best way to do serious typesetting, but OpenOffice is now pretty good for most general purposes, even scientific writing (at least for my area, biotech). I have a pirated version of MSWord on my MacBook which is mostly unused since I actually prefer OpenOffice. And most of my preferred journals readily accept OpenOffice formats now, so there is no longer the "closed-shop" MS-Word-only thing there used to be.

Incidentally, I might add that both MS Word and OpenOffice Writer are still poor shadows of what WordPerfect used to be in terms of its power, even for serious publishing. My first introduction to this was on Data General "mainframe" machines, but it lost nothing in the port to DOS. I know there have been releases subsequent to version 5.1, but they really just don't cut it.

Re:PDFs?

[xaxa]

Pages might be what you're used to and like, but that's becoming less and less the case.

I use Word about once a week, generally to fill in some template that a manager has produced for some official process. These are then printed out, and probably recycled within a week.

I've noticed my colleagues seem to spend as long trying to fix the formatting on these templates as they do filling in the empty boxes. Some simple HTML would be perfect here: they're only internal documents, millimetre-precision and perfect pagination isn't necessary (and Word doesn't give it anyway).

Some system is still needed for producing external stuff (whatever the people with Macs use in the media/marketing/publishing department, and something like Word for letters). Some scientists are probably using some collaborative functions of Word, but I doubt they care about the formatting until the very end of the work.

Re:PDFs?

[evilkasper]

Here's why we use Word; it comes bundled with Outlook. The people that pay us like Outlook; its simpler to have them use the whole Office suite than just part of it. It's not going anywhere.

Re:PDFs?

[techno-vampire]

Incidentally, I might add that both MS Word and OpenOffice Writer are still poor shadows of what WordPerfect used to be in terms of its power, even for serious publishing.

How true. Back in the days of WP 5.1, it was the standard word processing program for the legal industry. And, I might add, you never had to fumble with a document trying to figure out what formatting was being applied where. All you needed was to go into Reveal Codes mode, and you could look at the lower half of the screen and see for yourself exactly where the codes were.

Re:PDFs?

[marklark]

My iPhone displays PDFs very nicely. :^)

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts.

It's not just that they look better, either. Formatting rules have often been contrived for the purpose of conveying metadata and making things easier to read. Sure, you can do some simple formatting even in plain-text, including effective use of whitespace and non-letter characters (such as using a line of dashes as a dividing line in text).

But insofar as this debate comes down to whether formatting is important, I think it should be remembered the formatting sometimes carries important information. Just as a simple example, making headings larger and/or bold make it easier to pick them out and deliniate different subjects in a piece of writing. But also page breaks, changes in fonts, and colors can be used to give cues to the reader about context and organization that may be harder to include in plain-text.

Re:PDFs?

[tepples]

Printing documents for use at school or at the office is, however, replaced by email.

Since when do teachers at your high school accept homework by e-mail?

Re:PDFs?

[Archangel Michael]

Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts. I'm not saying Word is good at typography, but even a mediocre-looking Word document is better looking than someone's crappy blog font.

Yes and no.

When one considers many (most??) blogs are nothing more copy/pasted word documents that hold all the bloat of MS Word, it is no wonder it ends up looking crappy on the web.

I've seen nicely laid out Blogs and Webpages (Wikis) and I've seen horribly formatted WORD documents. Formatting for the media is key to good looking media.

What people need is a nice two week course on typography and page layout design, where they learn about things like "fonts" and "styles" and so forth.

But most people don't care about such things, having grown up on MySpace and spell check,not caring about differences between there, their, and they're and "the air" (yes, I've seen that one).

The point being, one has to know the media to which they are publishing, and know how to properly format things to look good in it. And good luck with that!

Re:PDFs?

[Richard Steiner]

My Nokia 770 displays PDF documents rather nicely, thank you. :-)

Re:PDFs?

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

So does my much cheaper enV Touch.

My only problem is I have to deal w/ Verizon's crap customer service.

I'd go to AT&T or T-Mobile, but they don't have great network service where I live.

Effed if you do, Effed if you don't....

Re:PDFs?

[jridley]

Yes, but it's kind of silly to distribute fixed documents in an editable format. If I am distributing something that I want to be left alone as is, I distribute it as a PDF. I only distribute DOC if I expect others to modify it.

Also, I have pretty good confidence that a PDF document will render pretty much the same in 10 years as it does today. I do NOT have that level of confidence in an MS Word document; history has shown that a document from an old version of Word, imported into a newer one, might render very differently than the author intended.

Re:PDFs?

[Allicorn]

If you operate a business in the UK you might well see other examples of PDF use. The types of use that Adobe obviously wants to drive.

A whole variety of tax submissions are now provided as PDFs that start out as complex, interactive forms with a variety of UI widgets, listviews, pop-up help, self-calculating fields and such and - when submitted back to the tax overlords (from within Acrobat Reader, without any browser involved) - become cryptographically sealed, non-editable, printable records of the data collected.

It's weird to see PDF doing this kind of thing when my historic view of the format was very much as yours "it makes for reliable printing". And although I think I'dve preferred if PDF had stayed the (relatively) simple, bloat-free, built-for-printing format that once it was - begrudgingly - I must admit it's kinda cool to see these funky new features in action.

Re:PDFs?

[MrHanky]

No, they don't use email, as they have replaced it with a web based collaboration tool. At the university, I used email.

Re:PDFs?

[InlawBiker]

It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software. It really always has been. The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers. I also find the new "ribbon" to be a huge improvement over the nested tree navigation of the old Word. Microsoft found an innovative way to navigate and it works.

At home I have and use Open Office and it's just fine for simple documents and spreadsheets. There is no need to spend the money for Office for simple tasks with OO.O works fine.

The thing to complain about Word is the exclusion of other formats to maintain their monopoly (this is being fixed) and their attempt to force their convoluted XML format on the world over all other formats.

Re:PDFs?

[fermion]

Absolutely not. PDFs are the format of the internet. Anything that has to look the same no matter the platform, no matter the printer, is going to be a PDF. The PDF standard is specific and can be easily implemented. Old PDF files are going to be materially the same as new.

One other advantage of the PDF is it cannot be easily edits. When a PDF is sent out, there is some assurance that it be the same to all recipients, not suspetible to trivial man in the middle attacks.

The thing about word processors is they are an extension of the typewriter. Many of the assumptions derive from the typewriter, an invention which is at least 100 years old, with some page layout and publishing features hacked in. MS Word is a good program, but mostly for writing memos and collaborating on short reports, as was the typewriter. As email takes over, we will see that things like MS Word are mostly useful for short reports that need a high level of collaboration. Long reports are still better done in OO.org or LaTex. Other writing is going to be done in thing like Pages that, for better or worse, understands tat presentation is often more important than content, and understands that the computer can do presentation in ways the typewriter could not.

In any case, any program that cannot directly generate a PDF and HTML file is not 21 century ready.

Re:PDFs?

[RichardJenkins]

Exactly - using Word to transfer files around increases lock-in, and certainly doesn't herald a swift death. Most businesses use word, so most of your colleagues use word, and expect you to be able to receive, edit and send back word documents that work flawlessly. You can't stop using Word until everyone else stops using it - which won't happen until alternatives work really well with the doc/ooxml formats - which Microsoft will make sure doesn't happen. It's pretty obvious in retrospect - using proprietary formats to transfer informatino locks you in to a platform. If we were still printing everything, Word wouldn't be ubiquitous.

Re:PDFs?

[ivan256]

Excellent software?

It's bloated, underperforming, and not significantly more featured than things that were on the market a decade ago. The new "ribbon" interface is the re-implementation of WordStar 3 for DOS keyboard shortcuts, except with the mouse and icons instead of function keys and a cardboard overlay. They have a steep "learning" curve until you find out where everything you need is hidden, and they make the interface ridiculously un-intuitive for anybody who hasn't been using a Word-like word processor for the last 10 years. It also forces you onto an unending upgrade treadmill where you pay again for the next version even if you don't care about the new features simply so that you can continue to interoperate with others.

To top it off, it's really expensive.

Instead of "excellent", I think a better word would be "nightmareish", or "wretched".

Re:PDFs?

[gEvil (beta)]

It's weird to see PDF doing this kind of thing when my historic view of the format was very much as yours "it makes for reliable printing". And although I think I'dve preferred if PDF had stayed the (relatively) simple, bloat-free, built-for-printing format that once it was - begrudgingly - I must admit it's kinda cool to see these funky new features in action.

That was the original purpose for PDF. But Adobe quickly realized they could do a whole lot more with it. I visited the Adobe offices in 2001 or 2002 and by that time, they had moved themselves to the mythical "paperless office." Most everything was done as electronic documents. In the corners of each room were scan stations where the few papers they dealt with could be scanned in, PDF'd, then archived, or emailed/faxed off, or turned into fillable forms, etc. Of course, they still had a printer here and there for the few things that they did need to print out, but it was pretty amazing to see what they had managed to do with their own technology. Now, how well it all worked, of course, is another matter that's best left answered by someone who's actually worked there and used it. But as someone visiting the offices and getting a quick tour, I thought it was pretty impressive.

Re:PDFs?

[peachboy]

... People who might be working on a Mac or some kind of *nix box. ...

MS Office is available for Mac as well, and has been for nearly a decade. It's even available at the Apple Store when you buy a Mac. The *nix install base is really the compatibility problem, although (as mentioned several times above) OpenOffice has rendered that nearly non-existent.

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

That is if the intent of the document is to be viewed. If it is to be edited amongst a group, feel free to choose in the group the editor/creator of choice.

Bingo. PDFs are a pain to edit. I'm not fully sure why this is, but I've heard it's at least partly because PDFs treat text as line-based rather than paragraph-based or rectangle-based objects. Word wrap on an already laid out document becomes a nightmare: You have to figure out some way to differentiate between soft- and hard-line breaks.

Re:PDFs?

[gEvil (beta)]

Yes, but it's kind of silly to distribute fixed documents in an editable format. If I am distributing something that I want to be left alone as is, I distribute it as a PDF. I only distribute DOC if I expect others to modify it.

And even then, it might be better to have them mark it up using the comments feature of Acrobat Pro (assuming your office has it). I much prefer seeing a pop-up bubble with comments, or a caret with some edits than multi-colored strings of crossed out lines and text.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still talk to some people who attend the high school I graduated from, and I hear that a lot of teachers now require students to submit their papers at midnight via email.

Re:PDFs?

[broeman]

My Sony PRS-505 ebook also displays PDF files nicely (though, it can't remove large margins, if used). It doesn't read Word files at all though (like any books were released in the format anyways).

Re:PDFs?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers.

Are you serious? I believe MS Word has its uses, and though I'm ambivalent about the new design, I can understand how some might find it useful. The point is, I'm not a Word hater at all. I've used it for many years, and I still do at times.

But "a bargain" when other free office suites, text editors, and numerous word processors are available? I'm also just not sure what "sophisticated features" it has that a "professional writer" needs. If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX). If you have need for footnotes, citations, cross references, etc., I would say that (a) Word's bibliographic support is pretty bad by itself, though when used with other software and plugins, it becomes useful, and (b) the support for cross references, etc. is minimal compared to the options given in some other software. If you collaborate, you need to track changes, but any good word processor does that today. What else does someone just producing text need?

If, by "professional writer" you actually mean "book designer" or something similar who is actually concerned with formatting the text, then Word's typography and design choices are just awful compared to the output of professional software (InDesign and Quark, which are admittedly expensive, or the free LaTeX). And if you're an independent writer who has to both produce text and format it, and you need a GUI, free programs like LyX and Kile can easily provide almost all the features of Word.

What "sophisticated features" do "professional writers" need that Word has, but other software (and even free software) doesn't? I don't think Word is bad, but I just don't understand the claim that nothing else "comes close."

Re:PDFs?

[afidel]

Ha! I keep hearing that printing is dying yet my experience is that all this technology has just increased the volume of printing people do. Today we have 65 page per minute printers so people think nothing of firing off 20 copies of a powerpoint slide deck to hand out at the meeting (where they will of course have the same slides up on the projector). For 500 people at our corporate office we print ~750,000 pages per month, which while admittedly is very high, is not so far off from the typical office I have supported.

Re:PDFs?

[Vu1turEMaN]

Agreed. And to the vast majority of Office 2003 users out there, this is seemingly anti-news.

People trying to buy Office 2007 right now realize just exactly how rediculous it is, and are using open office more.

Re:PDFs?

[wjousts]

It also forces you onto an unending upgrade treadmill where you pay again for the next version even if you don't care about the new features simply so that you can continue to interoperate with others.

Now that is FUD, plain and simple. With their latest change in file formats (to docx), Microsoft even put out free to download converters that worked at least back to Word XP (which was what we were stuck with at work at the time). One of MS' biggest problems has been people not willing to upgrade. Office 2007's biggest competitor is Office 2003.

Re:PDFs?

[ThousandStars]

I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking.

The other thing is that Word does a lot of stuff that other word processors I've used (Pages, Nisus Writer, Mellel) don't, or don't do quite as well, or whatever: toggling between page layout/continuous text, track changes/markup, and so forth. The latter is a particular problem for me because other people often have to read my work, and everyone I know uses Word. I don't have to convert files back and forth.

Word's styles still leave much to be desired--I can't get a style that will just say "Chapter 7: Tests" without an overly long space between 7: and Tests, but it's good enough.

Re:PDFs?

[wjousts]

We're stuck with Lotus Notes (and what a nightmare that POS is), and we still use Word. Outlook isn't the reason for Word's popularity.

I dream of the day we switch to Outlook!

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Free PDF Xchange Viewer will allow you to add comments and annotations to PDF's:

http://www.docu-track.com/home/prod_user/PDF-XChange_Tools/pdfx_viewer

Re:PDFs?

[eldepeche]

Uh, have you ever seen Wikipedia? It's pretty well formatted. No one is talking about going from Word to Notepad.

Re:PDFs?

[kaini]

"Office 2007's biggest competitor is Office 2003." - this will hold true for any piece of software that has the market sewn up to the extent that office has.

Re:PDFs?

[EvanED]

A whole variety of tax submissions are now provided as PDFs that start out as complex, interactive forms with a variety of UI widgets, listviews, pop-up help, self-calculating fields and such and - when submitted back to the tax overlords (from within Acrobat Reader, without any browser involved) - become cryptographically sealed, non-editable, printable records of the data collected.

Wisconsin's state income taxes were like this too. I had to upgrade Acrobat Reader to be able to file my taxes that way. (The alternatives were paper or pay TurboTax $10 or something.)

Re:PDFs?

[TheRaven64]

You don't need Acrobat Pro to add comments. I'm fairly sure that Reader can add them if the creater enabled commenting when creating the document and Apple's Preview.app can add them on anything.

Re:PDFs?

[Eternauta3k]

Since when do teachers at your high school accept homework by e-mail?

Since the year before last, although not all of them do.

Re:PDFs?

[MTTECHYBOY]

Until WordPerfect 6 came out - totally flushed the application - wasn't worth spit after that. WP 5.1 was it's high point.It would have been fine if Novell hadn't screwed up a very nice application

Re:PDFs?

[gEvil (beta)]

Even better then. Any time I've ever had to deal with marked-up/commented PDFs everyone involved already had Acrobat Pro, so I didn't realize Reader could handle it.

Re:PDFs?

[mehemiah]

If you have a MacBook, why dont you just use TextEdit. Its pritty neat and opens both ODT and DOC documents

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, we just print them out, highlight/draw on them, scan them into pdfs then resend...

Re:PDFs?

[elrous0]

I've used both Word and InDesign, and most of the time I still use Word for most simple and mid-range documents. I tried OpenOffice once before (an older version, not sure how much has changed since), but it couldn't even do some relatively simple stuff at the time (didn't recognize transparent layers in graphics, no option for setting a transparent color in a graphic, etc.). OpenOffice is indeed fine for most "mom & pop" users. But it lacks a lot of even the relatively simple features of Word. Word may not be useful for the high end stuff (that's what InDesign is for), but it's much more powerful for the lower level and mid-range stuff than OpenOffice. As for the expense, you can buy Office with the full versions of Word and Powerpoint for $80. So the price is a pretty nominal consideration now.

Re:PDFs?

[Ephemeriis]

... People who might be working on a Mac or some kind of *nix box. ...

MS Office is available for Mac as well, and has been for nearly a decade. It's even available at the Apple Store when you buy a Mac. The *nix install base is really the compatibility problem, although (as mentioned several times above) OpenOffice has rendered that nearly non-existent.

I am aware of that. However, that doesn't address the difficulties I outlined originally:

People who might not have the same version of Word that I do, or might not have Word installed at all. People who might be working on a Mac or some kind of *nix box. People I don't necessarily trust with an easily edited document.

If someone is running a different version of Word than I am I'll either need to install a compatibility pack or save it in a compatible format.

If they don't have Word installed at all then I'm going to have to save it in something they can read.

If I don't want them to make changes to my document, I'll need to add a password at the very least, or convert it to a PDF anyway (depending on what software they actually have installed and whether it can deal with Word's password protection).

Sure, there's a version of Word available for the Mac... But that doesn't help me if they've got a different version or if they don't have it installed at all.

Yup, Open Office generally opens Word documents just fine. And of all the folks who can probably deal with getting a format they can't currently read, *nix users are probably the most likely to be able to fix that problem.

But a PDF is pretty much guaranteed to work on just about any machine. Doesn't matter if it's an old Windows 98 machine with Adobe Reader 5.0 on it or a shiny new Mac Pro with Acrobat Standard. Doesn't matter if you've got Sumatra or GhostScript or FoxIt or Adobe or what. PDFs, generally speaking, just work.

Re:PDFs?

[gobbo]

I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking.

I did too, just like you! It was great for indexing, working with chapters, footnotes, and ToC, even drop caps. Styles were a lifesaver.

Here's the kicker: I did all that on a 512K RAM original Mac, with two floppy drives and no HD, with MS Word v.3.0. It booted in 17 seconds, and starting Word took 10 seconds. It didn't crash once in 10 years of regular usage.

Now I use Word 2008 [when I must]. It takes just as long to start on a computer thousands of times faster/bigger, and I don't use as many features (OS X has nicer spellcheck, for instance). The application is less stable than its 1989 version. I have to struggle with its settings, like activating hyperlinks (keeps losing the autocorrect setting to turn that shit off), or selecting text I don't want. About the only feature enhancement I actually use is commenting, the rest is just foofaraw.

Kill it now!

Re:PDFs?

[TheRaven64]

You may think you're joking, but that's actually how my first book was copyedited. The publisher printed it out and posted it to the copyeditor, who annotated it by hand and posted it back. The publisher then scanned in the copies and uploaded them for me. PDF annotations are nice, but they don't easily support copyediting marks (yet).

Re:PDFs?

[sdpuppy]

No, they don't use email, as they have replaced it with a web based collaboration tool. At the university, I used email.

Oh no - I always used the excuse that "my dog ate my router".

Now it'll be "My dog ate my web based collaboration tool" ?

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed... this guy is putting together a straw man

Re:PDFs?

[Doctor Faustus]

they make the interface ridiculously un-intuitive for anybody who hasn't been using a Word-like word processor for the last 10 years.
Even if you have been using Word for the last ten years, it's still unintuitive. The big problem I have with Word is that it still works the same way as WordPerfect, with begin and end tags to trigger formatting, but it doesn't let you see them.

The ribbon is a step back, too (and I've been using it for two years now), but I never really cared that I couldn't find the newer features. I don't think I actually use anything that wasn't in Word 95. Beyond that, I only care about programmability, and that's been pretty stagnant.

Re:PDFs?

[Carbaholic]

Back in the days of WP 5.1, it was the standard word processing program for the legal industry.

I interned at a law office 4 or 5 years ago and they still used WP 5.1.

I did not think it was better.

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

To mark up PDFs, I've used Jarnal. I'll readily admit, however, that it's clunky and not very user-friendly.

If you want to use it, there are 2 things I'd point out:

(1) first, Format - Paper and Background, change the paper from the default "lined" to "plain"
(2) to annotate a PDF, you have to File - Open Background then import the PDF as a background image

As I said, fairly non-user-friendly, but it does get the job done after that.

To get back to a PDF after you've annotated, you have to File - Export - Export to PDF, but that's fairly intuitive I thought (similar to the usual Print to PDF that I'm used to from other applications).

Re:PDFs?

[m.ducharme]

Wordperfect is by no means dead, btw. Corel has been keeping it alive, and so far both law offices I've worked for us Wordperfect for document creation over Word.

Re:PDFs?

[hughk]

Actually, there is the PDF/A format (sort of 1.4 without the actionscript and multimedia) which is a recognised archive format. If you store something in PDF/A, forget about ten years, you would probably still be able to resurrect the document in a century. The format is well documented,and there is at least one open renderer in addition to Adobe's own stuff (actually several).

For formal archival purposes, Word is considered unacceptable not just because of the obscure nature of the documentation (although some exists now), but because documents may contain links to external objects and presentation may depend upon all manner of environmental considerations.

Re:PDFs?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Nah, PDFs are portable and open: I can keep a 300 page manual in a dir and expect to open it with any computer at my disposal. Word docs are frequently incompatible from one version to the next.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

PDFs also have a GREAT bookmarking system which makes for amazing chapter-based navigation; something Microsoft Word documents can do but often neglect to. Since every PDF I have ever made was made in parts in a program like InDesign and then stitched together in Adobe Acrobat into one PDF, these bookmarks are already added in and I only have to change the names on them for the bookmarks to be perfectly functional to anybody reading my PDFs!

Re:PDFs?

[FishWithAHammer]

Word 2007's bibliographic stuff is a lot better than Word 2003's, IMO.

I personally wouldn't argue that it's better on features, but better on presentation. OpenOffice has always felt slow-ish and very clunky. I paid for the Home version of Office 2007, and it's worth it to me just for the new interface and the more snappy feel than OpenOffice.

Re:PDFs?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Silly! My dog slobbered on my router and it shorted out.

Re:PDFs?

[hcdejong]

Here we go with the rose-colored WP glasses again. The reason people liked WP is that WP and Word have failure modes that can be solved in WP using Reveal Codes and manually futzing with the code tags.
Guess what? A real editor doesn't have these failure modes, which makes the Reveal Codes feature obsolete. In 12 years of using FrameMaker to within an inch of its life, I've never had a failure mode that could be solved by manual tag editing. It Just Works like it's supposed to.

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

Interesting. I had an instructor in college who used WordPerfect and he swore by its table-creating abilities vs. MS Word's. I've never used it, so I really wouldn't know.

He's the only person I've ever met who actually used WordPerfect, though. Everyone else used Word.

Re:PDFs?

[mjpaci]

One other advantage of the PDF is it cannot be easily edits.

Kind of like Slashdot comments?

Re:PDFs?

[Grishnakh]

Maybe, but Word does not have Reveal Codes, and definitely doesn't "just work". It's constantly getting formatting screwed up, and it's a PITA to figure out how to fix it.

Good for you that FM works better, but that's not an option for most people, who are stuck using Word because that's what every company has standardized on. (It doesn't help that FM licenses aren't cheap.)

Re:PDFs?

[MrHanky]

Probably "my dog surfed doggie porn sites and now all my homework files got fleas".

Re:PDFs?

[Blakey Rat]

What "sophisticated features" do "professional writers" need that Word has, but other software (and even free software) doesn't? I don't think Word is bad, but I just don't understand the claim that nothing else "comes close."

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried the newest version of OpenOffice; some of these features might exist now.)

Word has Normal View (renamed to Draft View in 2007) that lets you focus just on the text and ignore all distractions from it. Word has a split-able scrollbar, so you can examine (and edit) two parts of your document at the same time. Oh and Word's Outline tool is far above-and-beyond anything OpenOffice offers. And Word has always had better performance than OpenOffice, which is weird since it has more features.

It's not some huge breathtaking night-and-day difference, but Word is the superior product.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you use Word and not Lotus Symphony? Wow, you're in luck!

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Actually formating is an area where LaTex really outdoes MS Words sad implementation of a very important idea. However, more on topic, in the article consistent (and sane) formating was presented as a reason to move away from MS Word and to a Wiki based document system. To say "properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts", is like saying, "properly formatted pages look better than MS Word or plain text", i.e., it doesn't make sense. HTML is a markup language. The markup is specifically for format. No one is arguing against formating documents. Its about how to achieve a workable document system that avoids MS Word's inherent pitfalls.

Re:PDFs?

[thetoadwarrior]

If you try to work with Word across multiple versions of the software and or with multiple printers, you quickly find it's shit.

MS has full access to their own format and full access over coding the software to read it and they still cock it up.

That said, Word works enough as far as most people are concerned and it's a decent price and everyone uses Windows so Office, a reasonable bit of software, gets pushed on them. That's why they use it.

Re:PDFs?

[drpentode]

PDFs have their place...particularly distribution of complicated forms and contracts. Print a PDF of a contract, sign it with a real signature (e-sigs not accepted everywhere), re-scan and send. With today's multi-function scanners and printers, this is actually faster than faxing. Better yet, my insurance agent has a special stylus for electronically signing documents. The end result is a PDF that gets sent to the main office to be filed with all the other paperwork. Sometimes, a real sheet of paper is still a requirement.

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

In regard to MS Word formats, the Physics department I used to work at installed OpenOffice for the single purpose of opening older MS Word document formats. OpenOffice did a better job than the current version of Word at the time for dealing with cases that made MS Word choked.

However, the poster's real point was that if you are a writer, you need a text editor with features that support writing. Writers deal with words. If you are a publication designer (of pamphlets or magazines or even books), then you need a whole different sort of application. His point was that MS Office is unnecessary overkill for a writer, introducing problems without solving any, and yet also not sufficiently powerful for a publication designer. A writer would do better using LyX :

LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).

LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface. This results in world-class support for creation of mathematical content (via a fully integrated equation editor) and structured documents like academic articles, theses, and books. In addition, staples of scientific authoring such as reference list and index creation come standard. But you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. A broad array of ready, well-designed document layouts are built in.

LyX is for people who want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, âoefinger paintingâ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output â" or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced â" looks like nothing else.

MS Word is a Jack-of-all-Trades that does everything poorly. You can bend over backwards to work with it, and if you don't know anything else you'll feel like a superuser. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

Re:PDFs?

[Ma�djeurtam]

"Reveal codes"... Blast from a better past!

When will MS let users reveal code in Word? I know they tell us it is not possible due to their oh-so-amazing engine, but know what? I don't believe that. I've lost HOURS reformating documents by trial and error, because invisible bolds, italics, fonts change or other absurdities got in the way.

When I was 14, when such a problem occured, "reveal codes" would always help me clean documents in a matter of seconds. Is there a sensible Word Processing application, today, that has this feature?

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

One other advantage of the PDF is it cannot be easily edited.

Fixed that for him.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

But... PDFs are a great way to send someone a Word document without having to worry about how it will display on their version of Word!

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the "upgrade treadmill" is FUD, though MS' converter is far from perfect. So, I only really have a sample size of 1, but I had an Excel file that was made in Office 2007 that would not open in Office XP, even with the xlsx to xls conversion. However, I tried to open the same file in OpenOffice Calc, and it worked beautifully.

So, yeah, you don't really need to stay on the upgrade cycle. OO.O can read the new Office files just fine. Not perfectly, but you may have as good a chance with it as you would with MS' converter.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software. It really always has been. The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers. I also find the new "ribbon" to be a huge improvement over the nested tree navigation of the old Word. Microsoft found an innovative way to navigate and it works.

LOL! That was pretty good, you had me going there for a minute. :)

Re:PDFs?

[techno-vampire]

I did not think it was better.

That's because you were comparing it to programs that'd had the benefit of 20 more years of development. Compared to other programs of the same era it was great.

Re:PDFs?

[antdude]

Yep, I still use Office 2000 with their converters (not for 9x though). It works fine.

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

It could be I'm not understanding you, but I've always found PDFs to be far easier to edit and format (with the right tools) than MS Word documents. I guess having the right tools really matters. Then again, MS Word editing without a Word compatible editor would likewise be "a pain to edit".

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

And these tools managed to perform word wrap when you edited already-laid-out PDFs?

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Available and installed are two different things, though. I'm pretty sure that PDF readers have far, far more market penetration that MS Office. Its hard to beat free. Sometimes when you especially care about the visual presentation, you want the document to look the same everywhere. Its hard to beat PDF.

Re:PDFs?

[jihiggs]

I feel for you man, I supported lotus notes email and various databases for several years, just recently we switched to outlook. it was not too fondly refered to as blotus chokes

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

The "Format Painter" can be used to "paint" over weird formatting issues, starting from somewhere the formatting is "correct". The weirdness will be erased and everything in the selection will be formatted to match wherever you started from.

Also, copying to Notepad and pasting back can help (but it will kill those curly quotes, em-dashes, etc., so be careful).

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The price is a bargain.

I thought word was free.. let me check..
eMule.. word.. yes, it's free! What price
are you talking about?

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Put a WYSIWYG editor on a wiki and it would be an even worse mess of formatting than MS Word.

Re:PDFs?

[michael_cain]

The entire legislative branch of the State of Colorado uses WordPerfect. In their case, it's (a) that the entire work-flow management system generates WordPerfect templates for the formal documents, and no one wants to pay to replace the system and (b) there are some millions of pages of official state records whose only soft copy is in WordPerfect, and much of whose formatting is dependent on insane macros.

The only real "feature" in WordPerfect tables that isn't in Word is that they can be used as baby spreadsheets with formulas and macros. "Baby" in the sense of simple, I've seen WordPerfect tables that run to several hundred rows. There are times, particularly under deadline, when it's very, very nice to have text and live tables all in one document. This was a bigger deal ten years ago than it is now.

PerfectScript for macros is a nightmare. If anyone asks you to maintain old PerfectScript code, run away screaming.

Re:PDFs?

[node 3]

With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.

No, you've got that ass-backward. The brilliance of PDF is that you have the equivalent of a print-out without actually having to print something out. As we move away from printing everything, PDF is more useful, not less.

The reasoning here is that if I send you a print out, it's more or less set in stone. You can mark all over it if you want, but for the most part (except for forms, which PDF excels at as well), people just use them as is, and the idea from the creator of the document is to provide some form of final product. With a Word file, you get an i-beam mouse pointer and a flashing cursor. You can very easily accidentally modify a Word file. But even if you don't, with Word files, your interface is always that of a document creation mode, not a document reading mode, except when you print it, or have it outputted to a PDF.

PDF is replacing the printer. PDF is the consumption, Word is just one possible (but not longer critical) too of creation.

Re:PDFs?

[32771]

> I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.

You could have given them a print out to comment on. That's easier to handle and way more interactive.

I also appreciate the good looks of LaTeX. Beyond that it shows that you had a few spare cycles to appreciate things like the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_wrap

even if it was a somewhat superficial way of appreciation.

Had you used LaTeX you could have also shown off with some sense for perfection, making some of us not feel so alone.

Re:PDFs?

[frank_adrian314159]

... differences between there, their, and they're and "the air" (yes, I've seen that one).

Don't tell me. You work in the South, right?

Re:PDFs?

[node 3]

I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking. If I had been in a different field, I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.

Nothing you've stated is Word-specific. Word is just an example of a document creation tool, and it's not even the best one.

Word "needing to die", isn't about the program itself so much as ubiquity of the format. In those exceptionally rare cases where you need to submit something in .doc format (how many theses does the average person write? how many journal submissions? how many anythings where .doc is required?), Word is no different from needing some other niche program, like Matlab or Autocad or Illustrator. No other niche product has such broad influence as Word does.

That's because Word was not always so niche (at least, among computer users, which was, admittedly, somewhat niche at the time, albeit a fairly large one, but still nowhere near as universal as today). If you created a document in the '90s and even early '00s, you almost certainly intended for it to be printed at some point. In the office, at home, at school. Additionally, you generally weren't always the sole editor of a document, it was meant to be passed around (usually on floppy!, but also often on a file server or via email). That meant that not only did you need Word, but the people you interacted with needed it as well (and vice versa). MS Word reached this critical mass, pretty much locking out all other formats from such ubiquitous use.

Fast forward to today, where most communication is via email and IM, where printouts are less common and therefore formatting is less important. PDF, html, email and IM have all pushed .doc into a niche. Where it still remains outside of that niche is from the people who are used to Word and didn't get the memo on saving to PDF, or the people who got Word with their computer, and are at most vaguely aware that doc/docx files are the things they created with Word and send them around via email thinking they just show up on the other end or something.

The first type really needs to change their ways, the second type barely know what they are doing (so it's hard to blame them too much). Fortunately for both, pretty much every graphical text editor can read .doc (and increasingly, .docx) files, but this is a sub-optimal way to interact with such files and for these uses, Word files really should die. Use it as a document creation tool if you want, but send it in another format, similar to how you won't normally send around a .psd file, but first convert to .jpg (except when sending to other Photoshop users, which is a niche in the realm of computer image viewing).

Re:PDFs?

[rizole]

Because anyone who dosen't read /. has no clue how to go about coverting this stuff.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a "professional writer", and I use gvim. Have done for a couple of decades. It has its own spell-checking, but I also run the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and the New Oxford Thesaurus under Wine -- no-one was more surprised than me that they both work under Wine.

That's it really.

I've also published a few books myself, for which I used LaTeX. (400-page technical books with diagrams and notes in wide margins. Proper typeset stuff.)

I find LaTeX much more flexible for indexing and citing than the Quark and Indesign -- though I haven't looked at Indesign closely for a few years. As you approach the print run, those things matter.

I follow Kile's progress, but it still doesn't have real-time spell-checking. I understand that it will be released with KDE 4.3 or 4.4.

Re:PDFs?

[Chemicalscum]

Mark parent up. After getting laid off at my old company where we were using Office XP. I worked for for a couple of months at a company that had Office 2007, the ribbon presented a high learning curve and was totally counter intuitive for someone who had 15 years experience with various iterations of Word. What an inane infantile waste of time. I am now working for a company that has Office 2003. What a relief it is no longer a struggle to work out how to format a document.

As for Openoffice Writer it is a great program and the compatibility is now superb. I have used it ever since it was first released and before that back to Staroffice 5. I use it at home to produce word documents, spreadsheets and presentations in MS formats for collaboration with colleagues at work. Back five or more years ago I had to check the document formatting in MS Office at work and tweak the formatting differences. Now I no longer need to do that and I can send them the documents straight away, even sending it to them by email directly from home.

Re:PDFs?

[GF678]

If I had been in a different field, I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.

I did my masters in Computer Systems Engineering. My supervisor told me explicitely to write my thesis in LaTeX (well, LyX actually) or OpenOffice. If I used Word... he would kill me. I was uncertain of whether he was actually joking or not, so I learnt LyX and it worked out quite well.

Re:PDFs?

[shaitand]

Agreed, and if your people are like the people I deal with day in and day out, they don't even use Outlook for email capabilities, they use it for calendering and sharing capabilities.

Is the functionality of outlook really that difficult to replicate? This stuff is used by virtually every small to medium sized business in the US. If every alternative solution that came out didn't take the greedy approach trying to squeeze them for every client then it might be possible to get somewhere. You could get very rich selling a server/client groupware suite that could import data from outlook/exchange, use outlook as a client, and included say 50 client licenses for two or three hundred dollars.

Re:PDFs?

[Red Alastor]

Word Perfect is still the best Word Processor and reveal code is still there. It's at version 14 now and supports the open document format.

Re:PDFs?

[xdroop]

Oh, don't be ridiculous. PDFs have the benefit of being approximately as portable as Word documents while being harder to change. I love PDF. I never send customers anything BUT PDFs any more, because I've been burnt too often on someone making a change to my "document" and then insisting that was how I sent it to them.

Re:PDFs?

[gilgongo]

It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software. It really always has been. The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers. ... The thing to complain about Word is the exclusion of other formats to maintain their monopoly (this is being fixed) and their attempt to force their convoluted XML format on the world over all other formats.

You say it's excellent, then go on to say MS has a monopoly. This therefore begs the question: excellent compared to what, exactly - pen and parchment?

Microsoft's monopoly with MS Office invalidates any effective discussion of its quality because 99.9% of people have no choice which software they use for things like word processing or spreadsheeting, nor do they have any concept of what an alternative to MSO might be like. Word may be the best possible word processor, it may be the worst - but we'll never know because there is no alternative, and apart from the brief existence of WordPerfect and AmiPro, has been no alternative for well over 10 years.

Here's an anecdote for you: my father was invited to visit East Germany during the cold war. His guide let him speak to a few people there, one of whom he talked to about cars. The person had recently been allowed to by a Trabant and was very excited to own a car. He cheerfully informed my father that Trabants were the best cars in the world - and he meant it. The fact that he could not name, much less have even driven, any other car completely eluded him, as did the idiocy of his opinion.

Re:PDFs?

[aamcf]

but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad.

The same could be said about radiotherapy. It is when it is used by people who don't know what they are doing that the problems arise.

Re:PDFs?

[ThousandStars]

If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places.

With all due respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. A good text editor, even one that'll give you diffs, is nowhere near as fast and as easy as Word's track changes system. As Philip Greenspun, well-known Microsoft shill, says regarding his book writing project:

At least at Macmillan, everyone collaborates using Microsoft Word. I'd wanted to write my book in HTML using Emacs, the text editor I've been using since 1978. That way I wouldn't have to do any extra work to produce the on-line edition and I wouldn't be slowed down by leaving Emacs (the world's most productive text editor, though a bit daunting for first-time users and useless for the kind of fancy formatting that one can do with Frame, Pagemaker, or Word). Macmillan said that the contract provision to use Word was non-negotiable and now I understand why. Microsoft Word incorporates a fairly impressive revision control system. With revision control turned on, you can see what you originally wrote with a big line through it. If you put the mouse over the crossed-out text, Word tells you that "Angela Allen at Ziff Davis Press crossed this out on March 1, 1997 at 2:30 pm." Similarly, new text shows up in a different color and Word remembers who added it. Finally, it is possible to define special styles for, say, Tech Reviewer Comments. These show up in a different color and won't print in the final manuscript.

As for your comment about free software, I'd observe that a) everyone I have to collaborate with has Word and b) only one other person I know has OO.org, which also looks hideously ugly on OS X and, when I've tried to use it, crashes frequently. Most professional writers appear to use Word. That they don't migrate en masse to text editors, which have been around since at least the 1970s, shows that there must be some advantage, even if it's merely network effects, to using Word.

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

I think if you read my post, you'll see that I'm not arguing in favor of Word per se. I'm arguing against the idea that strict/complex formatting for a printed page is worthless. My argument boils down to, "Various formatting techniques can carry various kinds of information and make things easier or more pleasant to read. Therefore, for every bit of formatting you remove from a document, you also remove opportunities to convey information or control the reading experience. Even if you just remove page breaks, depending on the content and desired presentation, you may be losing something."

Re:PDFs?

[shiftless]

Someone mod this idiot flamebait

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

" Microsoft does offer free Office document readers. FYI."

For Linux? (FWIW).

Re:PDFs?

[turbidostato]

"It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software."

That might be true but when I find somebody telling something like this I usually ask two questions:
1) What is it Ms Word excellent for?
2) How many word processors do you know at least as plentiful as Ms Word?

I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to imagine what kind of answers I get (hint: they are not so usually a good indication that Ms Word is such a good software after all).

Re:PDFs?

[SlashDev]

PDFs are mostly used to present digital documents that would be edited. I think both have very different uses.

Re:PDFs?

[RazorSharp]

PDFs were created with the internet AND printers in mind. The whole point is that you know your format won't change no matter what computer/printer you change. I can make document in Word on a PC, export it as PDF, then send it to a Mac with no word processor and I know it will look exactly how it did on the PC. I get sent a lot of .doc files created on PCs and when I open them in OOo on my Mac they're sometimes screwed up. Not always, but sometimes. Who knows whether it's because I'm using a different OS, word processor, or both; but the problem can be easily adverted with PDF and that's one of the main reasons Adobe made it other than money. Not to mention that if it weren't for OOo then it would be impossible for me to open a .doc (paying for Word is not an option, and not because I'm broke)

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid fucks are entirely missing the point of the article. He isn't bashing the capabilities of word, but rather how it is designed for a work flow that people don't use anymore. Either RTFA or learn basic reading comprehension.

Re:PDFs?

[cyberzephyr]

In the beginning Word Perfect ruled.
Word came later and 20 years later it's still here but it got bloated.
Lotus 123 and EXCEL happened the same way.
I'm a M$ user and i like open source like everyone else.
Sometimes, you have to kick M$ in the teeth but it has been around for a while.

Re:PDFs?

[LWATCDR]

I had to read that one a second time. I was afraid that you where suggesting that people use Word to create HTML. Which every version I have used did a terrible job at.
The problem with a properly formatted page is the simple question of formatted for what?
I tend to read a lot of text on a number of different devices. It may be my iPod Touch, Kindle, cell phone, laptop, or desktop. Text that is fromated to look good in print is a real pain on a mobile device and none too pleasant on a PC.

Re:PDFs?

[chromatic]

If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers.

I'm a professional writer and a publisher. I would never use a word processor for anything I cared about seeing in print.

Re:PDFs?

[cyberzephyr]

True that!

I still liked the transition to True type fonts (TTF). Adobe and M$ were working together better then.

Don't get me started on 4 color separation :-)

Re:PDFs?

[tonyt3]

I think your last comment contradicts your basic statement. People don't upgrade because they do not need to and because the new program is expensive. Why upgrade? If all you need is operability with something new that M/S has done, they should supply that. All Open Source programs would do that. A cash cow is designed to make money. t

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Original poster is right. Its not FUD. Its a fact. I was sent xlsx documents recently. Couldn't read them. No converters available - the file format readers on Microsofts site could only handle .doc files and .xls files - nothing to read .docs or .xlsx. Had to ask for them to send them again in xls. One day wasted. Hows that for productivity? The guy sending me the file didn't even appreciate Microsoft had done this to him. He just thought he was sending me an Excel file.

The reason they don't want to upgrade is because you get forced onto the "continuous upgrade" treadmill. People have recognised it and have now said "enough". Its policy here not to accept Word documents because we cannot guarantee we can read what we are sent. If you want to communicate with us, send us a PDF. Adobe always have up to date file readers available.

You're right about Office 2003 vs 2007. 2003 doesn't have the new incompatible docx format, 2007 does. Etc. You've made the previous posters point for me. When my partner needed Office (for her business) we got 2003 because it was a more reasonable price, wasn't slower (read the reviews, 2007 is much slower than 2003), didn't have the horrible ribbon interface (UI consistency was something she wanted), and of course, she'd be able to send .doc documents (as default) to anyone she needed to (she isn't a power user and remembering she has to choose a special option to do .doc is not her thing, she wants to concentrate on her design business not worry about her word processor).

In 26 years of commercial software writing I've never purchased Office for the one simple reason that I know that in a year or two I'll be forced into an upgrade I don't want that will be expensive, also I can read a document from someone in a new file format. THe number of times I've tried reading a .doc file from someone in whatever Word/Write/WordPad is on my machine and its comes out all messed up - why would anyone put up with that? Its just rubbish, all produced by the same company and designed to be incompatible.

I do, on the other hand, spend many hundreds of pounds purchasing MSDN each year, so don't take me as a Microsoft hater. Far from it. MSDN is great. But regardless of the company, I cannot stand marketing/sales tactics that force upgrades through incompatible file formats. Office is a classic example. Some might say it is *THE* classic example.

Fortunately for me, things like Office/Word are optional. Whereas I know folks, for the work they do, Office is mandatory, if only to interoperate with their customer base. Yeah I know you say its FUD, but you're welcome to be uninformed.

Re:PDFs?

[Draek]

And although I think I'dve preferred if PDF had stayed the (relatively) simple, bloat-free, built-for-printing format that once it was - begrudgingly - I must admit it's kinda cool to see these funky new features in action.

I don't. Mostly because I read Slashdot often so I know both why it's capable of doing that (Javascript) and how many security holes that has opened in Adobe Reader (a metric fuckton). Hell, even an AJAX app that splits out a PDF would be cleaner from a design, security and usability standpoint and I hate webapps for things like this.

A Turing-complete scripting language has *no* business in my for-print document. Hey, wasn't that why we trimmed down Postscript to create PDFs in the first place?

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just writing from the point of view of a book designer/document production pro: LaTeX is academic. It's great that math profs can write papers with complex equations in 'em and everything, but I'd rather eat glass than try to use LaTeX or related tools in a production environment. Back in the day, I would periodically pick LaTeX over PageMaker, but ever since InDesign CS came out (in, what, 2003?), I haven't touched LaTeX once. And, when I realized it had been two years since I'd needed it, I literally did a dance of joy right in the middle of my office.

For design and production of printed material of any kind, the difference between Indy and LaTeX is even more profound than the difference between Photoshop and GIMP. Free tools are great and everything, but there's a reason why we are willing to buy it when Indy costs so damn much. (Because it's far and away the best tool for print production purposes.)

Re:PDFs?

[ivan256]

It's popular to hate on Word, yet all the Pro-Word comments are modded up, and the anti-Word comments are modded down?

Something doesn't add up.

Re:PDFs?

[Matheus]

*maybe* it's worth giving a try again.. I kept up with Word Perfect post 5.1 since I truly loved it (and still truly miss reveal codes)

What did I find: Corel turned it into an unusable and unstable piece of crap.

If they've managed to fix their mistakes then I would love to go back to using it but in the meantime it was not for lack of trying that I left WP and now spend most of my "pretty" document writing time in Word. (thank you work MSDN license for making it pseudo-free)

Re:PDFs?

[magarity]

colleagues seem to spend as long trying to fix the formatting on these templates as they do filling in the empty boxes
 
Hear, hear! A curse on those who invented (and those who create documents with) the miserable embedded table feature of Word. I hate those damn things! I've seen way too many documents in a corporate setting that were nothing but a giant embedded table wanting to be filled out. Please, if you want something that draws hard to fill in boxes and must use an Office product, use Excel at least.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that is FUD, plain and simple. With their latest change in file formats (to docx), Microsoft even put out free to download converters that worked at least back to Word XP (which was what we were stuck with at work at the time).

Actually, the .docx converter works fine in Word 2000. It works so well, that my company feels no need to upgrade.

Re:PDFs?

[nicholdraper]

You've missed the point. Its not that word doesn't have its place. And in the academic world, progress is slow and trails the entrepenueral world. Yes word works for writing a traditional book or paper, but if your university was more up to date, a submission of a web site that linked to your sources would be better. Then instead of a 20th century thesis, you would have created a 21 century thesis that could be searched and linked by everyone. You could have comments like slashdot on each page and you could get instant feed back by your professors and the world. I have long been done with the academic world, but the only thing worse is the corporate world. I showed my last employer how a Wiki was a much better repository for technical information. It is easily accessible any where in the world, we tied the security into our active directory system so it was secure. But, alas they also failed to understand the significance of new approaches to text management. I've since left that company and I am doing the same thing for a company that gets it. And get this, I get paid a consulting fee by my previous employer to lookup documents in their own Wiki and email them back to them. I charge in block increments so that a one minute query gets me a quarter hour of pay.

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I think that if you get what I was trying to get at, you'll see that its not that I think you are wrong that formating is useful. Rather I take issue with the context it was used within:

At issue is the statement, "properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts", which is asserting that wikis aren't (or can't be) properly formated. My comment was in regard to your statement that, "It's not just that they look better, either." You are buying in to the unfounded assertion, which is that properly formatted HTML is not formatted properly.

To summarize, we are in agreement that properly formated is better than improperly formated. I was just pointing out that you began by agreeing with a statement that certainly appears bogus, before going on to make a valid unrelated (to what I took issue with) statement.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe solutions will only render your pdf exactly in 10 years if the following don't happen.

We should have much higher resolution, color or ??? devices and thus need to move to a richer font render engine. btw co-developed by adobe, msft, and to some small degree apple. This is what generates the bounding box for each character. So your text might wrap to next line or go off the end of the line if the display engine compensates or not. (see testing below)

Or your font that you choose might simply die a noble death in the eyes of the worldwide community and the rendering engine has to pick something 'similar' which might totally suck. So you could try embeding your font into the document.

Then you might embed a font that is later deemed insecure because some hacker has attacked the font language itself (opentype) which happened in the past month. Then your font is never usable because it was hacked. each glyph in a font is a little program in case you weren't aware.

The only way to insure that your doc looks exactly the same is to keep a copy of the entire tech stack as is. we do that solution at my company because 10 years is nothing to us.

or you have to constantly retest as the new solutions come out and fix the bugs. not too many docs merit this level of work...

Technology marches on.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the number of times I've seen them put into action in a horribly inept fashion, I've not gotten that excited. Enter some sort of critical text, into a window with a fixed 20 char length, but I've got 30 char... crap. Or the situation where it scales the font to preserve the window... down to tiny size.

Yes the form capabilities are pretty good, but I've seen them used poorly more than I've seen them used well. And I usually want a copy of the final object, my brain has a hard time wrapping itself around the divorce of data and formatting that the newer PDF approach uses. Users seem confused that you would send something that was not actually a WYSIWYG file. I get it, but we're pretty fixed in that visual metaphor.

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I don't create PDF directly. I create LaTeX, then covert it to PDF. So I've not noticed this problem of which you speak, but then again, I'm not trying to modify PDF directly, rather I'm producing a PDF with necessary changes.

It'll help if you think of LaTeX as the source code, and PDF as the compiled binary. Then its no surprise that direct, sophisticated editing isn't easy. (Likewise, it sure wasn't easy back in the day, using debug to directly edit a binary file). However, making changes to the source *is* easy. Using LyX its laid out in a sweet GUI. It does word wrap for me. Then I just "recompile" (actually, export) the LaTeX into PDF.

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

The premise of the article, however, is that Word "should die" because the fine-grained formatting allowed by Word is useless, and HTML (which doesn't give the same level of control) provides everything you could want/need.

It's not an issue of proper or improper formatting. The author is basically saying, "pagination is stupid and formatting doesn't need to be very controlled because we're not printing."

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Pagination is only one small part of formating, and its demise is only a small part of the author's argument. The author was saying, I believe, that continued pagination is stupid when and where there is no longer an inherent need for pagination.

I really wouldn't consider Word "fine-grained", by the way. If you need fine-grained control, use LaTeX, if you need ultra-fine grained control, there is TeX. Its about the best there is.

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

The formatting the average user can get from Word is a hell of a lot more fine-grained than what an average user can get from HTML. And considering that the average user isn't going to be willing to learn to use LaTeX, it doesn't really matter whether it's better than word. The point is, Word isn't going anywhere until you come up with another way to enable people to control formatting the way they want it, and yes, some people want pages.

Saying pagination is stupid is a little like saying fixed-width webpages are stupid. It may not be necessary for reading, and you personally may not like it, but depending on your project and your intent, it might still be important. It's possible that you could want to control your formatting and layout strictly enough that you want to know the size of the display medium you're working with. Now if you're not actually going to print the page, then the size of the page may be arbitrary. However, if you hit a situation where layout and formatting is important, then not having a fixed width and height may hinder whatever it is you're trying to do.

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

First, its true that the average user would get better results with less training using LyX, without ever having to learn LaTeX.

Second, it seems to me now that you are confusing formating with presentation. You do know, for instance, applying emphasis is formating, but whether emphasis means to display in bold or italics is not formating, but presentation? Likewise, you format your document by indicating the location of paragraphs and lists. How this is presented, though, isn't formating. Does a paragraph start with an indentation? Not formating, thats what a style sheet determines. Do you use one or two or three columns? You don't use columns in formating. You denote the structural information, and let your program flow the formated data into however many columns your chosen style sheet uses. This also means that changing margins or number of columns is simple. You change the style sheet ad recompile. Again, formating has merely to do with denoting the structural characteristic of a section, not its appearance.

The reason that LyX works so well for the untrained newbies is that the newbie selects a section type from a drop down menu, but the presentation of that characteristic is done via style sheets written by experts. Thus, a newbie can concentrate on what they want to say, while LyX insures it looks like it were professionally typeset. You can't get that using MS Word (as a newbie) unless you hire a professional to apply formating for you. You can't get it that easily, even if you are said professional, using MS Word.

Font selection is an interesting thing to bring up. Font selection isn't part of formating, except as the style sheet would apply different fonts (and font sizes, etc...), to different structures in the document. It sounds to me like what you mean by fine-grained control is to throw away all structural consistency and rather than format a document, do formating and presentation word by word by word. That is insane. Its also not allowed in the professional journals with which I am acquainted.

Re:PDFs?

[xtracto]

I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad.

I used Latex to write my PhD thesis, and it was a dream come true. However, I remember getting a Latex source file from a colleague, who made the impossible to increase fonts and do other stupid things. Needless to say, the document was a total nightmare

On the other hand, nowadays I must use Word to produce documents (it is mainly used by my colleagues in the field I am working) and as you say, I always (every time!) use styles and NEVER use the format boxes. This produces consistent documents which are easily reformatted.

The moral of the story? no matter what tool you use, if you use it correctly you can get good results.

Re:PDFs?

[Bert64]

People don't expect word to work flawlessly, it just doesn't and never has, they are willing to accept as normal that it's full of bugs and work around them...
These same people are not willing to accept similar bugs from any other product, many of which occur due to trying to implement a poorly designed, reverse engineered format. They demand that any other product work flawlessly in order to replace something that works very poorly indeed.

Re:PDFs?

[Bert64]

He said "any computer at my disposal"... What if those computers aren't running recent versions of windows (which is all those free viewers run on)?

Re:PDFs?

[RogerWilco]

One of the biggest problems I have with OpenOffice (that I use on my Mac and on Linux), is that it tries to emulate Ms Office, with all it's flaws.

I still use WordPerfect on Windows (version 12 currently so I'm a bit behind, but I don't buy each new version).

When I compare Word:Mac 2004 with any version of WordPerfect past 6.0, these are the major things that are much easier/better in WP:
- Large documents with multiple sub-documents, but a central Index and page numbering, figure/equation/graph/table numbering.
- Equation Editor. (LateX or WP are lightyears better than MS).
- Handling of figures, caption formatting, and location, the placing in the text/on the page (I hate the whole anchor thing, I sometimes just want to put it on Page 30, 2 inches fro the top or something like that)
- The same document format for each version. (WP has used the same format for 15 years or something, and can import/export to any version of Word, why does Word need a new document every other version? I can create a document in version 12, and it will open in version 6.0 for DOS. (my father is a dinosaur as it comes to computers).
- No changes in layout if you change the printer is gets printed from.
- Automatically updating of indexes and similar lists.
- Proper handling of styles.
- Easy automatic timed backups.

In my view Word is still a glorified scratchblock, while WP, LateX, PageMaker/Indesign, Acrobat and QuarkExpress allow you to actually create documents. Word is a plague, it's a terrible program.

The reason why Ms Office wins are in a large part because of the other programs bundled with it, and of course it's tie win with the OS.
PowerPoint is pretty decent though, and Excel is the best spreadsheet I know. When I moved to Dilbert land I found out what the real killer app of Office is though: Outlook.
Neither Evolution, Groupwise nor Lotus Notes can compete with that.

Re:PDFs?

[RogerWilco]

Have you ever even tried a recent version of something like WordPerfect, or in a higher price category things like Indesign, Acroread or QuarkExpress? Using Word for professional publishing would be a pain, it's by no means the most sophisticated tool for the job, the others are lightyears ahead.

If you claim the above you have no clue what is needed for a really professional publication.

Re:PDFs?

[RogerWilco]

Ms Office is king mostly because of Outlook and Excel. They have no real competition there, neither OpenOffice's offerings, nor things like Groupwise, Evolution or Lotus Notes come even close.
It's what I understood after I worked in Dilbert land for a year.

Re:PDFs?

[SBrach]

Word viewer 2007 works on any version of windows released in the last 9 years. I would not call windows 2000 a recent version of windows.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX).

LOL - in other words if by "professional writer" you actually mean a geek taking a break from their busy schedule of bashing microsoft products then I spose the fact that macros are easier in LaTex (or emacs, or vim, or whatever) than word might be interest. The average "professional writer" is not going to be interested in macros - they are interested in communicating.

Re:PDFs?

[cffrost]

[...] not caring about differences between there, their, and they're and "the air" (yes, I've seen that one).

Ctrl-F4 was created for situations like that.

Re:PDFs?

[wjousts]

Original poster is right. Its not FUD. Its a fact. I was sent xlsx documents recently. Couldn't read them. No converters available - the file format readers on Microsofts site could only handle .doc files and .xls files - nothing to read .docs or .xlsx.

Really? Guess you didn't look very hard.

Re:PDFs?

[wjousts]

I think your last comment contradicts your basic statement.

No it doesn't. People don't upgrade because they don't need to. It's not an upgrade treadmill, which was my FUCKING POINT!

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

Then you're not editing the PDF, you're editing the source from which the PDF is generated.

I can print-to-PDF any Word document, as you described, and later modify the Word document and print-to-PDF again. I'm not editing a PDF, though.

In a PDF, there's no difference between a soft carriage return (where the line wraps normally), a hard carriage return (<br/>), and a paragraph end (</p>). This makes it difficult to re-wrap the lines if you're actually editing the PDF.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidentally, I might add that both MS Word and OpenOffice Writer are still poor shadows of what WordPerfect used to be in terms of its power, even for serious publishing.

However, if you lost the strip telling you what all of the Fkeys did you had no chance in being able to use the program....

Re:PDFs?

[barzok]

Back in the days of WP 5.1, it was the standard word processing program for the legal industry.

WP is still used by a lot of law offices. One of my lawyers sent me a WP document just a couple months ago (the other one uses Word, or at least distributes DOC files).

Re:PDFs?

[Saint Fnordius]

I have to take exception to the idea of Microsoft Word being good for writers. It actually seems more like overkill, getting in the way of actually writing at times. Several writers prefer instead to fall back on smaller shareware solutions such as Scrivener (Mac OS X). I would say Word's current strength lies not in excelling at any specific task, but being just good enough in almost all tasks that deal with writing.

It's an entire workshop of cheap tools that can be cantankerous, but they get the job done. Other applications may be well-crafted tools, but they are not as general-purpose as Word is. And since this workshop is already in your house, it's hard to justify going out and buying the high-quality tool.

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

Second, it seems to me now that you are confusing formating with presentation.

Third, It seems to me now that you're being pedantic.

It sounds to me like what you mean by fine-grained control is to throw away all structural consistency and rather than format a document, do formating and presentation word by word by word?

Fourth, it seems to me now that you're setting up a straw man.

Re:PDFs?

[Saint Fnordius]

This is because the PDF was designed to distribute documents to be printed at the endpoint, with no editing. It was supposed to be the next step up from Encapsulated PostScript, expanded to hold multiple pages in one file and provide identical appearances no matter which printer was used. I still have the original flyers for Acrobat 1.0 somewhere up in the attic, which gushed about creating once, and printing anywhere. Kerning was preserved by breaking text into sub-lines of text. Some programs can reassemble lines, but reassembling blocks is beyond them.

The original Adobe Acrobat users were supposed to be DTP professionals, to make it possible to send electronic proofs or to let people mail documents to the print shop without requiring the printer have the same version of QuarkXPress or having to give him a copy of the fonts. Those roots are what limit the PDF format today.

Re:PDFs?

[Saint Fnordius]

Ah, but those of use who own Macs don't get Mac:Office for free, and that's the kicker. Word is common OEM software even on cheap machines, even if the rest of Office is replaced by MS Works.

With a Mac, you actually have to consider plunking down cash for a version (and most users nowadays would rather buy iWork instead). That limits the market share of MS Word on the Mac platform.

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

Yeah, basically. As virtual paper, PDFs are pretty nice, but editing them isn't much easier than editing a real paper copy. Time to get the white-out and typewriter...

Re:PDFs?

[RockDoctor]

With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.

PDFs have very important non-printing uses. The thing that makes them (relatively) good for printing (consistent placement of a variety of page elements with respect to each other) remains useful even outside the printed context. I use them frequently at work despite the terrible limitation the Adobe have arbitrarily imposed of constraining a page to have a maximum dimension of 200in. (We often have to work with document "pages" that need to be in the region of 400in, and world-record matching work in my field would imply single-page documents exceeding 1000in maximum dimension. This is a problem, but we can live with it for the ubiquity benefits from using PDF as a document distribution format. For actually working on the source documents - the cost starts around £15k/seat +£2k/year/seat and your system hardware will dictate your limitations. I still haven't found the limits on Win2K/256MB systems, and I've not looked on newer systems.)
The ubiquity of PDF reading tools for reading/ displaying documents is not to be sneezed at. Adobe know this (which is why there are commenting and annotating tools and APIs for doing these tasks on PDFs ; the "yellow highlighter" icon is very apt) ; OpenOffice.Org know this (which is why they can read Word documents, and do it well). Ubiquity is very useful.

No, I haven't RTFA. Yet. I'm about to.

Re:PDFs?

[sarkeizen]

Fourth, it seems to me now that you're setting up a straw man.

No, this is the kind of mistake that newbies to the informal fallacies make. The person is simply disclosing their view of your position. Kind of amusing that if the seemingly implied assertion - "Refuting an argument that has been explicitly disclosed as not necessarily held by your opponent" - qualifies as a strawman. Then the statement "Seems like you are setting me up for a strawman" would also be a strawman.

Re:PDFs?

[techno-vampire]

Not as long as you remembered that F3 was Help and F7 was Exit. I've not used WordPerfect in at least five or six years and I still remember those two.

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

No, this is the kind of mistake that newbies to the informal fallacies make. The person is simply disclosing their view of your position.

Not if you're willfully choosing a position that I am not taking for the purpose of setting up a weaker opponent to your own arguments.

I never argued anything like "We should throw away structural consistency and do formatting word-by-word." Either you're intentionally mischaracterizing my position, or you have some serious trouble with your reading comprehension.

Re:PDFs?

[sarkeizen]

Not if you're willfully choosing a position that I am not taking for the purpose of setting up a weaker opponent to your own arguments.

Meh. Newbies. The question of definition is less about what you state above and more about how important it is to have the argument strongly passed off as your own position. The other poster doesn't do this. Without that it's simply "not your argument" that's being defeated. There are many logical fallacies and honest mistakes which fit this definition however the only one that makes the *strawman* distinctive here is that someone is strongly passing off this argument as yours.

Even if your definition is somehow acceptable. You should realize how much of it requires a seemingly unreasonable level of knowledge about your opponent. In order to know that the opponent is *willfully* choosing to respond to an argument other than yours it stands to reason that you must know (or have strong evidence over the alternative) their motive and also know (or have strong evidence over the alternative) that they know your argument (otherwise they would be "not responding to your argument" accidentally not willfully).

This makes establishing your proposition (said argument is a strawman) rather difficult and perhaps impossible. Combine that with the fact that by inferring the same motives to your response "It seems you are setting up a straw man" you could level the same accusation at it and so on...ad infinitum. The result is that this doesn't appear to be a very *useful* definition of the term now does it?

I never argued anything like "We should throw away structural consistency and do formatting word-by-word." Either you're intentionally mischaracterizing my position, or you have some serious trouble with your reading comprehension.

It doesn't matter that you do not think that's what you argued to that person. It's true that they might not know what you mean by your statements it's also possible that you don't know what *they* mean by their statements. Giving us one more possibility. That you have, as you say problems with reading comprehension. aaaaaaand we have the logical fallacy of false dichotomy.

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

The question of definition is less about what you state above and more about how important it is to have the argument strongly passed off as your own position.

No, the question is how intentional your misrepresentation of my argument is. But, wow, look at how quickly you want to change the subject again to pedantic redefinitions of common terms. It's almost as though you don't have any ideas or arguments relevant to the topic we're discussing, and you're more interested in childish pissing contests.

Re:PDFs?

[AthanasiusKircher]

"With all due respect," I do know something about the professional writing world, but that's irrelevant. As I said in my original comment, I have nothing against Word, and I use it myself. And I always have a copy laying around in part because of the very reason you mention -- when collaborating with various editors, they want to use Word's system for tracking changes. Fine. It's a good system, and it's a valid choice. I've also dealt with editors who wanted to use Acrobat to track comments and edits, which isn't as useful as Word's in some ways. But I therefore have a copy of Acrobat as well. Others still want paper proofs with hand edits. So I also own some pens and pencils.

But my argument wasn't about whether Word was good -- it was questioning the GP's assertion that Word has certain "features" essential for professional writing that are unique ("nothing else even comes close" or something like that). If you define "has a huge market share" as a "feature," then I understand where you're coming from. (Why it has that market share is a separate issue that may or may not have anything to do with its current quality.) To me, that's an extremely important aspect of using Word, but is that one of the "features" that the GP was talking about?

The fact is, in the publishing world, everybody does things their own way. Many use Word, for various reasons; that is true. Just as a publishing house can tell me I need to use some crazy non-standard citation system, they can also force me to use Word for collaborative purposes because everyone else does. But that, to me anyway, has nothing to do with the "features" of the underlying software.

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the question is how intentional your misrepresentation of my argument is.

Which is fine for your personal definition of the term but it's not a very useful one nor does it fit well with examples in the texts on logic that I've read. Think about it.

But, wow, look at how quickly you want to change the subject again to pedantic redefinitions of common terms.

'quickly'? 'again'? in what sense?

It's almost as though you don't have any ideas or arguments relevant to the topic we're discussing,

One of which is wether or not an argument was a strawman.

and you're more interested in childish pissing contests.

Better to apply that criticism to yourself. You are the one going off a topic you were ready to discuss (that of an argument being or not being a strawman) and turning to a personal attack.

Re:PDFs?

[sarkeizen]

No, the question is how intentional your misrepresentation of my argument is.

Which is fine for your personal definition of the term but it's not a very useful one nor does it fit well with examples in the texts on logic that I've read. Think about it.

But, wow, look at how quickly you want to change the subject again to pedantic redefinitions of common terms.

'quickly'? 'again'? in what sense?

It's almost as though you don't have any ideas or arguments relevant to the topic we're discussing,

One of which is wether or not an argument was a strawman.

and you're more interested in childish pissing contests.

Better to apply that criticism to yourself. You are the one going off a topic you were ready to discuss (that of an argument being or not being a strawman) and turning to a personal attack.

Re:PDFs?

[Reziac]

Actually, WP macros are external to the document, and if you need to alter or reproduce their effect, you can always edit or copy the formatting codes directly from the document.

Re:PDFs?

[Reziac]

Internally, Word documents are a swath of text plus an appended database that tells the document how it's supposed to be formatted, by pointing at a specific location then applying the formatting. The problem is that sometimes the database gets out of sync, and it has no good way to kill orphan codes. And its code display is too rudimentary to be of much use.

That's why I like WordPerfect -- Reveal Codes shows you everything, plus all the codes are inserted AT their point of application. If something gets really fucked up and all else fails, you can always fix it with a hex editor!

Re:PDFs?

[Red Alastor]

*maybe* it's worth giving a try again.. I kept up with Word Perfect post 5.1 since I truly loved it (and still truly miss reveal codes)

That feature would not be possible in Word. Wordperfect documents are a stream of text and tags (just like html) which makes reveal code trivial, Word has objects inside objects inside other objects until you reach turtles.

There's also "Make it fit" that others never managed to copy.

I'm not sure which mistakes you speak (I used word back then) and only switched to WordPerfect at version 13. Then I switched to Linux and Open Office but I miss Wordperfect. In any case, the reason why I like WordPerfect is because I don't fight against it like I do in the others. And it's not because I'm more used to it, I used the others for a larger amount of time.

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

Or Alt-=.

Re:PDFs?

[Reziac]

I've been trying to come up with an alternative to WP5.1 for writing, partly because the 25 line screen doesn't cut it anymore, but mainly because of the problem of converting cleanly and easily between HTML and WP formats. It can be done, I've got macros that do a lot of the grunt work, but it's still tiresome and tedious. (WPWin's notion of HTML is kinda ugly, so it won't do either. Ironically, the best WP-to-HTML converter I've seen yet was an add-on for WinWord6.)

I've tried RTF editors but they all seem to have issues, most often "disappearing text when it doesn't like how you overlapped formatting options".

Word documents are too subject to corruption due to Word's text-plus-formatting-database structure.

I don't like what OpenOffice does to the internal document structure, and (at least as of last time I tried it) I *hate* how it stores documents (zipped up).

I may wind up writing in HTML, for much the same reason as I like WP: HTML can be viewed and edited as raw codes-plus-text, AND the formatting codes go at the point of application, rather than pointing into the aether like Word's do.

Re:PDFs?

[Reziac]

I once asked someone from way-back-when-WP-dev about those F-codes, and was told they were taken directly from the original mainframe/UNIX environment. Goes to show what a bunch of young'uns most of the slashdot *NIX fanatics are... if they knew their history they'd all be rabid WP supporters. ;)

Re:PDFs?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

As much as it pains me, I have to admit that substituting MS Word print-to-PDF for a LaTeX-to-PDF via LyX (or Kile, or even Emacs,) is certainly fair (enough) and within the scope of the methodology I'm exposing. Said methodology being that

PDF be treated as an end product format, with another editable format that can be easily transformed to PDF .

So then why don't you do that? Are there other criteria of which I'm unaware? Do you need to edit PDFs that were generated by third parties? Are they internal to your organization, and would it be possible to implement a policy of "no PDF w/o [fill in your editable format] source included"?

Just a little googling dug up the question of PDF-to-LaTeX conversion in the Ubuntu forums, which would rather sweetly allow round-trip reverse engineering.

Seems less than encouraging:

Re: Pdf to Latex convesrion
remember that PDF's main design goal is visual layout. it does not contain structural information.

a latex will specify that something is a section or subsection heading, pdf only says what font,size and position the words should have.

also latex keeps track of figures, tables and references, and only puts the numbers in when exporting to pdf (or dvi if you are oldschool). the pdf file will just have the numbers, not the associations.

you would need clever code to rebuild all the information that is lost in a pdf file.

Looks to me like we're back to the central difference between document structure and document presentation once again. Structure is amendable to algorithmic processing. Presentation in its purest form (think a jpeg of a handwritten note), while perhaps giving pixel by pixel control of display, is much less amendable to, for instance, sweeping regex modifications. Hence the desire to keep the two separate, and my suggestion to not let go of the "source" when you've built the "binary", so to speak.

Re:PDFs?

[dublin]

Nobody's nailed the *real* reason most people choose PDF for document distribution: It's still the only foolproof way (for most people) to make sure that WIS (what **I** see) is WYG (what **YOU** get). If fonts and layout matter, then PDF lives simply because it can nail those down.

Word docs are awful for transferring documents, since if the recipient has another version of Word, or different/missing font, then all bets are off as to what will be at the bottom of page 8. (OpenOffice takes hits from both directions here, since it is both a varying version and its fonts are different.)

I *hate* the idea of PDFs, but I use them extensively, because the font industry's insistence on DRM to prevent font proliferation has screwed up documents for the last 20 years. Hell, we're only just now starting to *maybe* be able to use fonts and typography on the web for the first time, but it's far from certain that the foundries won't take steps to shut this down.

And what, exactly is really the difference between embedding a font in a PDF and embedding a font in a word processor document file? The former is legal, the latter is not. I guess it's that unbreakable Adobe Acrobat encryption or something... ;-)

Re:PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

JSTOR made a decision to keep their journal articles in page format, because that's what people are used to and like.

Actually, JSTOR decided to keep things in page format for copyright reasons - anything else would be making a derivative work from the original.

Re:PDFs?

[BrokenHalo]

...and was told they were taken directly from the original mainframe/UNIX environment.

Unix came later. WordPerfect was originally written for Data General minicomputers, which at the time (~1980) ran AOS/VS, which is not even remotely like Unix.

Re:PDFs?

[Reziac]

It's so ancient, even itself can't recall its origins ;)

Somewhere around here I've got WP4.something for Xenix. Won't run on modern *NIX, tho.

Re:PDFs?

[clone53421]

Yeah, it basically comes to editing PDFs from third parties (whenever I don't have a source document that is editable). Fortunately I don't usually have to do that... it's only when we consider moving exclusively to PDFs that the question comes up "how do you edit one".

Annotating a PDF – highlighting, underlining, and/or adding text – is relatively easy, but editing the existing text basically requires whiting it out and re-typing it.

The issue hasn't come up much with my organization (original documents are kept in MS Word format), but in personal matters I use print-to-PDF instead of a physical paper copy for most of my archival purposes (online receipts, statements, etc.). Also I was working at another place for a while where we often published documents to PDF (newsletters, brochures, and things of that sort). As a matter of curiosity I wanted to know if good PDF editors exist, and it turns out that all you can really get is an annotator (e.g. Jarnal). Basically you're stuck with the editable original + non-editable PDF pair, as you surmised.

Re:PDFs?

[BrokenHalo]

It's so ancient, even itself can't recall its origins ;)

Maybe, but what does that make me, I wonder? I worked with AOS/VS for several years, and I even remember liking it... 8-|

Re:PDFs?

[Reziac]

Granddad, is that you? :)

Tho the first computer I ever had anything to do with was an IBM1620, and it was a big upgrade when we went from punch cards to a paper-tape reader... so maybe I should say "Hello cousin!" instead! ;)

Re:PDFs?

[sarkeizen]

I'm guessing that by your lack of response you figured out that your definition was silly.

If not, try removing "intent" from a strawman argument. Still seems like a strawman doesn't it?

Re:PDFs?

[nine-times]

My lack of response is that I don't see the point with arguing against irrational, spurious, and pedantic arguments.

Re:PDFs?

[sarkeizen]

Too bad. Evidence says that your pontification is probably incorrect.

After all, it's easy to point out the specific issues with arguments that are irrational, spurious and pedantic and demonstrate them to be such. The former two are easy to show contradiction and the latter it's easy to show a gap in relevance to the issue at hand. As long as your opponent is willing to talk (which I clearly am).

But instead of simply pointing out the specific places where my arguments fail. You seem to have a penchant for *pronouncing* things as wrong in some vague way (i.e. irrational, irrefutably researched, yadda yadda..) and then running away without actually making your case.

Any reason your running away like this would be compelling? Don't you think there's better evidence to believe that you are simply engaging in face-saving or dissonance preserving here?

Anyway whichever of your stall tactics you engage now. I think it's pretty clear that you've lost this round.

Re:PDFs?

[shiftless]

Thanks, that's exactly what I was asking for!

But seriously--mod the GP flamebait. I'm sick of tired of seeing idiots talk shit about the South. I could write a post asserting that black people are worthless criminals, or Mexicans are gang members, and I would be modded into oblivion. Yet somebody throws out an offhand comment implying that most people from the South are retards, inbred rednecks, trailer trash, etc and it's just completely accepted. Fuck you elitist assholes.

Re:PDFs?

[QuietObserver]

. . . the reason why I like WordPerfect is because I don't fight against it like I do in the others.

I completely agree, although I cannot say I've used the others for a longer amount of time. I can't stand Word, primarily because I can't see what I'm doing, and it tries to do so many things for me, usually without asking (which WordPerfect never does). Of course, Reveal Codes is the most powerful editing feature I've ever seen, and there are also so many other things, like "Center on Margin", "Right Flush", and "Indent" that allow me to easily do things the others can only do with tabs.

Oh, he doesn't need Word anymore?

[mnemonic_]

Is that so? Good for him.

Re:Oh, he doesn't need Word anymore?

[Hadlock]

I need Word still, sadly. Notepad doesn't have an integrated spellcheck, and our IT department won't let me install Open Office. Sometimes in a pinch I'll spell check in gmail or google docs.

Re:Oh, he doesn't need Word anymore?

[AP31R0N]

This should be modded Insightful.

__

i would love to switch to OO.o, but it just isn't up to what Word has been able to do for years. Maybe someday... but it's just not a competitor for the corporate world yet.

Re:Oh, he doesn't need Word anymore?

[leonbev]

He won't until he needs a new job, anyway. Most employers want resumes sent to them in Word format, and you're risk having weird formatting problems cropping up if create it in OpenOffice instead and save it in Word format.

Hell... the job search industry alone could probably keep Word relevant for another 5 years.

Re:Oh, he doesn't need Word anymore?

[walshy007]

Most employers want resumes sent to them in Word format,

Too true, sent a resume in in pdf format to one mob, to which they said, 'need in word format' borrowed mothers xp machine with office on it and saved it as the openxml thing, another response later 'Need in old word .doc format' after that I just gave up. An IT mob that can't read proper standards like pdf, or even convert between versions of software that they have demanded be used for submission? bah to them.

Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

So, the fact one does not need to make as many printouts abrogates the need for a good text processor. I see. That is like saying "Because I live within walking distance to work and walk to work, I don't need a car. At all. Ever."

Re:Stupid conclusions

[HogGeek]

That could be true, depending on your lifestyle.

From my reading, he no longer needs MS Word,

He not stating that he doesn't need to write documents. Maybe, in his world, a good mail program provides everything he needs; Just as much as a public transportation system provide the needs for some individuals...

Re:Stupid conclusions

[timster]

Well, in the case of Microsoft Word, the analogy is more like "because I live within walking distance to work, I don't need a steam-powered locomotive with a cracked boiler. At all. Ever."

Look, I'm usually a calm and rational sort of guy, but I hate that effin' program.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[kriebz]

Are you calling Word a good text processor?

While it may have a lot of features, be already well-known by users, and have a large install base, that doesn't automatically mean it qualifies as a "good text processor". Software has a lifecycle, and any program is going to have features that make it over-specialized or less modern compared to newer contenders.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

It's beyond that... it's like saying that because one person living in New York can take the subway, it means that all other forms of transportation for the entire world should be permanently eliminated.

I hate to say it, but there is this place outside the blogosphere called "reality" where people do this stuff called "work". Word processors are vital to getting "work" done, because (and I know that this will shock you so sit down) there are documents that actually require "formatting" and have to look professional. Not to hate on your 3-word wide single column blog with a hipster-orange border trim, but in the land of "reality" people tend to expect somewhat better.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[MrHanky]

To be fair, though: Word isn't a good text processor. And no, neither is OpenOffice Writer.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[garcia]

Because I live within walking distance to work and walk to work, I don't need a car. At all. Ever.

Well, you probably don't "need" a car, at all, ever but you certainly do want one.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[genner]

To be fair, though: Word isn't a good text processor. And no, neither is OpenOffice Writer.

Then what is?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

Yes, I can make that 5 mile journey to store on horse back. Oh, use the bus you say? And, walk 4 miles to the closest stop? No thanks.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[MozeeToby]

Actually, it's more like saying "Because I live within walking distance to work and walk to work, no one needs a car. At all. Ever."

Re:Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

Are you saying that Word is not a good text processor?

If so, would you care to support that assertion?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[ColdWetDog]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad part is many people actually feel that way about cars as well.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[genner]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.

You mispelled Vi.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[sunderland56]

Actually I think his viewpoint is more like, "Since I live within walking distance of work and walk to work, NOBODY in the world needs a car".

While he may have a valid viewpoint for his own uses, generalizing that viewpoint based on a sample size of one is pretty much guaranteed to be invalid.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Spy der Mann]

Are you saying that Word is not a good text processor?

If so, would you care to support that assertion?

Sure! Word is an evil text processor. good != evil, therefore, Q.E.D.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[mwvdlee]

IMHO, any HTML editor. Or LaTeX if you want something that prints nicely.
It took me many years to figure out I really do NOT need WYSIWYG, I need structured documents with layout applied to the structure, not the characters.
I just wish LaTeX would integrate better with the rest of the world, so I could use it more.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[MrHanky]

It depends on the need, really. If you write for print, directly or indirectly, something like LyX should be better, as it enforces certain standards that most Word users break unknowingly or knowingly. Typesetting a Word document takes a lot of work, due to the fact that it's almost always littered with errors like random double spaces, improper sectioning and paragraphing, inconsistent use of styles, etc. Word only looks easy to use, but most users use it incorrectly, and until 2007, it even encouraged improper usage. OpenOffice is actually better in that respect, as it at least makes styles obvious.

Of course, it's a Word world, so Word and OpenOffice are often the only practical options. Technically, from a writer/editor's standpoint, there's nothing particularly good to it. I kind of like Word's commenting feature, or at least prefer it to OpenOffice's.

If you write for the web, and text editor will do. I prefer Emacs for text documents and Vim for configuration files, which makes me a double heretic.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the author's conclusion is all that wrong - from his/her own perspective. However to say it should die because you don't need it anymore is like saying the stock market should die because you don't trade stocks. Things can exist and persist without having a direct need from everyone.

Disclaimer I didn't RTFA but I presume the author's conclusion jives with TF headline.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Pentium100]

Word is a good text processor, at least for me. I can do whatever I need with it and have no problems.

Software has a lifecycle...

meaning instead of MS Word 2003 I should be using some program that needs 16 CPUs and 8GB of RAM to do exactly the same thing as MS Word (since I am happy with its features)?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Tsaot]

Emacs is a good OS, but if there's one thing it needs, it's a good word processor.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook can use Word for its document editing as well. So dressing it up in new clothes does not remove a tool's usefulness.

Like any tool, you use it for what you need it for. You may find better tools from time to time, but just because you delegate it to the shelf doesnt mean its useless.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Tsaot]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.

You mispelled ed.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't need a car. At all. Ever.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[LaissezFaire]

Actually, it's more like saying "Because I live within walking distance to work and walk to work, no one needs a car. Unless it's an Emacs extension. Ever."

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I work with Word 2000, and it's never given me any trouble. Every year or so, I try installing OOo and using it for a while : it never lasted for over a week. I always go back to good ol' Word 2000.

Plus, I'm a freelance translator, and my translation memory software only works with Word ; my clients also send documents in the .doc format and won't accept any other format, except perhaps .docx but it'll be a cold day in Hell before I use whatever version of Office spawns such shit. But even if I disregard such professional obligations, Word is still easily my personal word processor of choice, hands down.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[rxan]

Printing seems to be the issue he is focused on. But you can't just assume that you'll never need to print out your documents. If your documents are written in a non-WYSIWYG format (like HTML) then you'd have a horrendous time trying to figure out what page everything ends up on.

I imagine that this sort of debate will become more of an issue when we get things like good quality E-paper. Should be interesting then. Right now he's just a tempest in a teapot.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[drdrgivemethenews]

No more printouts also seems to mean you will be happy with MediaWiki, a system without a WSIWYG interface, drawing tools, diagramming tools, embedded graphics, in-line comments and change tracking, and much else. And the author asserts that it's good enough for one use (Wikipedia), so it should be good enough for about anything. Not.

The strong nuclear force is well modeled at a macro level by nerds and the weird systems they love. You can't pry them apart without emission of gamma rays and particulate matter.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[93 Escort Wagon]

No more printouts also seems to mean you will be happy with MediaWiki, a system without a WSIWYG interface, drawing tools, diagramming tools, embedded graphics, in-line comments and change tracking, and much else. And the author asserts that it's good enough for one use (Wikipedia), so it should be good enough for about anything. Not.

This comment has multiple issues. Please help improve the comment or discuss these issues in subsequent comments.

• It needs additional references or sources for verification.
• It may contain original research or unverifiable claims.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[toleraen]

Sounds like you live in the middle of nowhere, which means you should have plenty of room to raise your own livestock and grow your own grain and vegetables. You can make that trip to the general store on Sundays, should be able to put in your order through Sears, Roebuck and Co at the same time. Giddyup.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live Vi!!

Re:Stupid conclusions

[xaxa]

Yes, I can make that 5 mile journey

Sounds like a nice bike ride :-)

(Seriously, I don't especially want a car. If I won a million on the lottery I'd probably get one, but at the moment I'd rather have a trip somewhere exotic, or a slightly nicer home, or to eat out more often.)

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Magic5Ball]

BBEdit and UltraEdit are good GUI text processors in that they provide a variety of useful functions for transforming text systematically. They can do regexp, document comparison, advanced templates, whitespace conversion, etc. but do not force the user to go there. gEdit could be in that group when it matures a bit.

To make pretty customer-facing documents (PDFs) that rarely change in substantive content, decent layout tools (applies j/k rules, supports ligatures, can position text and graphic elements through coordinate specification and not just nudging with the arrow keys, non-broken interface for using more than six text styles in one document, tables that breathe correctly, understands color management, supports document bleed without gross frame hacks) include Adobe's InDesign and Illustrator which support file pointers to Word and other documents so that content and presentation can be handled by different people. Recent Corel Draw versions with passable multi-page document support are also good, but not cross platform.

In my experience, Word and sxw are both wastes of time in this area since both novice and expert users spend more time fighting the interface than doing work to produce their desired formatting and layout. They're great tools for generating body copy across organizational boundaries, but poor for making it look good.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[TemporalBeing]

Are you saying that Word is not a good text processor?

If so, would you care to support that assertion?

"good" implies it's above average, and Word is only average. And the usage statistics (at least presently) would show that. ;-)

Re:Stupid conclusions

[TemporalBeing]

vi, you insensitive clod.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

You misspelled "misspelled."

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have 16 CPUs and 8GB of RAM, you clearly don't have enough RAM; this seems like quite a small amount for a 16-way SMP machine. I suggest you consider upgrading your projected specifications?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.

You mispelled Vi.

And you misspelled misspelled. ;-)

Re:Stupid conclusions

[genner]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.

You mispelled Vi.

And you misspelled misspelled. ;-)

You started a sentence with a conjunction. :p

Re:Stupid conclusions

[TheRaven64]

Well, someone added a decent text editor a couple of years back...

Re:Stupid conclusions

[kcfoxie]

I'd venture to say that MILLIONS of people would agree with the thinking on the car.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

Please provide a non-biased source for the usage statistics. You may also include the a summary of the statistics. Remember, in your usage, average means it is in line with all other items.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

But to properly write it, what else should he start it with? :D

(A triple play! Woo-hoo!)

Re:Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

Except for the blazing heat; the frequent, heavy thunderstorms; and the deadly traffic. I live in one of the worst locations for riding a bike.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[grassy_knoll]

Go easy on him... given the key combinations in his OS ( emacs... wish it had a decent text editor ) typing "emacs" when he means "vi" counts as a typo.

Emacs: When carpal tunnel met tourette's... a love story.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[jcr]

Look, I'm usually a calm and rational sort of guy, but I hate that effin' program.

Hating MS word is an entirely rational response to its flaws.

-jcr

Re:Stupid conclusions

[PitaBred]

I have saved documents in Word that I later (within minutes) cannot open again. Word may have nice features, but the file format that it implies is horribly broken and anti-user. I'll take a system with fewer features than Word but the confidence that I'll be able to get at the information again any day.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[zippthorne]

Oh, come off it. Real geeks use a line editor like lp - <<ENDOFDOCUMENT Because we never make mistakes and only ever need one hard copy of anything.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.
?
You mispelled ed.
?
Fixed that for you.
?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Blakey Rat]

The old format, or the new one? Which version of Word were you using?

You *do* realize that Microsoft created a new file format specifically to address situations like the one you mention, right?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

Funny, that has never happened to me.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[PitaBred]

What, you mean the one that they tried to buy ISO certification of? Yeah, that's something I'd trust my data to. "FormatLikeWord95" or whatnot is unacceptable in a document format.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Is0m0rph]

I've used UltraEdit daily for at least the last decade. No other text editor tops it IMO. Has about everything you could need for a code editor as well.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[CronoCloud]

Sunday? It's against the Will of Heaven to have stores open on The Lord's Day. You mean Saturday. :-)

Re:Stupid conclusions

[civilizedINTENSITY]

A good text processor is going to have excellent regex support because you want to be able to specify much more complicated search and replaces than MS Word supports. A good text processor should open quickly, and open even tremendously huge files, limited only by the amount of memory you have. MS word truly sucks at this. A good text processor is going to make it easy for me to do regex search and replace across all the text files in my project. A great text processor makes it fast and easy to jump around my open files. MS Word fails.

Personally, in terms of text, I've found nothing that comes close to Vim. Vim's keybindings let me get things done in the time it would take to reach for a mouse. When I'm working with multiple files that have lots of dependencies, I find that Geany has the best and quickest project level tools. I've never seen anything show me so fast where all the locations of a given regex was in my project.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Well at least no one is advocating sed or awk!!!

Re:Stupid conclusions

[civilizedINTENSITY]

And yet strangely enough I've seen well produced diagrams, embedded comments, and embedded graphics on Wikipedia. If you'd read the article, you'd perhaps have known that superior change tracking is one of the main reasons for migrating from MS Word to a wiki based system. Also, for consistency WYSIWYM is better than WYSIWYG. (There is no such thing as WSIWYG. )

Re:Stupid conclusions

[benwaggoner]

You won't get a FormatLikeWord95 tag if you're not using Word 95, of course :).

It's important for lots of users that they can maintain functional compatibility and bidirectional conversion with older Office documents, so that was a core design goal of the .???x formats.

You may not need that yourself, but a lot of people do, and the new formats give them that in a much more interoperable, searchable, and efficient XML-with-.zip structure.

It seems like 90% of the compliants about the new formats don't even acknowledge the design goal, which makes any discussion of how good it is pretty irrelevant.

A clean-room new office file format would have had much worse interoperability and hence much less adoption, for only aesthetic gains at best.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, that has never happened to me.

It has happened to me, and no, it is not funny.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[lord sibn]

I consider three miles to be "walking distance." takes about 45 minutes, lots of people drive longer than that to get to work.

I live 1.7 miles from work, takes me about 25 minutes to get there on foot. And anything that I cannot carry home with me on a bus/taxi/what-have-you, is something I can order online and have delivered to my doorstep. I do not need a car for anything.

Obviously, my situation can change, but it is not a fair comparison. My problem with word is not that I do not print many documents, it is that Word has so many features that nobody I know will ever use more than 10-20% of them. Seriously, in the world of word processors, you probably don't need most of the crap that's in Word. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Word is the emacs of word processors.

(N.B., I actually use emacs -- which easily has thousands of features I will never use)

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Formatting pretty documents with Word sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing business people do, and we all know that business people don't actually do work. Shouldn't you be on a golf course about now?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[turbidostato]

"Like any tool, you use it for what you need it for."

Like any tool, you use it for what somebody else convinced you you need it for. There: corrected for you.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called Vim. Just IMproved it for you.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[hedwards]

I didn't know "vi" was pronounced "Word."

But in all seriousness, Word is not a good text processor, it's not even a mediocre text processor. Mainly because that's not what it was designed for, I don't recall ever seeing an ad that was pushing the kind of functionality that vi has, even if you do mix in the keyboard. What Word is meant for is to be a WYSIWYG text editor, not to knock that type of application, but that's not the same thing as a text processor.

But beyond that, Word isn't terribly good at what it does. A lot of that comes down to the lack of sane engineering on the part of MS. A lot of the features are hidden deep within the UI and sometimes you have to really know your way around the program to fix some pretty fundamental problems. I remember spending quite a bit of time one time trying to figure out how to turn off autocorrect. And there's a tendency for MS to reshuffle the whole UI frequently enough that one wonders why bother to learn about the deeper inner workings when chances are they'll change significantly with the next release.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[shutdown -p now]

"FormatLikeWord95", as defined in Ecma OOXML was indeed unacceptable in a document format, which is why it was 1) properly documented, and 2) taken out of the mandatory part of the ISO OOXML spec.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Peyna]

vi

Re:Stupid conclusions

[MacDaffy]

I certainly agree with you on your assessment of Word as a text processor, but Microsoft Word 5.1a on Macintosh was once the gold standard of word processing.

Word had not yet acquired the bloat that would drag it to the bottom. The interface was comfortable, accessible, and unobtrusive. It got out of your way and let you write. "What You See Is What You Get" ceased to be just a Flip Wilson gag line, in large part, because of Word and the Mac. There's still a dwindling cadre of people who use Word 5.1a because it was just that good.

My main problem with Microsoft is that they're willing to look bad themselves if it makes someone else look worse. I'm not buying Microsoft Office 2008 or its successors. It's my chance to help stave off The Redmond Monster's attempt to create yet another craptastic standard.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[NoOneInParticular]

If stuff needs to look professional in the business world, why are they using Word? For someone that has used latex and framemaker, Word just looks horrible!

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Smarty little Spyder...

So now inanimate objects like code can be evil?

Go home silly baby

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

You mispelled Vi.

You misspelled misspelled.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[dublin]

Word is a word processor, not a text processor. There's a big difference: Word processors (Word, OOWriter, WordPerfect, AbiWord, etc.) mix up content and formatting, much like in the old pre-CSS HTML days. Formatting in WPs is generally specific text markup (bold, size, etc.) applied to a specific range. Text processors (most commonly the *TeX and *roff families) separate most formatting from the content - you just pour your text into the various content types and the text processor will apply whatever format it's been told. TPs tend to be more tag, style, or attribute-based - WPs with styles are somewhere in between, but as many have noted, actually using and enforcing correct use of styles or other predefined formatting in most WPs is difficult to impossible, especially with multiple editors/authors. TP documents are harder to get set up (TeX in particular is a PITA), but once that's done, it's much easier to focus on content and forget formatting.

Final thoughts: 1. Word isn't going away unless GoogleDocs or the like kills it, since it's still the only rich text editing tool of any consequence that is widely available, and it has the advantage of being sort-of compatible with itself. 2. Putting so much critical and nearly uneditable information in that little (normally) invisible paragraph mark at the end of your paragraph is simply insane!

Re:Stupid conclusions

[QuietObserver]

Depending on what you need, I'd suggest WordPerfect; it doesn't do HTML well, but it has no problems retaining formats after they are saved. I've never had to reformat a document. It also has many features Word cannot have, due to the useless way Word handles data, such as Reveal Codes, Center of Margin, Right Flush, and Indent. Also, it has true WYSIWYG, so you never need to print preview (I use draft mode, and I've still never needed to use print preview, since I can just switch to the regular editing mode if I'm concerned about how tables or pages actually look). Also, it rarely assumes anything; you tell it how you want to format the document, though it does set up outlines if your typing indicates you want it to, and the outline settings are much better than Word (and I'm using WP9, which is about ten years old now).

Advent of the paperless office

[Anonymous Coward]

It's finally here! The elusive paperless office has arrived. People have stopped printing things. Are you serious? That assumption aside, people still need to prepare documents and if they don't print them on paper, they print them to PDF.

Re:Advent of the paperless office

[Jurily]

Sigh. When will these people ever learn.

Repeat until it sinks in: paper trail is more important than storage and search efficiency. CYA über alles!

Re:Advent of the paperless office

[pieterh]

PDF indeed has the advantage of being a fairly reliable way to deliver formal documents to end users. I get e-tickets as PDFs, and I send out invoices as PDFs.

There has always been a burden of turning information into knowledge, and Word used to be one of the better ways of doing this, as an individual author.

But more and more we prepare such formal documents mechanically, and we use other ways to create the really interesting works, which today are collaborative, not individual.

For me, the advent of cheap wiki platforms like Wikidot.com show the future. No paper, no heavy editors, but very rich collaborative tools that let us build knowledge bases through massive collaboration. In other words Wiki is killing Word.

Now, I am hoping for a simple wiki-based replacement for spreadsheets and presentations. Not emulation, but replacement.

Re:Advent of the paperless office

[gbjbaanb]

I thought about that too - I mean, what mediawiki really needs is a way to constrain a page into a 8.5 x 11 sized page and then give users a nice WYSIWYG editor.. (a bit like Word :-) ). But then I thought a bit more - text is good, and with stylesheets even HTML can be made into something that looks good and prints out nicely, look at all the blogs with their formatting that work. If that kind of style/templating system could make it into mediawiki then we really would have an alternative to Word and desktop-based applications.

The point is that you still need to print things, but you also want them stored on the server for searching and easy viewing (that latter rules out sharepoint), and version control with audit. Currently the focus is on the printing and the ease of use is secondary. Switch that around and you have the Office killer app.

Re:Advent of the paperless office

[tepples]

Repeat until it sinks in: paper trail is more important than storage and search efficiency. CYA über alles!

But how much detail are we going to keep in the paper trail, and how much in files stored on a well-known online backup service, whose SHA-256 values are part of the paper trail?

Re:Advent of the paperless office

[Rastl]

My answer to the 'paperless office' has been the same one for over a decade now.

We'll have the paperless office the day after we get the paperless bathroom.

Re:Advent of the paperless office

[xaxa]

My answer to the 'paperless office' has been the same one for over a decade now.

We'll have the paperless office the day after we get the paperless bathroom.

You are aware that in many countries using tissue to smear shit around your arse isn't considered hygenic?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_faucet
(etc)

(Unfortunately, neither is popular in my country.)

It might die, but not swiftly

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die. Even if it does it wont die swiftly.

I really don't want Microsoft or Word to be dead and be replaced by another monoculture. Just inter operate nicely with non patent encumbered, open, software. We will live in peace.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[digitalsolo]

I think the statement that 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use Word might be optimistic.

600 million to 1 billion people use Word, around 45 people worldwide actually have any clue how to use it. Around 11 people understand how to use it with the "ribbon interface".

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Pop69]

You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them ?

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[dummondwhu]

At first, I hated the ribbon interface, but I actually grew to like it. Really, because I knew where most stuff that I cared about was buried in the menus, but whenever I had to find something new or something I forgot about, it was a pain.

The ribbons give a little visual queue and pretty much everything I want is out there in a series of tabs.

It's not perfect, but I kind of like it. I like the idea of the ribbon, but maybe MS could have arranged theirs a little better.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[AndrewNeo]

Woo! I'm one of eleven! (A better question is, how many people, myself included, like the ribbon interface better than the terrible tangle that was the menu system?)

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[brindleboar]

Oh come on now... Eleven? That many? I want names, man, I want names...

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[initdeep]

quite a lot do actually.
regardless of what slashtards seem to think.....

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[DeadDecoy]

I kinda think the ribbon interface is nice too, once you get used to its wierdness. It's actually functional when working with other people over version controlled documents, in that I don't have to dig through menu items to accept/reject changes to see a clean version of the final product. If I worked with it more (in a collaborative environment), I'd actually buy it. But, OpenOffice seems sufficient for my needs right now. Kinda like how some people are willing to Gimp instead of photoshop to manipulate pictures. It's only done once in a while and the core functionality is there.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[rxan]

The ribbon kills the previous interface. Unless you love clicking through 50 cascaded menus over and over.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Linker3000]

Are you sure it's as low as three people who understand the ribbon interface?

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[HBI]

Any program that required the knowledge imparted by a keyboard overlay to use was pretty lame.

The only good use of a keyboard overlay I ever saw was for the Microprose flight simulators like F-19 (later F-117A), F-15 Strike Eagle II/III

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[clone53421]

I actually mostly used the shortcut keys.

Oh, and still will, because they're faster than fishing around on the Ribbon trying to find the style that I want to change.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[iamhassi]

"MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change."

What?!? But Jeremy Reimer has spoken! How dare you claim we should not all follow his example into Linux bliss:
"I chose MediaWiki, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia. It was relatively easy to install on a virtual Linux server. Since everyone has read Wikipedia, the interface was familiar and so our users needed no training."

I'm glad it was easy for you to install it on your virtual Linux server, could everyone in your office do that? Could your mom? Could your replacement?

While this is a nice idea it doesn't sound like a mainstream solution. My old job had just started a wiki for the FAQs. Few people used it due to login issues and an over-complicated system of finding information. It'll take the kids of today becoming the adults of tomorrow before we can move offices into a completely wiki-type system.

I think we'll all be using Google Docs in the near future, especially if Google Chrome OS does well on netbooks. Google Docs already has a share feature and I'm sure adding a wiki wouldn't be too difficult.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use Wordperfect sometimes, but I'm more the artistic type and am usually working in MacPaint.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[spasm]

"Horses and buggies have too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use horses. Their use might not die. Even if it does it wont die swiftly. "

Fixed that for you.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[erroneous]

So Word is doomed because within a mere 150 years of Cugnot building the first automobile the automobile industry completely swept away horse-based transport from the developed world?

Microsoft must be quaking.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[ShakaUVM]

>>MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die.

They used to, yeah. Then Office 2007 happened. I give tech workshops, and at every single one I see the people fumbling around in Office 2007 (which they all use, at least at work) stuff they knew how to find without thinking in previous versions.

Some of it really is counterintuitive, like a pull-handle on a door under a "Push" sign (there's a restaurant like that, and it's fun to watch every single person try the door the wrong way, even people that have been eating there for 15 years) - for example "Insert New Slide" in PP2007 is NOT under the insert ribbon. Guess where everyone goes when they try to insert a new slide? I just hit ctrl-m, since it doesn't make much sense to me either to go to the Home ribbon.

There's some nice things about the ribbon bars, but they suck overall from a usability standpoint.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[ShakaUVM]

>>I don't have to dig through menu items to accept/reject changes to see a clean version of the final product.

What? There's a review toolbar. You have that always on, so it's actually a lot more usable than the fucktarded ribbon menu that you need to click to every time you want to switch between accepting/rejecting changes and working on the document.

I think the only people that actually like Office 2007 (and complain about having to click through nested menus) were the people that didn't know that you almost never had to do so.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Anonymous Coward]

WordPerfect never died, it just lost out being the #1 Word Processor.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Tubal-Cain]

Gates, Bill
Ballmer, Steve
de Icaza, Miguel

That's all I got right now

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[ThousandStars]

You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them ?

And in those days, the total number of computers bought every year exceeded the entire previous install base, year after year. Since the neighborhood of the late '90s, however, that hasn't been true. Today, if you want to get people to switch operating systems/word processors/e-mail clients/whatever, you have to get people who already have computers to consciously change their behavior. This is really, really hard to do. That's the difference between WordPerfect's dominance in the '80s and Word's dominance today.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[sgarg]

MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change.
Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die.
Even if it does it wont die swiftly.

A fraction of the quoted figure - 0.6-1bn actually know how to use MS-Word. The rest just behave like monkeys would if given a typewriter. Frankly, people just do not get it. You send documents in editable formats like that of MS-Word if and when you want the recipient to make changes. Else, you just send out a PDF.

For me - TeX/LaTeX and the userfriendly WYSIWYM GUI LyX on top of it

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr digitalsolo: your estimation that so few people can understand the ribbon interface must unfortunately reflect your own less than desirable intelligence level.

Good luck with your career at your local fast food chain.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[LQ]

Woo! I'm one of eleven! (A better question is, how many people, myself included, like the ribbon interface better than the terrible tangle that was the menu system?)

The menus were a mess but after about 10 yearrs of using Word you got to know where everything was. Then they moved nearly everything which annoyed the hell out of me at first. Now I understand the ribbon and am even sort of warming to it.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[MightyYar]

I had OO.org set to open .doc files. My wife used my computer to open and edit a paper she was writing. She did notice that my version of "Word was weird", but she otherwise had no idea that she wasn't using a Microsoft product.

Needless to say, she doesn't use any advanced features of Word, though I was horrified enough watching her manually correct references and footnotes that I showed her how to use that feature.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[AndrewNeo]

You're very right, as sometimes it takes some searching to find things that were well-known before.. but as someone else pointed out in another comment, a good number of feature requests were for stuff that was already in there. For example, I didn't know the Research stuff for citations was in Word until the Research ribbon tab in 2007.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[rrohbeck]

I've used it for 15 years and I still don't know how to use it. Seriously.
Each time is... bewildering. Surprising. Just like a box of chocolates.
Maybe it's because I never received real training on it since it's expected that I don't need it as a CS professional. As others mentioned, the functionality is non-obvious, as opposed to WP or other ways of using markup.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[spasm]

a) It's an analogy - the point is the relative rapidity of the transition from universal use to niche use. Anything to do with computers seems to happen a lot faster anyway.

b) The first working automobile to ubiquity was a moderately long time, however it was a long time before it became clear the automobile was actually a serious contender to replace horses (half the science fiction writers of the late C19 thought we'd all be commuting via balloons and aeroplanes). Who knows which of hundreds of prototypes or beta applications already out there will later be recognized as a real contender for obsoleting word. A better timeframe would be first mass-produced vehicle (the object that actually replaced horses, as opposed to earlier bespoke automobiles) to horse obsolescence, and for that we're probably talking 15 years tops.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Anonymous Coward]

That ribbon interface is so bad, that Open Office team can not even copy it properly.

MS Word on the MAC in 1988

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Word back in 1988 was AWESOME! I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. When typing my mechanic's lab papers, it was great to be able to insert the equations (integrals and derivative symbols - WooHoo!), format, cut and paste, and correct - even on that shitty little black and white screen the original MACS had! There was nothing like anywhere by anyone.

I miss those days.

Re:MS Word on the MAC in 1988

[Foobar of Borg]

MS Word back in 1988 was AWESOME! I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. When typing my mechanic's lab papers, it was great to be able to insert the equations (integrals and derivative symbols - WooHoo!), format, cut and paste, and correct - even on that shitty little black and white screen the original MACS had! There was nothing like anywhere by anyone.

I remember those days too. The only reason it seemed awesome was because the alternative was a typewriter, or at best a Smith-Corona word processor with the interchangeable daisy wheels. Oh, and the alternative to software cut-and-paste required you to actually cut and paste, and then make a photocopy so your little figures wouldn't fall off the page at the wrong moment, or at least look unprofessional.

I miss those days.

I don't. I like having easy to use programs that let me get my work done quickly.

Umm What?

[ae1294]

Word wasn't the first son.... and word processing isn't something you just use to 'print' stuff. It never was just about that. This isn't news, and this article doesn't even make sense...

Why did this end up on the front page of /.?

Re:Umm What?

[AndrewNeo]

Why did this end up on the front page of /.?

You must be new here.

Re:Umm What?

[humphrm]

My take on the article was a bit different.

Yes, Word wasn't the first. But I think the author is right that MS Word was the first incarnation of word processing software that was really geared toward printing. Prior to that, we had applications that were geared toward simplifying layout and design and allowing creative people (and yes, I'm including IT people in this group) to simply plug their content into the application, and make only a few simple layout and formatting settings.

Now you have Word, which while not the first WYSIWYG editor, was nearly the first. And by the way, that should really be "WYSIWYP" - P for Print, not Get, because what most people got back in the early days of Word (not wordprocessing) was a printout. And the point is, why are we spending so much time and effort making Word docs look pretty when old-school technology like FrameMaker which has long since been abandoned in corporate America used to (mostly) do that for us?

Re:Umm What?

[Alascom]

Sure Word wasn't the first, I used SpeedScript on my C64, WordStar, and others. But the author has a very valid point. The whole original purpose of word processing was to replace the type-writer, which only produced printed documents. With a word processor, it was easy to make edits, print multiple copies, save copies, etc.

The "Word" processor was never intended to be a format or procotol for transferring electronic documents, which is how its being used today.

Re:Umm What?

[noidentity]

Why did this end up on the front page of /.?

Simple math:

MS: +10
Word: +5
die: +5
swift death: +5

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

Why is that modded insightful?

That has got to be the worst meme used here on slashdot and deflects from valid points unlike all the other ones that are mostly harmless. Everyone goes bat shit crazy about it's over 9000, frosty piss, overlords, etc but anytime anyone says 'You must be new here' it gets modded up...

It really just looks like everyone likes to feel part of the 'group' and like feeling superior by being ok with the status quo here, but they at the same time, hate the status quo everywhere else in the world.

The above story is 'not news for nerds'. It's clear it's not even written by someone who has ever used a word processor other than to do school reports. It's totally pointless... (yeah, I must be new hear comment to follow) Honestly, this is sad, I at least enjoy reading the other fake and/or distorted news on this site. That and the news that is weeks out of date that everyone jumps on like it's fresh off the press. I can at least see a point to that stuff.. this 'story'.... It's unworthy to even waste one's time reading the first few lines...

Now I know this site is nothing more than a way to make money on ad's that no one ever really see because everyone uses adblock but still come on now!

Re:Umm What?

[ChefInnocent]

If I had any mod points, I'd mod you -1 Flame.

You seem to be getting bent out of shape because of a pointless story on /.. Well, much of /. is pointless and is not news for nerds. But in a way, this article has some points that might be worth discussing even if we don't agree with it in total. I'm not sure that /. is really about news so much as it is about vaguely interesting stuff. This site probably is more about money than it was in the old days, but many of us stick around cause we've grown accustom to the scenery. Back then, I recall most of the articles being tech related. Today, it is a hodge podge of stuff. Generally, the stuff is at least days out of date. The point is to see what others think about it whether they read it last year or today for the first time.

Honestly, if you don't like "our" memes, there's probably a better site out there. If there isn't, it's the web; create one. Maybe ae1294 will be known better than Taco or Cowboy Neal. Even if you don't become more known, that site will be more tailored to your desires and you can decide if it is for money or not.

I think the only thing most Slashdotters would like to see go is the Idle section, but even that has some merit. Now, I expect I will be modded "-1 Feeding the Troll." It doesn't matter, I'm just here cause I've grown to like the scenery.

Re:Umm What?

[nixdroid]

Of course this article doesn't make sense. It was written by someone who has actually spent time thinking about the software they use and arrived at a logical conclusion. How on earth could this possibly have any effect on M$ users?

Re:Umm What?

[sharkey]

Well done. Good to see a 6-digit ID get that joke right.

Re:Umm What?

[jank1887]

I have a friend who did their 100+ page thesis in FrameMaker. Swears by it for any serious technical document. Didn't have one layout problem the whole time, unlike myself and countless others (I know 4 personally) who spent days just getting Word to behave. (I probably got the best at preempting most of the problems by using styles, links, references and indices more or less correctly, but still had to spend way too much time dealing with the problem of moving a block of text from one part of the document to the other, then hunting for the magical new location of all of my figures.)

I'm now using TeXnicCenter/MiKTeX

Re:Umm What?

[david_thornley]

But I think the author is right that MS Word was the first incarnation of word processing software that was really geared toward printing.

Really? Back in the old TRS-80 days, I used LeScript primarily to format things nicely for my daisy-wheel printer. Either you misspoke, or meant something completely different from what I understood, or you have no sense of history.

Re:Umm What?

[zippthorne]

Except Word isn't a word processor. It's a document layout program. It does limited word processing as part of that, but it does less than it used to do in that area, far less competently. And it never matched say, wordperfect, in grammar correction. As far as document and page layout however, it's markedly improved over the years.

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

If I had any mod points, I'd mod you -1 Flame.

Feel free to come back later and mod it flamebait as Yes I am saying something Negative but True and against the fandom...

You seem to be getting bent out of shape because of a pointless story on /.. Well, much of /. is pointless and is not news for nerds.

Exactly, thank you for reinforcing my point.

But in a way, this article has some points that might be worth discussing

I agree, if you're a mod whore there is lots to discuss....

This site probably is more about money than it was in the old days, but many of us stick around cause we've grown accustom to the scenery.

Thanks again for reinforcing my points friend.

it's the web; create one. Maybe ae1294 will be known better than Taco or Cowboy Neal. Even if you don't become more known, that site will be more tailored to your desires and you can decide if it is for money or not.

I don't really want to be well known, I do like money however...but yes I've thought about creating a site like this. One with working HTML and Unicode support. One with automatic spell checking for things like; their/there, it's/it is, where/wear with a nice little message that says 'Sorry you're going to have to try again.' or something...

Would you like to help code? You can have the Cowboy Neal position...

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

Well done. Good to see a 6-digit ID get that joke right.

Did I? I really have no idea if you're joking or not as I've been busting my ass in IT since I was 18 (am 31 now) and I didn't have the time to spend playing on /. until about 6 months or so ago. So yeah I am sort of new here but that doesn't mean I don't have my very own nerd card and know some shit.

It is interesting that everyone has an ID based on how long they have had an account. There is no way of ever changing that number and it can always be used to mock others based on nothing more than I was here wasting time before you where. You have a pretty low ID so I guess that makes you a middle class /.'er and since mine is so high I'm in the peasant class.

This is just one more thing that is 'OK' here but in the rest of the world /.er's rail against it. The mirror is best left covered I suppose less we realize that we are often times no better than those we mock...

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

Except Word isn't a word processor.

That's just semantics really. Honestly a word processor use-to-be a slightly computerized type writer if you really wanna nit-pick. But I'm interested in what you think Microsoft Publisher is then?

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

MS: +10
Word: +5
die: +5
swift death: +5

Wouldn't 'swift death' be a multiplier or modifier for die or would that make the system to complex to manage...

Re:Umm What?

[CronoCloud]

Considering that a six digit ID could have been reading Slashdot for years, I think I signed up in 2000, after starting to read Slashdot in 99 IIRC, they ought to get the memes right. I, for one, welcome our 7 digit ID overlords.

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

The "Word" processor was never intended to be a format or procotol for transferring electronic documents, which is how its being used today.

Well OK then what was meant to be the protocol of storing and transferring electronic documents? If your answer is ASCII or ANSI I will feel very sad.

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

, for one, welcome our 7 digit ID overlords.

This reminds me of Amway. Just build the pyramid so there are always people under you to look down on and collect something from...

Re:Umm What?

[SlashDev]

Somehow the words Word and Frontpage always refer to Microsoft.

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

Somehow the words Word and Frontpage always refer to Microsoft.

I wonder if they have trademarks on them... That would be rather funny if they did... Probably do :-(

I'm not going to degrade myself by looking...

Re:Umm What?

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML, HTTP?
PDF?

Re:Umm What?

[AndrewNeo]

It's scary to think I could have signed up years before I did, and I'd still only have a 6 digit ID. Of course, we'll have 7's for an eternity, now.

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

HTML, HTTP? PDF?
Fail, Fail, sure ok sounds good, get everyone to drop Word and I'll jump on that bandwagon..

Maybe you should make an account AC.. you post sooooo many messages here....

Re:Umm What?

[zippthorne]

Page layout program.

There is some semantics, but the essence is that the services that word processors provided and the service that Word provides do intersect, quite a bit, in fact, but word's focus is mostly outside that regime. For instance, word processors cared more about word count than word placement. And would have functions to facility the entry of markup and such.

The modern software which most approximates the functionality of a word processor would probably be vi or pico (emacs is neither a document tool, nor a word processing tool. it's more of an embarrassment). I think we can all agree that there are things which vi and word both do, but there are a field of things that each does that the other doesn't, or doesn't do well. That's the difference between a word processor and a layout engine.

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

Page layout program. - etc, etc, etc.

I've never really been into 'legal-speak' or more to the point here its computer equivalent 'geek-speak' as I have to deal with non-tech people every day to relate complex idea's to management, but I understand your point now and where you were going with what you said...

Re:Umm What?

[ae1294]

It's not off topic, it's a tumor... I did fuck up with the I / He part but honestly the whole story had no real topic to begin with but the mod god's have spoken.... Scary...

word was around even before windose

[Anonymous Coward]

I can remember the versons before the windose ones, back in the day of 5" floppies and epson mx-80 printers (dot matrix), I wonder which windowing library they were using. All I can remember is that it was a heck of a lot better than a typewriter.

I printed his article...

[oahazmatt]

I printed his article, just so I had the satisfaction of throwing it out.

Re:I printed his article...

[Anonymous Coward]

ha!

funniest thing I've read all day.

Re:I printed his article...

[Anonymous Coward]

You really should recycle and not throw things in the trash.

Re:I printed his article...

[gEvil (beta)]

You really should recycle and not throw things in the trash.

Nah, in this case he should just burn it.

Word is the IDE of writers

[Anonymous Coward]

Look around. See any typewriters? That's because MS Word made it so convenient fro writers to use a computer. Auto spelling correction, multiple document control and integration, collaborative tools: bells and whistles to most people but bread and butter to writers.
And yes, Open Office works "just like MS Word". But isn't that the point? OO needs to work like something and MS Word is a great starting point.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[flyingfsck]

Never heard of WordStar have you? or WordPerfect, or...

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[MBGMorden]

Not sure of your point. I never used WordStar, but I once did use WordPerfect quite a bit. Originally the old 5.1 version for DOS, but later several revisions of the GUI/Windows versions. Once to the GUI stage WordPerfect and Word looked and acted pretty close to the same way too. Not exactly, but as close as OOo Writer does to Word. Or AbiWord (which is my favorite small, light/lean Word clone), or KWord for that matter. Debating who copied who is pointless. The simple situation is all of these programs work so similarly because from an interface standpoint, it's really a pretty good way to do things.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[Hurricane78]

Obviously you never used a real text processing software. MS Word is about the worst starting point you can think of. And people being used to it explains why they think it is acceptable.

MS Word's interface is crippling at best. Even the new versions, where they at least partially removed modal dialogs.

But the biggest joke of 'em all is the usage of mouse-controlled elements. In a text processor? Really??

A really good text processor would internally use TeX, would have no use for a pointer device other than graphical stuff like box positioning / vector object drawing, and would let you modify styles in a cascading form of style classes (a bit like CSS, but trough a nice graphical interface with fast keyboard control).
Then add a plug-in-system like in Firefox, to add wizards for the bells and whistles in at least one nice easy language (like Python) and one fast one (like C, Java or Haskell), and allow people to create pre-packaged sets of these wizards on a nice website.
Tadaa. Now everyone can be very happy.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[Knara]

You mean the two word processors that later in their lives basically cloned the WYSIWYG interface of Word to a very large extent?

I used WP and Wordstar back in the day (the 8088->80386 days) and they were good for the time, but using the tags and what not became pretty pointless once Word was easy to get. Years later I was working in a software store and saw the new versions of Wordstar and WordPerfect, which are 90%+ visual and functional clones of Word. The reason being that Word does 99% of what you want, 95% of the time. Just like most of Microsoft's products.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard of WordStar have you? or WordPerfect, or...

And working from the articles premise, they'd be as "not needed" as Word. He's not actually stating that Word is not needed but really Word Processing in general (a doubious conclusion IMHO). Since Word as a product, for right or wrong, has become synonmous with word processing hence the title.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[The Moof]

Auto spelling correction

Ah yes, auto spelling correction. A feature I had to disable because it kept telling me I intended to type "cat orgies" and not "categories" whenever I had a typo.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Word Perfect was a huge, huge, word processing application which was the sole reason businesses bought PCs. I used it back in the 90s and definitely was the killer app. MS Word was never very good and only got big in recent times.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[Archangel Michael]

MS Word made it so convenient fro writers to use a computer. Auto spelling correction

Now if you could only USE this awesome feature. Oh wait, "fro" is actually a word, so spell check didn't help you there either. Bummer for you.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[tsstahl]

Look around. See any typewriters? That's because MS Word made it so convenient fro writers to use a computer. Auto spelling correction,

Tell me again how far we've progressed? ;)

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[ThousandStars]

See my comment here.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[RazorSharp]

That's bull. The reason you don't see any typewriters is because of computers in general. If MS had lost a certain lawsuit you'd be saying the same thing about ClarisWorks or WordPerfect or something.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[Anonymous Coward]

... fro writers to use a computer. Auto spelling correction ...

Hwo do I switch on the Auto spelling crorection faeture?

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[aqk]

You're new at personal computing, huh?
Wha, you stopped using your typewriter 10 years ago?
News:
There were a lot of word-processors around before MS Word sprung up. And yes, there were even operating systems before "Windows".
I havent used a typewriter in 25-30 years.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to live next to a successful published author who is using wordpad.
 

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[JayBat]

Look around. See any typewriters?.

Gawd, it must be nice to be so entirely irony-free. :-)

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[dmmagic]

I don't know any writers who use M$ Word. I don't doubt they're out there, and statistically it'd make sense for the majority of writers to use Word, but somehow I just haven't met any.

I use Scrivener myself, and Pages or TeX for typesetting and formatting. Most writers I know are on Macs and abhor M$ Word, or use LaTeX or something else on Windows. Office is just too unstable.

Why it XYZ

[Anonymous Coward]

So why don't I need Word any more?

We don't care?

Why's every schmuck feeling responsible to pour a list of reasons in writing on why he hates something and never used it? Newsflash: the world doesn't revolve around your narrow view.

But wait, if Word should "die a swift death" maybe the author has concrete indisputable reasons for it.

Maybe it was the rise of office networking. Maybe it was when the printer companies kept raising the price of ink to ridiculous levels. Maybe it was when we realized we couldn't print out the whole Internet.

Oh, for crying it out loud...

No chance MS Word is gone ...

[neonprimetime]

Maybe the traditional office will die out soon in favor of an online version such as Office Live, but in general MS Word is here to stay ... not going away anytime soon.

For example, there was a small business daycare that I know of that had Open Office installed on their work computers. Keep in mind that OO is free ... no cost. Still, the owners hated it so much, they just weren't used to it and got frustrated enough that even in these tough economic times, they went out and forked over the cash for a copy of MS Word. Of course that's sad, but it happens every day with non-techies.

MS Word dying is simply wishful thinking ... but it's not reality.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never downloaded a version of OO.org that hasn't crashed within 5 minutes of starting it up. At least the document recovery dialog that pops up at the start works.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[Anonymous Coward]

OO is free, but also was programmed in Java. I completely understand people getting frustrated with it so much as to pay for using a piece of crap like MS WORD.

MS WORD seems good, until it starts doing automatically strange things on your document like reformatting or putting lines here and there that you can't delete, weird fonts, floating images that keep moving and other things that you try to change and word stops you. Proof of infernal possession, dude. I think I've got more friend calls about strange behavior on ms word than about trojans.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[Hurricane78]

Yeah, because we trust Microsoft or Google so much to store our confidential internal documents, and we desperately need *another* slowing-down inner platform inside that thing... ;)

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they were pissed when they saw the ribbon interface. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[DerekLyons]

Still, the owners hated it so much, they just weren't used to it and got frustrated enough that even in these tough economic times, they went out and forked over the cash for a copy of MS Word. Of course that's sad, but it happens every day with non-techies.

Why is it sad that they forked out cash for a program that does what they want in they way they wanted it done? While Open Office is free, not all costs are counted in cash dollars. (I've tried three times to shift from Word to OO, and given up in frustration each time.)
 
I find it annoying the number of 'techies' who refuse to understand that people can and do make their decisions based on things other than politics and religion. Some techies (read "much of Slashdot) are worse than fundies when it comes down to looking down their collective noses at those who don't worship at the same altar they do.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I like word. I really feel like its the only MS software worth paying for. Not that I can run it on my linux box, but on the machines that have windows anyway I might as well stick with it. OO generally just works, but I still have issues with it. I even put up with changes like the ribbon (which also isn't that bad).

Probably not the right place to post this though... yay for being a coward.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[pampi]

For example, there was a small business daycare that I know of that had Open Office installed on their work computers. Keep in mind that OO is free ... no cost. Still, the owners hated it so much, they just weren't used to it and got frustrated enough that even in these tough economic times, they went out and forked over the cash for a copy of MS Word. Of course that's sad, but it happens every day with non-techies.

... and, their office is not open anymore

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[AnyoneEB]

OOo is written mainly in C++. The Java controversy was a result of some features being implemented in Java, but those have worked with GCJ/GNU Classpath since 2005 (around that time, specific effort was made to make sure OOo would work with free Java implementation), which made the Java use in OOo a non-issue.

OpenOffice.org is not a great piece of software. It just happens to not be Java's fault in this instance.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[ahabswhale]

The bottom line is that Word is bloated with crap that 90% of its users never touch. So OpenOffice may not have every feature of Word but it has the vast majority of features that the average person requires. It's the reason why the greatest competitor of Office 2007 is Office 2003. There's 4 years of complete irrelevance. What this guy is likely referring to is that the users weren't willing to spend 5 minutes to learn something that's a little different because they expected OO to work exactly like Word.

Personally I can't stand Word due to it's extreme invasiveness. It tries so hard to think for me that the whole time I just get pissed off using it and this is in spite of my efforts to make it stop trying to think. Consequently, I spend more time trying to undo it's "thinking" rather than focusing on my thoughts. It gets in the way instead of out of it. It's over priced trash IMHO and I really can't fathom the fascination with it.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[DerekLyons]

What this guy is likely referring to is that the users weren't willing to spend 5 minutes to learn something that's a little different because they expected OO to work exactly like Word.

Right, users don't like OO so they must be stupid and lazy. You're exactly the kind of slashdotter I was referring to in my original post.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[ahabswhale]

Please show me where I used the words stupid or lazy in my post. Looks like you're the problem.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[Anonymous Coward]

People paying money for what they believe is superior product which makes them more productive over choosing a free option simply because they don't have to pay money for it is sad?

My mother thinks I'm crazy for paying extra and getting sliced cheese over a block and slicing it myself. It saves me maybe 2 minutes per week and nearly stuff all effort, but I still don't want to give that convenience up.

Re:No chance MS Word is gone ...

[the_womble]

Can you document any actual problems? I find that most people barely notice the difference between one word processor and another.

Most use of word processors is to write short letters and the average user barely notices if you substitute something else.

This is not true when people work collaboratively on large documents and use features like tracking changes heavily. Better alternatives for this case is exactly what the article is about.

Maybe because

[VincenzoRomano]

documents are not what they used to be!
Look at Slashdot or Wikipedia as an example.
And you don't need Word (or whatever else) to read them or to write into them. Just a good karma.

Re:Maybe because

[ColdWetDog]

You're using Slashdot as an example of a document editor?

The software that can't be bothered to accept unicode or even most HTML without choking? The software that can't be bothered to have spell check? The software that can't be bothered to have an undo function?

Mighty low bar you're setting there. Mayhaps did you start with Edlin?

Re:Maybe because

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because I'm going to write an 800 page proprietary technical document for my company on Slashdot. The so-called death of word processing is just nonsense written by someone how doesn't really need one (and thus, no one does).

Dear Jeremy: Scott McNeally

[Anonymous Coward]

In a speech to the Australian National Press Club said:

"when the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs and they get their callipers and brooms and microscopes out, they're going to blame the massive reduction in productivity and lowering and slow-down in the standard of living during the 1980s and 1990s that we are living through right now - they're going to blame it entirely on Microsoft Office.".

Yours In ASCII
Kilgore Trout

Dumb argument but...

[thisnamestoolong]

Word definitely should be on its way out. Not because we don't print everything out (digital distribution is MORE of a reason for everyone using the same program), but because the free alternatives do everything just as well (or better, they are much more lightweight) and are interoperable. Not that this will happen soon, as the vast majority of computer users are idiots and will continue to shell out thousands of dollars to Micro$oft, since M$ Word still is synonymous with 'word processor' in the common lexicon (and Office with office productivity suites), in the same manner as 'xerox', 'kleenex', 'band-aid', etc. This leads millions of fools to think that they need to shell out a few extra hundred dollars AFTER paying a few hundred bucks on their OS just to get it up and running. The subscription anti-virus companies are in the same racket.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Having contempt for the majority of computer users is tells us more about yourself that it does of them. This contemptuous attitude is a typical sign of a deep seated perhaps justified feelings of inferiority.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the "s" key broken on your keyboard? I stopped reading your comment when I saw Micro$oft and M$ Word. Time to grow up.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love a decent free office suite, but I've yet to find one. Open office seems very crash prone - I've lost work several times from it. It's also quite slow compared to MS Office.

Office is the only MS product I use, because it still has the best word processor and spreadsheet that I've used. It's a bit buggy because I use it through crossover on Linux, but it's still less crashy than open office.

I'm still waiting for a *reliable* free alternative. I'd contribute, if the thought of writing office software didn't make me want to drill my teeth out. Ugh.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I pay for Word because I find it to be a superior product, that doesn't make me an "idiot" nor a "moron".

Re:Dumb argument but...

[recoiledsnake]

Word definitely should be on its way out. Not because we don't print everything out (digital distribution is MORE of a reason for everyone using the same program), but because the free alternatives do everything just as well (or better, they are much more lightweight)

I don't really understand the complaints about bloat. I will just block quote(since Slashdotters don't like to click on links) from this article here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
by Joel Spolsky
Friday, March 23, 2001

Version 5.0 of Microsoft's flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.

By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB ... almost a tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?

Wrong.

I'll bet you think I'm going to write one of those boring articles you see all over the net bemoaning "bloatware". Whine whine whine, this stuff is so bloated, oh woe is me, edlin and vi are so much better than Word and Emacs because they are svelte, etc.

Ha ha! I tricked you! I'm not going to write that article again, because it's not true.

In 1993, given the cost of hard drives in those days, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space.

In 2000, given the cost of hard drives in 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space.

(These figures are adjusted for inflation and based on hard drive price data from here.)

In real terms, it's almost like Excel is actually getting smaller!

What is bloatware, exactly? The Jargon File snidely defines it as "software that provides minimal functionality while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and memory. Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This term is very common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause."

I guess those guys just hate Windows. I haven't run out of memory in more than a decade, ever since virtual memory appeared in Windows 386 (1989). And hard drive space is down to $0.0071 per megabyte and still plummeting like a sheep learning to fly by jumping out of a tree.

Maybe Linus Ã...kerlund can explain it. On his web page, he writes, "The big disadvantage of using these bloated programs is that you have to load this very large program, even if you just want to accomplish one tiny little thing. It eats up all your memory... you're not using your system in an efficient way. You make the system seem more inefficient than it really is, and this is totally unnecessary."

Ohhh. It eats up all your memory. I see. Actually, well, no, it doesn't. Ever since Windows 1.0, in 1987, the operating system only loads pages as they are used. If you have a 15MB executable and you only use code that spans 2MB worth of pages, you will only ever load 2MB from disk to RAM. In fact if you have a modern version of Windows, the OS will automatically rearrange those pages on the hard drive so that they're consecutive, which makes the program start even faster next time.

And I don't think anyone will deny that on today's overpowered, under-priced computers, loading a huge program is still faster than loading a small program was even 5 years ago. So what's the problem?

RA Downes gives us a clue. It looks like he spent hours dissecting a small Microsoft utility, apparently enraged that it was a whole megabyte in size. (That's 3.15 cents of hard drive space at the time he wrote the article). In his opinion, the program should have been around 95% smaller. The joke is that the utility he dissected is something called RegClean, which you've probably never heard of. This is a program that goes through your Windows re

Re:Dumb argument but...

[readandburn]

M$ Word still is synonymous with 'word processor' in the common lexicon

So was WordPerfect.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[karan1003]

Not true. People shell out millions because it is (not just was) hands down the best word processor out there (i love FOSS, but openoffice sucks), and that's after they made themselves the standard (again, because they were the best). You'll find something similar with Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid as well - they became synonymous with their products because they were at some point the best. whether that's as true right now varies from case to case. Besides, this sort of thing happens even now, for example, when people say they will "google" something. It rolls off the tongue a little easier than saying they'll "use a search engine to find information about" something.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[aaandre]

With all due respect for his dynamic writing etc., I have to call bullshit on Joel's article. He uses ad hominem to blame the users for how they feel when faced with bloatware and does not address the sloppy coding that creates bloatware.

The cost of hard disks is low but cost is not the only thing that contributes to the quality of life of a user. If Word takes ages to start on last year's top of the line pc, and takes it's time responding to input, then something's wrong. Knowing how software grows and knowing that word code has been "maintained" for over 10 years, I imagine that if rewritten from scratch, that software would end up much leaner and faster.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The article isn't attacking users, he was quoting something else.

Re:Dumb argument but...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it does.

Folks are printing more than ever it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply because they can.

Moron! Word is a word processor

[o TINY o]

Some of us actually do more than just email short statements to friends these days. In fact, I suspect that this user might think email is on its way out, since according to this same logicl, email doesn't do anything more than a blog, twitter, chatting, or Facebook can't do. On my school campus, we don't always have to print. However, when we don't, we still write/prepare the documents in word, and then attach them to an email, or print them as a PDF. Either way, Word is still instruemental in the writing, formatting, reviewing, and etc, of that document. There is no acceptable alternative to Word. Open Office Word is ok at best. Google docs is ok, but it is web based. Until someone attempts to take on the almighty Word (highly unlikely due to its universal use across both PC and Mac platforms) - then Word is here to stay.

Re:Moron! Word is a word processor

[IceCreamGuy]

I used OpenOffice for 7 years of college and had zero issues, and probably about 75% of submission had to be in electronic form. What do you use Word for that you can't use Wordpad.exe for? Why can't you do the formatting in Mediawiki and then export to PDF?

On my school campus

Ok, it's pretty easy to see why you don't understand why email is still (unfortunately) relevant, but give it a couple years in a corporate or medium business; none of the services you mention have even half the features of email.

Word is still instruemental

Oh if only you had used Word (or Firefox, or OpenOffice) to compose this message it would have been spell checked!

Re:Moron! Word is a word processor

[o TINY o]

I used OpenOffice for 7 years of college and had zero issues, and probably about 75% of submission had to be in electronic form. What do you use Word for that you can't use Wordpad.exe for? Why can't you do the formatting in Mediawiki and then export to PDF?

On my school campus

Ok, it's pretty easy to see why you don't understand why email is still (unfortunately) relevant, but give it a couple years in a corporate or medium business; none of the services you mention have even half the features of email.

Word is still instruemental

Oh if only you had used Word (or Firefox, or OpenOffice) to compose this message it would have been spell checked!

I actually was using FF, but was in a hurry. I think you misread what I was saying. I still think Email is extremely important, I was saying based on his horrible logic that it wasn't. Wordpad doesn't do spell check, its formatting is more manual and has far fewer options. It is by no means an acceptable substitute to Word. Open Office is great for a free program, but it is not nearly as powerful as Word, nor does it offer the nice UI that Word does.

Re:Moron! Word is a word processor

[Pentium100]

Why can't you do the formatting in Mediawiki and then export to PDF?

Why would I want to stop using a program I already know how to use (enough for my needs anyway) and start using a program that I don't know how to use to achieve the same result (written document) that I could do with the first progam?

Re:Moron! Word is a word processor

[tepples]

Why would I want to stop using a program I already know how to use

Because you don't have a license from the non-free program's copyright owner to install the program on the computer available to you. Or because you don't have permission from the computer's owner to install programs on the computer.

Re:Moron! Word is a word processor

[hedwards]

That is precisely why it must die. Nobody, should ever, under any circumstance be emailing Word documents around. IT professionals have been trying to kill that for years with good reason.

If you absolutely must do that sort of thing, you shouldn't be using anything other than either RTF or ODF, and the only reason there's a question is that ODF isn't as widely supported. Just because you and your associates can't figure out how to use the alternatives does not mean that the alternatives are unacceptable, it just means that you couldn't figure it out. OO.org does have some problems, I don't think there's a point to lying, but in terms of writing, formatting, reviewing and such, it does a perfectly fine job of that with a couple minor exceptions which don't really show up that often. Well, assuming that one isn't emailing around formats which shouldn't be emailed.

wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because we spend a lot of time on the Internet and using computers doesn't mean other industries are gone. His thoughts lie a bit too much in the "all the world's companies make software" category. Call me when they figure out how to make the Internet more than just another entertainment medium (hello, facebook, still a media company). Otherwise, companies making real things will still need printed materials.

On the other side, 3D pie charts...

[leonbloy]

... should die a slow and horrible death.

Re:On the other side, 3D pie charts...

[nidarus]

I don't think 3d pie charts by themselves are evil.

It's the people who use 3d pie charts when they should have used a bar chart, and then decide to use random, but very similar colors to encode 9 data points instead of just putting the labels near the slices.

Honestly, did anyone manage to read that chart?

Re:On the other side, 3D pie charts...

[Anonymous Coward]

What type of data would call for a 2-d pie chart over a barchart? Even barcharts are horribly overused, when many times a simple dot plot is what will convey the data with the least amount of ink! Terrible! Go read Cleveland!

Re:On the other side, 3D pie charts...

[mikeage]

This says it all: http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/3d.jpg

Re:On the other side, 3D pie charts...

[ignavus]

... should die a slow and horrible death.

Um, can we make that a quick and horrible death?

I don't want them lingering around any longer than they have to.

Re:On the other side, 3D pie charts...

[rrohbeck]

Nooo! Dancing 3D pie charts in Excel are the coolest demo of Win32 Perl EVAR.

Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[RobotRunAmok]

Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much.

Tell that to the Big Boy publishing industry, who still predominantly take queries and submissions only in hard copy handed to them by a postal worker. It's changing, but glacially...

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[pluther]

More and more, publishers are accepting electronic submission.

As Word documents.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[Xtravar]

Real publishing requires formats other than MS Word.

Sure, the authors may type their works in MS Word. And the specs for the project are typed in MS Word.

But when it comes down to actually publishing a book, you need something like Adobe inDesign.

My girlfriend's in publishing, and we have frequent arguments over why a stupid book needs more than Word has to offer... but apparently it does.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[TheRaven64]

I finished my second book earlier this year and provided the publisher with PDFs (as I did with my first book) generated with pdflatex. The books were both written in Vim, and included diagrams, code listings, and so on. I'd hate to imagine what it would be like to write either them, or my PhD thesis, for that matter, in Word.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[PeanutButterBreath]

Tell that to the Big Boy publishing industry, who still predominantly take queries and submissions only in hard copy handed to them by a postal worker. It's changing, but glacially...

I worked in publishing for several years, and I shudder to think of the volume of garbage that would ensue if the barrier of printing and mailing a manuscript (as low a barrier as that might be) were removed. The industry does move at a glacial pace in all regards, but the poor sucker who has to manage the slush pile is right in the calving zone.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, 'citation please'. Books, magazines, and newspapers -- it's been electronic for ages now, usually Word. That's the only reason I have Word, actually.

I'm not saying that you don't know what you're talking about, I'm saying I don't know what you're talking about. Who are these publishers that only accept paper from their authors? I didn't know any still existed.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[IntlHarvester]

That's nice, but I think the GP's point is that 99% of book authors never touch a typesetting tool, whether that's Latex, InDesign, or whatever.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[TheRaven64]

If they're not doing typsetting, then all they need is a text editor, ideally probably with macros / scripting. Most of the UI in word is dedicated to things that they don't need, so it will end up being a distraction rather than a help.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[owlstead]

Do you mean the old "glacially" which is slow or the new "glacially" which is fast?

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[IntlHarvester]

I prefer to do much of my writing in a text editor, but if you suggested that to most people, they would laugh in your face.

Word works fine used as an electronic typewriter. IMO the UI is actually too oriented towards that approach.

Re:Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[Peyna]

For some reason, I figured Big Boy preferred submissions in milkshake and cheeseburger form.

What's your point?

[PishiGorbeh]

This makes no sense. Where is the logic here?

Very nicely put.

[mellon]

This is exactly right. Even if what you're doing is working on a book, MS Word is not the tool you need to produce the book, and yet authors typically are asked to submit their work as Word docs. This just creates needless extra effort, because Word docs are so clumsy and Word is so buggy. The problem is that everything that's been done so far to replace Word (e.g., OpenOffice) has replaced all of Word's functionality, including the dead-end-to-print function.

What we need is a word processor whose intended end-product is a web page, not a printed document. The nice thing about this is that if you need to turn it into a print document, turning a web page into a print document is very easy. But making the print document be the main product means that we wind up with documents that work best on dead trees, instead of documents that are easy to use electronically. So we need to stop wasting so much effort on OpenOffice, and start working on something that actually does what we need now.

BTW, somebody pointed out that PDF is what should die, not Word, because PDF is a way to transport stuff in virtual dead-tree format. That's true as far as it goes, but Word docs are used in the same way, and cause much greater harm because they are a closed format. So while the author's point is as valid for PDF as it is for Word, Word is the root of the problem, and PDF and Word documents used in place of paper are a symptom of the problem, not the underlying problem.

Re:Very nicely put.

[tepples]

What we need is a word processor whose intended end-product is a web page, not a printed document.

I seem to remember that being called Nvu.

Re:Very nicely put.

[PeanutButterBreath]

This is exactly right. Even if what you're doing is working on a book, MS Word is not the tool you need to produce the book, and yet authors typically are asked to submit their work as Word docs. This just creates needless extra effort, because Word docs are so clumsy and Word is so buggy.

This is because at least 999 out of every 1000 books (or ideas for books) conceived isn't worth considering for publication. Imposing needless extra effort on "authors" is a feature, not a bug.

Word should never have been "in".

[argent]

It's an appaling word processor, providing absolutely minimal structuring for documents... its paragraph-based structure is almost as primitive as the early macro-based text formatters of the '60s and '70s, and years behind the formatters of the late '70s and '80s. HTML is more sophisticated, with formal nested objects that don't do things like breaking a nested list if you insert a paragraph in the middle of one of the bullets.

Worse, since Word compatibility is so important, virtually all word processors that have come out since Word became dominant have copied the abysmal layout and document structure model.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[Joe Mucchiello]

The problem you have with Word is you don't know how to use it. It can do all the things you say and more. It can create hierarchical sections (like h1, h2, h3). It can autoindex. It can footnote and endnote. You can annotate a Word doc. What it does not do correctly is Page level formatting. That is something you need for (ironically) pre-press work. My personal copy of Word 97 has features I use that I've still yet to find in Open Office 3. The other nice thing about sticking with Word 97 is it is not as bloated as its modern counterpart so it runs nice and fast on modern hardware.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[Anonymous Coward]

While you may prefer more structure, most authors do not. They prefer to think of their computer as a fancy typewriter, and even getting them to think of paragraphs as structuring is a great leap for them. Attempting to enforce more structure than the users want will only cause them to not use the product or just use it "wrong". Seriously, just try to explain formal nested objects to my mother.

dom

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[AceyMan]

Mod parent up.

I refuse to master Word for the reasons cited. My neurons are too valuable to master a broken app. When users ask how to do something, I invariably say, "Hit F1".

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[I'm not really here]

This is exactly why I use Google Docs... HTML based, allows CSS for styling. All in all, it just does the job well, and I can access my "application" from any computer with access to the internet.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[argent]

Attempting to enforce more structure than the users want will only cause them to not use the product or just use it "wrong".

Who said anything about attempting to force them to use more structure? There's pure HTML editors that are as easy to use as any word processor, that don't shove nested objects down your throat. Having proper nesting available doesn't mean forcing people to hew to a strict DOM.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[argent]

The problem you have with Word is you don't know how to use it. It can do all the things you say and more. It can create hierarchical sections (like h1, h2, h3).

No it can't. It can fake it, and it does a good job of faking it about 80% of the time. 20% of the time the underlying lack of nesting comes out like pus from a forgotten wound and ruins my nice clean shirt.

My personal copy of Word 97 has features I use that I've still yet to find in Open Office 3.

So? OO is one of those word processors that has copied the horrible Word document structure. It's just Word in drag as far as I'm concerned.

I'd rather edit text in raw HTML, using TECO, on paper tape.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[redmid17]

If you had been using MS Word, you wouldn't have those typos or grammar errors in your post.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[TheRaven64]

The problem you have with Word is you don't know how to use it.

No, the problem with Word is that it makes using it incorrectly easier than using it correctly. Coincidentally, this is also the problem with a great many other pieces of software, including programming languages. Blaming the user is easier than fixing the interface though.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone doesn't understand nested objects, show them a russian doll.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[serbanp]

Joe,

With all respect due to your low /. ID, it looks like you never used MS Word for heavy document creation.

Where I work, people (wrongly) use it for generating Data Sheets. These are highly structured documents with lots of pictures, graphs (coming from eXcel) and drawings (coming from visio - yuck!). It is always both sad and entertaining to see these writers, quite knowledgeable in the MS Office ways, struggling to prevent the whole document from self-destructing.

The truth is that, after so many years of development, MS Word is still a POS, good only for holding a low or moderate amount of formatted text and a couple of graphical elements. When the .doc file grows beyond 10-15MB, all sort of weird behaviors start showing up (formatting lost between saves, automatic renumbering going crazy, page flowing getting broken for no reason we can "see" or identify etc etc).

MS Word is possibly the best tool to write a fancy letter or a 10-page report (or even as the editor of choice for Outlook), but for serious document editing, it's a broken toy.

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the problem with Word is that it makes using it incorrectly easier than using it correctly. Coincidentally, this is also the problem with a great many other pieces of software, including programming languages. Blaming the user is easier than fixing the interface though.

Might this include the lack of visible codes and the innumerable "auto" annoyances (auto style, auto "correct", auto replace). My experience with editing documents by Word illiterates is that they mash the keys until seeing the result they want. This means the same visual result may occur via spaces, tabs, margin change, or an explicit style. When Word randomly adds styles - something 95% of users will NOT understand - it seems to ensure that the use is haphazard, frustrating (try undoing something you didn't do), and totally inconsistent within a family of documents (like 20 ".doc"s that make up our ISO procedures).

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's an appaling word processor..."

It has automatic spell-checking, so it's apparently much better than whatever you use.

Reports or Papers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see he's never written long papers or reports either based on his conclusions.

Interesting take...

[sohmc]

While I agree that Word has outlived its usefulness, it probably isn't going to die anytime soon. Mostly because MS has invest too much money into it and has convinced every university and government on the planet that they MUST use Word or else someone won't be able to read it. I like how the author convinced his entire company to move to MediaWiki as their document management system. It's pretty ingenious, if you ask me.

Re:Interesting take...

[Dan Ost]

In my 6 years of schooling, the only time I had to turn something in in Word format was for a course where the assignment was to write up our first resume.

You are wrong

[JerryLove]

In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out.

This is, simply put, not true. Microsoft had a word-processor for the kind of basic-school-assignment work you describe: MS-Works Write.

.
Word was targeted at professional writers... people writing books and technical manuals and the like. That's why it had as many pre-press features as it did, that's why it was as expensive as is was, that's why (as Microsoft at one point pointed out), more than 80% of requests for new features were for features that were already there.

.
Over time, it seems, people didn't want to use the "cheap" word-processor, thinking that there was no difference between "better suited" and "lesser". They then complained that this professional word-processor was too complex (surprise). (and to be honest, Works had some real issues too).

.
Most users were not intended to use Office. In the beginning, there wasn't even an Office to use. That product was MS-Works.

Re:You are wrong

[PPH]

Word was targeted at professional writers... people writing books and technical manuals and the like.

Which all are eventually going to be .......printed out. Where 'printed out', loosely interpreted means; formatted for human consumption.

What you, Microsoft, and many others are missing is that; its entirely possible that the information contained in said documents will be consumed by another machine. That's the essence of knowledge capture, expert systems, AI and the like. And its something that, even today, Microsoft just doesn't 'get'.

Re:You are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying the original article is right, but what exactly are you arguing here? The statement you chose to argue against said nothing about students. It simply says that the primary purpose was to "ready a document so that you could print it out." Then you say that Word is so much more because of all its pre-press features. That is the exact same thing as "readying a document so that you could print it out." It doesn't matter if you are professional or not, preparing a document for output is the same, formatting for the printer, whether that be inkjet, laser, or (prepress) offset printing.

Then you ramble on about Write, which still has nothing to do with the line you chose to argue against. To add icing, you then bring Office into the equation!

Re:You are wrong

[NoahsMyBro]

Your point might apply to some, but at least in my case you're off the mark. I bought my first PC in 1993. At the time I was almost completely ignorant about PCs, to the point that I assumed a word processor was included with the computer when I made the purchase. After setting my brand-new PC up and turning it on, I couldn't find anything to *do* with it. The machine had DOS (6.0, I think) and Win 3.1, but no other software, at all. I had term papers to write, so I returned to the store I'd bought the PC from, and spoke to the salesman I'd worked with. He explained to me that computers didn't 'come with' Word. He then explained to me that I could buy Microsoft Office for a couple of hundred bucks, or get MS Works for $70. I figured there had to be some qualitative difference, and asked repeatedly what the differences between Works and Office were. The answer I received was that Office was intended for professionals, and had extensive features that I'd likely never need or use, and Works was intended for home users with much lighter requirements. I was assured Works would be sufficient. So, I bought and installed Works. I then proceeded to work on a lengthy full-semester-project term paper. Very quickly I discovered that the Works word processor HAD NO UNDO FEATURE. There was no automatic UNDO capability at all, other than reverting to a previously saved version of your file. In my opinion, this was an unforgivable ommission. I immediately went out and bought MS Office (v4.3, I think), and haven't used Works since. Works may have been intended for home users or students, but it was critically crippled for me, and presumably others. FWIW, I happily used that version of Office up until my employer mandated Office 2003 company-wide a few years ago. (PS: The Preview window is stripping all line-breaks from my comment. Hopefully the posted comment is more readable than what I'm seeing. Using Opera 9.64, Win XP Pro SP2)

Re:You are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure we should take your opinion on word processors seriously, given that you seperate paragraphs with full stops.
 

Re:You are wrong

[Tom]

Word was targeted at professional writers...

Not really. It was targeted at amateur writers and professionals who had to write stuff as a side-aspect of their real work.

Word, even today, lacks a lot of what professional printing needs, and most publishers started accepting Word documents only because it had become so obiquitous everywhere else. Put the same text into Word and into a LaTeX template and print out both on a good printer, and even a novice can instantly spot the difference.

DTP (when layout matters) or TeX (when it doesn't) is what professional writers used until Word started corrupting things.

Re:You are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

All well and good, except that you can't read a Word document in Works. Thus, Works is pretty much useless.

Re:You are wrong

[hcdejong]

Word was targeted at professional writers... people writing books and technical manuals and the like. That's why it had as many pre-press features as it did, that's why it was as expensive as is was,

No. It was targeted at general office use, and got more and more features tacked on as Microsoft tried to increase the number of markets it could 'serve' with Word.
Pre-press features? Microsoft shot themselves in the foot from the get-go on that one. Having your document auto-reformat itself when you select a different printer means that Word documents are invariably greeted with derision and groaning by printing houses.
Technical manuals in Word? only if you want to kill the poor writer. There's no way to enforce consistent formatting, it's unstable when documents get large, there's no way to share information between documents, its graphics handling sucks, there's no way to publish variants (multiple similar books) from a single source, and I could go on. If Microsoft targeted Word at professional writers they did a job so spectacularly awful it makes Clippy seem brilliant by comparison.

hdj (technical writer)

Re:You are wrong

[RedK]

(PS: The Preview window is stripping all line-breaks from my comment. Hopefully the posted comment is more readable than what I'm seeing. Using Opera 9.64, Win XP Pro SP2)

(PS: You're using HTML Formatted instead of Plain old text. In HTML, line breaks are just whitespace and as such ignored. You need to use the <br> tag in order to perform line breaks. Your browser and OS have nothing to do with it)

Re:You are wrong

[NoahsMyBro]

I was originally using Plain Text mode. I only switched the posting-format to try and solve the problem. Obviously, nothing was solved.

Re:You are wrong

[Colonel Korn]

Word was targeted at professional writers...

Not really. It was targeted at amateur writers and professionals who had to write stuff as a side-aspect of their real work.

Word, even today, lacks a lot of what professional printing needs, and most publishers started accepting Word documents only because it had become so obiquitous everywhere else. Put the same text into Word and into a LaTeX template and print out both on a good printer, and even a novice can instantly spot the difference.

DTP (when layout matters) or TeX (when it doesn't) is what professional writers used until Word started corrupting things.

You're confusing "professional writer" with "professional publisher." Most writers don't do typesetting or layout work. That's another, separate job. Publishers wouldn't do well to use word, but writers do very well with it.

Re:You are wrong

[clone53421]

The CSS is sort of screwed up... paragraphs sit with no white space in-between in preview mode, but it'll be there when they post.

You have to use Plain Old Text mode, and it'll convert your whitespace into paragraphs. (You can still use the HTML tags if you want, though... and I frequently do.) Also note that to type the < and > symbols you have to use the HTML entities (&lt; and &gt;).

Re:You are wrong

[NoahsMyBro]

Thank you. I probably haven't posted since the change to the new site format.

I'll keep your post in mind going forward.

Re:You are wrong

[dkf]

Put the same text into Word and into a LaTeX template and print out both on a good printer, and even a novice can instantly spot the difference.

Not if you've persuaded Word to use Computer Modern fonts, they can't! (Most people really are that oblivious.)

Re:You are wrong

[Tom]

If you're just doing the plain-text writing, you almost certainly don't need and (until recently) very probably didn't use Word.

Writers I know (which is not a huge sample, I'll grant that), either use specialized tools like Scrivener (mentioned in the article, and coincidentally also my tool of choice) or something a lot simpler than Word. All the complexity of Word is not needed and in the way.

Re:You are wrong

[elcommandante]

Succinctly said and right on the money ! Word was an abortion when it first arrived and is still a pile of crap. What ever happened to Interleaf ? Now that was a word processor ! But Latex is still a divine gift from above (once you've gotten past the learning curve).

Re:You are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Word wasn't actually targeted at professional writers - it has always been sold into office markets where the customers are using it for business writing. There are orders of magnitude more people using word processing in this way than there are professional writers.

Historically there were actually quite a few specialised word processing tools designed for professional writers - two key examples would be FrameMaker and XYWrite. XYWrite was specifically designed for journalists and was considered to be the tool of choice in this space from about 1985 until the end of the 1990s. Framemaker was designed for large technical documents maintained by a team of technical authors - in the aerospace industry one can find examples of documents maintained with Framemaker that run to tens of thousands of pages.

As an aside, if you think Word is suitable for large documents try using FM and discover the joys of a system that properly handles documents assembled from multiple files and doesn't bugger up cross references.

Guy never heard of a monochrome laser

[Anonymous Coward]

I even got my mom one when she started complaining about her inkjet pricing and clogging, etc.

And you know what? Just like 99% of others they never use that photo printer again. Most people want basic, worry-free monochrome printing. Lasers give them that.

Color laser price points could change this in the future, but inkjets have sucked for a long long time.

Last Word

[mindbrane]

My last Word, Office Pro 2003. No one asks for it anymore. There was a time in the recent past when the majority of requests for submissions would be accompanied by a request for a .doc format, not anymore. Now it's just email me and most of the stuff stays in the cloud or in email format. HTML 5 will probably be the last nail driven in the infrastructure that makes the browser the be all and end all of office documentation. Excel is still deeply entrenched among the bean counters and the armchair quarterbacks running sports fantasy teams but, for my purposes, I've found OpenOffice and GNU Cash to be ample in all regards.

Re:Last Word

[colinrichardday]

Excel is still deeply entrenched among the bean counters and the armchair quarterbacks running sports fantasy teams but, for my purposes, I've found OpenOffice and GNU Cash to be ample in all regards.

Not Gnumeric?

Re:Last Word

[mindbrane]

Thanks for the pointer. I've not tried it, but do run Octave and R. Although, after plus 2 decades on PCs, I find pen and paper best suited to my needs.

Dumb premises make dumb conclusions

[grasshoppa]

The premise that because someone's purpose for using Office 20 years ago is relevant to today's office use is, frankly, moronic.

There are literally millions of ways people use the Office suite, and I'd hazard a guess that the printability of their work is a nice feature, but not the primary reason.

Stupid argument.

Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[edremy]

Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much

Somebody's not living in reality here. I *wish* people were printing things out less. I could use the ~$10K I spend out of my budget every year just to feed two printers in a lot better ways, but the print count continues to climb, every single year.

That's just for single sheet- our poster printers are seeing 2x to 3x growth in use every single year.

I don't have a textbook for my course- I use one $18 trade paperback and electronic reserves for the rest of the content- book chapters, magazine articles, etc. All digital. And most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[Knara]

This echos my experience. I have a whole floor full of people who print out more and more each year, for reasons that fall into 2 general categories:

1. When you're reading very long articles/papers, sitting at your desktop and reading them isn't easy on the eyes (or the rest of your body), and
2. Printing them out and storing them (along with the legal folks) allows you to CYA because you can confirm in 10 years that the typo in your product was due to a typo pulled from JAMA a decade previous.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[fotbr]

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that as a whole, people still prefer reading dead-tree copies rather than online copies. Sure, the various ebook readers are trying to create a new market, but compared to dead-tree-book-sales, they're a very small drop in a very large bucket.

And as a student, I *hated* reading online -- I couldn't easily take a highlighter or pen to the article, which was the way I planned out arguments or points I needed to make in various papers I had to write. It could be done, yes, but it wasn't as easy as clicking "print" and then using my existing methods.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[GiMP]

The solution is to encourage electronic distribution, charge students for printing. Put signs on the printers, "Save money: copy electronically.". Professors will almost certainly, at least in the beginning, need a quota for free printing and copying, after which they'll need to pay. You can then shrink that quota against a schedule.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[EvanED]

Somebody's not living in reality here.

As a current grad student, I'm not sure university is what you want to bring up as "reality". ;-)

And most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.

*raises hand*. I did that for all my paper-reading courses. Between a filing cabinet drawer and a couple stacks of papers on my desk, I've easily got 2 to 2-1/2 feet of printouts. Most of them are conference or journal papers, and most of those were printed for classes.

When someone gives me a (1) light (2) battery-less (3) easy-to-write-on (4) easy-to-read alternative to paper, maybe I'll stop doing that as much. In the meantime, it's nice to be able to read when I'm not at my desk (e.g. on the bus) while being able to easily make margin notes. I recently got a research tablet PC, and that solves (3), but not (1) (even though it's one of the smallest non-Mac-Air laptops out there) or (2). I am going to try to use this for notes for a while; we'll see how it goes. The Kindle solves (1) and part of (4), but the smaller screen just goes ahead and destroys that. The Kindle DX or whatever the larger version is called does better at (4) (though I do wish it has higher contrast than the little I've seen in real life, and the screen is still several inches smaller than an 8-1/2x11 sheet of paper so those conference papers will still be a little small, so between these issues paper is still well in the lead), but still doesn't do well at (3). And that's not to mention the cost issue -- if I lose a printout or whatever, I'm out having my notes. If I lose my Tablet, I probably owe the department a couple grand.

Sure, digital offers a number of benefits over paper too; but right now the balance is too-often in favor of "print it".

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[EvanED]

The solution is to encourage electronic distribution, charge students for printing.

That won't stop us, or at least won't stop me. I'll just bring in my personal printer. (A Xerox-made toner cartridge for my printer, the LaserJet 4+, gives 7000 pages for $40. A case of 10 reams of the paper at least our dept uses, Hammermill 20lb, 92 brightness paper, is another $40. That's 1.4 cents/page, or $2 to print a typical paper. That'd usually be worth it to me to not have to read it on a computer.) Or print from home. Sure, it'd save the OP his $10K/year on printers, but it wouldn't reduce my printouts, and would be at the cost of a little ill will if I thought the quota was unreasonably low or the per-page cost too high.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[EvanED]

That's 1.4 cents/page, or $2 to print a typical paper.

Sorry, I can't multiply. I'm off by a factor of 10. That should be 20, not $2. Just makes my "this would be worth it" point better. ($2 is borderline and would depend on the class.)

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[VGPowerlord]

And as a student, I *hated* reading online -- I couldn't easily take a highlighter or pen to the article, which was the way I planned out arguments or points I needed to make in various papers I had to write. It could be done, yes, but it wasn't as easy as clicking "print" and then using my existing methods.

eBook readers (or at least Kindle) let you take notes, or the student's lawsuit against Amazon regarding 1984 wouldn't be happening.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[farnsworth]

but the print count continues to climb, every single year.

How are things going over there at the US Mint?

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[vlm]

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but everytime I read the very tired old slashdot cliche:

When you're reading very long articles/papers, sitting at your desktop and reading them isn't easy on the eyes (or the rest of your body)

I always envision a pimply slashdotter whom spent his last pennies on a thousand dollar brand new graphics card and a giant flatscreen best measured in square yards, and now can only afford to sit on a flipped over five gallon bucket with a bare incandescent bulb hanging by the wires from the ceiling reflecting off the screen like staring into a searchlight. With optional sunlight reflecting off half the screen.

I don't claim its impossible to create an ergonomic disaster... but that does not prove the impossibility of a well designed workstation where its perfectly comfortable to read, watch videos, etc, off a screen, all day, every day. It all boils down to "I admit I live in an ergonomic disaster, therefore an ergonomic non-disaster cannot exist for anyone else".

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[tepples]

And most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.

Do all students have a convenient handheld reading device? Laptops aren't always the best answer for that. And if students are expected to read the materials outside of the Wi-Fi coverage area, do they have a $60 per month data plan?

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[edremy]

I've tried the Kindle on my eReserve stuff- since it's all scanned as PDF images, the Kindle can't easily resize/reflow the pages and for a lot of the stuff it's simply too small to read. (Our eReserve program doesn't OCR the documents since it's just waaay too time consuming.)

The DX version is slightly better here, but still not as good as a normal screen.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[tepples]

Printing them out and storing them (along with the legal folks) allows you to CYA because you can confirm in 10 years that the typo in your product was due to a typo pulled from JAMA a decade previous.

So does storing the original document electronically and printing out its SHA-256 value.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[sorak]

Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much

Somebody's not living in reality here. I *wish* people were printing things out less. I could use the ~$10K I spend out of my budget every year just to feed two printers in a lot better ways, but the print count continues to climb, every single year.

That's just for single sheet- our poster printers are seeing 2x to 3x growth in use every single year.

I don't have a textbook for my course- I use one $18 trade paperback and electronic reserves for the rest of the content- book chapters, magazine articles, etc. All digital. And most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.

Sorry about that. I'm not in your class, but I know the type you're talking about. It is much easier to study by printing out a hard copy, and finding a quiet, comfortable, place to read over the notes. If I had to do all my studying in front of a computer screen, I would have gone mad.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[vlm]

Printing them out and storing them (along with the legal folks) allows you to CYA because you can confirm in 10 years that the typo in your product was due to a typo pulled from JAMA a decade previous.

So does storing the original document electronically and printing out its SHA-256 value.

Don't forget to notarize the hash, either old fashioned print out, or an electronic signature, so you can prove it existed before the date of the notarization, rather than something you just made up today.

An option to minimize notary costs, to save time, is to make a document of hashes, hash it, and notarize the hash of hashes.

And to eliminate the ability to delete files or substitute in modified files, serialize your notarizations, and use the hash of the previous list of hashes, as the first hash on the new list of hashes. So, from last weeks notarized hash, you can simply step back in time thru lists of hashes, thus proving you didn't edit the old document.

It can get... complicated... but really no big deal. Unless someone gets really good at calculating hash collisions.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.

Have you considered sitting down with a prospective (not graduate/slave/willing-to-sell-kidneys-for-grant-money-or-recommendation) student and seeing how easy your materials are to use?

Also, paper is really easy to annotate. IIRC, research in college heavily consisted of going to libraries and coping a metric ton of material. You see, libraries get a little irate when you return their prize copy of Moby Dick with a few hundred scribbles in it. Nobody cares if you do a 'Half-Blood Prince' job on your 8x11 low-rez stack of stabled copies.

(Also getting hold of a book only to see someone with poor grammar skills tried to correct every other sentence - in a friken' fiction book - is pretty nasty.)

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[Knara]

Explain that to a paralegal. Its no mystery as to why the go-to solution for such things is "print it out and store it at Iron Mountain(etc)" is the go-to solution.

Are there technical alternatives? Yes. Are they common or likely to be common anytime in the near future? Nope.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

Splendid, just rolling in money!

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[TheRaven64]

If you're spending $10K/year on printing, maybe you should consider investing in some decent eInk readers? $10K will buy you around 20 decent eInk devices, and if you're buying in bulk you may be able to get a considerable discount. Something like the iLiad has a Watcom tablet built in so you can annotate PDFs easily and lasts more than a year. Maybe you could start by making some available in the labs for people to use but not remove? You could probably get the manufacturer to give you a discount and then subsidise them a bit more for students in exchange for removing their free printing privilege (e.g. buy an eBook reader at a 50% discount or get free printing). For members of staff, you'd almost certainly get a net win by buying them an eBook reader (you could probably get them to put it on their grant, too, so it doesn't come out of your budget) and use that instead of printing papers to read.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[TheRaven64]

I can't give you (2), but the iLiad gives to the other three. It's lighter than a printed journal paper (or not, depending on the page count, but it's close). It's got a wacom tablet, so you can write on it as easily as you can write with a pen (i.e. not very well in my case). It's about as easy to read as newsprint. The battery lasts for long enough that I read on it while in the airport lounge and then for a transatlantic flight, so as long as you can charge it overnight it won't run out of power. It's smaller than A4, but it's big enough that you can easily read a paper which uses the standard LaTeX margins on A4 or US letter paper. Mine has a cheap 1GB flash card in it, which is enough for all of the papers I've read and a load of books.

The one downside is that I can't use it to read in the bath. The humidity would probably be unhealthy for it, and I'd be very nervous about dropping it in and destroying an expensive gadget. Although, come to think of it, the flip-bar would work through a bag, so someone could probably make a waterproof case for it...

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[edremy]

We've been trying to do this for ages: most colleges I've worked at have some sort of pay-for-print scheme. It's usually something like 250 pages/semester free, after than $0.05/page- it lets people print the important stuff and hits the heavy users.

It's derailed here by politics- people don't want to charge "Yet another fee" to students since we're an already expensive private school. Of course, all those charges get moved right back into the stream- it's not free when they click to print out that 900 page article: my department eats the cost and either needs a budget increase or doesn't do something else that might benefit the students more. (And it's not free when they click print again on that 900 page article since it didn't print instantly the first time- the printer was digesting it. I really wish I was joking about that.)

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[ShakaUVM]

I don't claim its impossible to create an ergonomic disaster... but that does not prove the impossibility of a well designed workstation where its perfectly comfortable to read, watch videos, etc, off a screen, all day, every day. It all boils down to "I admit I live in an ergonomic disaster, therefore an ergonomic non-disaster cannot exist for anyone else".

I obviously read a lot of stuff on my computer (I'm in a forum, natch). However, I just can't stand reading books on my computer. I have electronic copies of a number of novels on here that I've always meant to read, but I can't do it. I think it more has to do with the unending scroll of hundreds of pages inside of Word/Acrobat that is the issue, rather than the ergonomics of it.

I can't stand Kindles either, but that has more to do with how they actually function in practice (the flash and lag between page turns).

For any long amounts of reading, give me dead trees.

My wife is the opposite though - she reads all of her novels electronically, in a web browser, and has been doing so since I met her back in 2001.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[fotbr]

And I noted that it could be done. It just couldn't be done as easily as clicking print.

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[Knara]

The folks I'm referring to tend to be professionals with advanced degrees who have spent large portions of their life reading and editing. They know how they like to work, and looking at a PDF on a monitor isn't that way. (I tend to read my docs on a computer screen, personally, but for longer reads, I like a comfy chair, a cup of , and a quiet room).

Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously

[EvanED]

It's lighter than a printed journal paper (or not, depending on the page count, but it's close).

14 oz is not bad; that's light enough to fit my request. That said... WTF kind of journal papers to you read that are nearly a pound? :-)

We're not talking a whole proceedings here, just a single article printed. A 500-paper ream of 20lb paper is 5lb; you'd need 175 pages (88 sheets) to get to 14 oz. That's a good 13 or 14 conference papers. ...it's big enough that you can easily read a paper which uses the standard LaTeX margins on A4 or US letter paper

What about double column format with narrow margins though? I mostly-randomly pulled out 10 papers from a filing cabinet drawer; 8 were typeset in this format. 1 was typeset in single-column format with relatively narrow margins, and 1 appears to have been "typeset" in Word, with inch or inch-and-a-half margins. There are a few papers in LNCS format (single column, wide margins), but these are by far the exception.

Looks like the same company (iRex)'s DS1000S has a larger screen (10.2") and isn't much heavier. It's still almost 30% smaller dimensionwise than a letter paper though.

You also say that it's as easy to read as newsprint, but newsprint still doesn't have the contrast of standard printer paper.

I'm still not convinced this satisfies "easy to read" for academic articles. It's close though... and the fact that they got the wacom in there is quite impressive. In a few years I think things may be different, but I think paper is still a pretty clear winner for me for now.

Archival Quality?

[Fractal Dice]

As long as there is a program around 100 years from now that can still read the archives of stuff I write today, I'm happy.

There's nothing so frustrating as pulling up a document I wrote 20 years ago to get some quotes and finding that no modern editor understands the format, forcing me to hack through the binary to pull out my work.

Re:Archival Quality?

[tepples]

There's nothing so frustrating as pulling up a document I wrote 20 years ago to get some quotes and finding that no modern editor understands the format

That's an example of why it's best to save documents in a publicly documented format. This can be HTML, ODF, or even RTF. As long as a format is well documented, you can run some sort of Free program to convert your document to HTML (or its successor) and then style it back into at least a readable form with CSS (or its successor). Practically, there's more danger than you'll lose the ability to read a physical format.

It is what it is

[travisb828]

Word along with its other MS Office friends is installed on every desktop at work. Everyone knows how to use it, and because of this its the standard. People use it to write documents. The most important thing is that Word is used to write official looking documents. These documents are emailed around, posted on various sharepoints, copy-pasted into something else, and revised.

Just think of this part in the Hudsucker Proxy except in MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2QlitH4nYY

DOSBOX + WordPerfect 5.1

[starglider29a]

Nuff said.

(Except the unspoken part about finding a Mac that can run DosBox that can still read the WP install floppies.)

Re:DOSBOX + WordPerfect 5.1

[clone53421]

How do you print?

Re:DOSBOX + WordPerfect 5.1

[TheRaven64]

DOSBox can't print, but WordPerfect had a print-to-file option. You can use this with a generic PostScript printer driver to get a PostScript file and then print this with Preview from OS X (or just convert it to PDF for online distribution). You may also be able to find a PDF printer driver for WordPerfect, but I've not looked.

Re:DOSBOX + WordPerfect 5.1

[starglider29a]

That is an excellent question. I don't. At least not in that mode.

The reason that WordPerfect 5.1 is great for writing is that it is only words. No WYSIWYG. No mouse. One huge doc with only a hint of pagination. It allows a direct connection from the brain to the screen, with the fingers as adapters. Otherwise, I get constant barrages of spelling and grammar cues (which I CAN turn off, but then what's the point?)

You spew what you are thinking onto the screen, save it, spell check it (in batch, not real time), save it.

By the time yer ready to print it, you know what it says, but not what it looks like. Writers should only care about words. Formatting is for someone else, even if it's you with another hat. How many times have I had my wordflow broken trying to get the bullets to behave?

The God's truth is, that I don't do this. But after I use Word for a while trying to write a book (I do) or a proposal (I do), I WISH that I were using the old way.

Re:DOSBOX + WordPerfect 5.1

[TheRaven64]

But after I use Word for a while trying to write a book (I do) or a proposal (I do), I WISH that I were using the old way.

Why do you use Word to write a book? Doesn't your publisher let you submit camera-ready PDFs? Mine does, so I use Vim to enter text with LaTeX markup. It's all semantic, so if I want bullets I just use the correct markup for an itemised list and then worry about formatting later, typically when I get to the end of a section or chapter.

Re:DOSBOX + WordPerfect 5.1

[clone53421]

The reason that WordPerfect 5.1 is great for writing is that it is only words. No WYSIWYG. No mouse.

Correction, WP 5.1 most definitely did support the mouse. It was just normally hidden unless you moved it.

Missing the point

[wookaru]

I RTFA and its not about switching word processors. Its about moving beyond people editing files one at a time and passing them around - in printed or email form. Basically, the author just discovered the "Magical World of Wiki" and has gotten his office to adopt a wiki as their documentation system.

Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology made the front page of /. is beyond me...

Ooooo BTW guys, have you seen that video of a dancing baby?! Its ROTFLOL!

Re:Missing the point

[rootofevil]

Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology [citation needed] made the front page of /. is beyond me...

Re:Missing the point

[sorak]

I RTFA and its not about switching word processors. Its about moving beyond people editing files one at a time and passing them around - in printed or email form. Basically, the author just discovered the "Magical World of Wiki" and has gotten his office to adopt a wiki as their documentation system.

Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology made the front page of /. is beyond me...

Was it published 14 years ago?

Re:Missing the point

[Tom]

Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology made the front page of /. is beyond me...

Because 14 years ago, you couldn't have deployed that technology in an office and moved everyone including the secretary to use it. Today you can, and that's the news.

Actually, it's still a bit of early adopter thing, strange as that may sound. The combination will become really popular when IBM (or some other big name) picks it up, calls it something buzzwordy, and sells it to the clueless execs for a ridiculous amount of money.

Re:Missing the point

[TheRaven64]

It was written 14 years ago, but then the author printed it and left it somewhere. Recently, someone scanned it in and uploaded it to a wiki.

Re:Missing the point

[wookaru]

According to wikipedia :-) The first wiki was released in 1995. But they really didnt get popular till wikipedia broke big in 2001.

Re:Missing the point

[bcrowell]

I RTFA and its not about switching word processors. Its about moving beyond people editing files one at a time and passing them around - in printed or email form. Basically, the author just discovered the "Magical World of Wiki" and has gotten his office to adopt a wiki as their documentation system.

Right, "Word" should never have even been in the title. The whole article would have made more sense with s/Word/a word processor/g.

Wikis are great for the kind collaborative editing he's talking about, but I suspect that his ability to get his office to adopt a wiki was influenced strongly by the fact that they're techies. I had a similar situation at the school where I teach physics. We have a stockroom full of apparatus, and a stockroom clerk who keeps track of it all. She put it in an Excel spreadsheet, and we then had pretty much all the hassles that he described in the article -- the awkwardness of trying to use MS Office for group editing of documents, when that's not what MS Office was fundamentally designed for. The spreadsheet ended up being incomplete, inaccurate, and useless. I set up a wiki, and converted all the data into wiki format, but had zero luck getting the lab tech or any of the faculty to actually start using the wiki. I think it was a combination of the fact that it was unfamiliar technology with the fact that it came off like I was trying to make extra work for other people.

It would also have been interesting to hear whether they considered Google Docs. Since they're techies, the disadvantages of Google Docs (privacy, lock-in, vulnerability to Google's whims, proprietary software) probably outweighed the disadvantages of a wiki (needing to set up your own wiki server and maintain the wiki on an ongoing basis). But for non-techies, I suspect the idea of setting up a wiki on a server would have been a no-go.

Re:Missing the point

[IntlHarvester]

The combination will become really popular when IBM (or some other big name) picks it up, calls it something buzzwordy, and sells it to the clueless execs for a ridiculous amount of money.

Yeah, the buzzword is "collaborative groupware" aka Lotus Notes. :P

Re:Missing the point

[peterpi]

Because 14 years ago, half of slashdot weren't even born.

Re:Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful, people might stone you with C64ies for this comment...if you are lucky. If you are unlucky people will bring VAXen.

The printed page

[Anonymous Coward]

As a student I needed to print out essays so I could hand them to my instructor. In the office I needed to print out reports so that I could hand them to my supervisor. The end goal was always the same: I printed out something to give to someone more important than me, who would evaluate it and, if I was lucky, give it back to me at some indeterminate time in the future.

I'm not sure how long ago Jeremy here graduated, but as a 2007 graduate, I regularly printed papers for peer review or final submission to the professor. Now, I may be a bit of an oddity since I was an English major, but I doubt it. Nearly every day I'll print out another draft that a coworker has hastily thrown together and comment on weak points, highlight spelling or grammatical errors, make suggestions, or add notes to myself. I bring these sheets with me to informal meetings where I review the content with a subject matter expert and make more comments/revisions.

If the power of Word lies in it's ability to serve as the digital go-between for paper, I need that strength now as much as ever. Print isn't dead, friends, its role is just chaining. It's a strong compliment instead of an end all be all. Until digital interactions allow me to quickly mark up a document without using a specialized interface (keyboard, mouse, Wacom pen, etc.), I'm not going anywhere. Oh yeah, even if tablets make leaps and bounds, the physical properties of the printed page will keep me using it. Light weight, thin, able to be crumpled, folded, easily transported and interchanged in the physical world.

PDFs first, Word second...

[Lonewolf666]

Jeremy Reimers' article is about systems that make collaboration easier.

Considering only that aspect, PDFs would need to die even faster than MS Word, because the installed base of PDF editors is not even close to that of Word. So you cannot realistically expect that the guy who receives you document can edit it and send it back with annotations.

MS Word actually does a halfway decent job there. Except for the occasional format change that spells trouble for owners of old Word versions, and the change tracking that cannot compete with a real version control system (over multiple versions it becomes a real mess).

But Open Office wins on the format change topic, because upgrades are free. So you can always upgrade without much hassle if you get stuff in a new ODF version. It might eventually win on change tracking too, if things like http://sourceforge.net/projects/odfsvn/ are successful. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried that one)

But the real question is if we shouldn't drop the "document to send back and forth" paradigm. Jeremy Reimers reports that his company had good results from moving to a wiki.

Personally, I think something Wiki-like with more WYSIWYG and GUI editing might offer the easiest migration path. Jeremy Reimers reports that he didn't have much luck with that, but I guess that was a case of weak implementation.
The technology exists, and I don't see why it would be impossible to make it work smoothly in a wiki.

Re:PDFs first, Word second...

[TemporalBeing]

Considering only that aspect, PDFs would need to die even faster than MS Word, because the installed base of PDF editors is not even close to that of Word. So you cannot realistically expect that the guy who receives you document can edit it and send it back with annotations.

Except there is a flaw there. PDFs are consistently used in the fields it was designed for - and most notably the publishing industry. Want to publish a book? Sure you may work with doc/docx for a while, but near the end of the cycle it goes to PDF which is what the print operator uses to generate the book itself - it's what the printer hardware understands.

Word has no such specialty fields that would keep it around. It doesn't provide for such specific details to be good for the publication industry or any other industry. It's display is very monitor/resolution dependent.

Re:PDFs first, Word second...

[Anonymous Coward]

But Open Office wins on the format change topic, because upgrades are free. So you can always upgrade without much hassle if you get stuff in a new ODF version.

Open office 3: Requirements
Requires Windows 2000 or newer. Or OS X Tiger or newer. For users of Windows 98, or 10.3, or what have you, that are otherwise content with their "old" operating system, and previous version of application software, this isn't a "Free Upgrade" if they have to upgrade their operating system.
Open Office is also a pig on older systems.

Re:PDFs first, Word second...

[tirnacopu]

Are there ANY PDF editors? Not even Adobe sells one. I'm talking about an application that accepts an existing .pdf file, allows you to edit it freely with rich format tools, and saves the output. Do not quote quick fix tools like annotations, think of an example that allows you to take a 2-column multi-page document with headers and footers and transform it into a 3-column one.

Re:PDFs first, Word second...

[Lonewolf666]

OK, but that is a pretty extreme case.
On the Windows side, we're talking about systems that are over 8 years old (assuming that machines from 2001 onwards came with XP). I don't know many people who still use one of these.
For Mac OS X, version 10.3 came out on October 24, 2003 which is a bit more recent. But still almost 6 years.

The problem with Word file formats is a lot more present: Office Open XML (DOCX) was introduced with Word 2007. Obviously older versions have a problem with that.

Re:PDFs first, Word second...

[clone53421]

PDFs hold text as lines, not paragraphs or "text boxes".

There's no difference, in a PDF, between a "soft" and a "hard" carriage return (the line just ends). Thus, it's very difficult to re-flow the paragraphs... all you have is a series of lines of text. Is the next line part of the same paragraph (soft carriage return), or a full line-break (hard carriage return)? For that matter, you also have to differentiate between the hard carriage return (<br>, for comparison's sake) and the paragraph break (<p>). This is difficult. (For that matter, you also have to figure out, at the end of the page, what is part of the page footer / page header, and what is actually text that flows from one page to the next. Ever noticed, when copying text that spanned 2 pages of a PDF, that you ended up with the page number stuck smack-dab in the middle of your paragraph?)

That's the main reason, or so I've heard.

Re:PDFs first, Word second...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

The (easy, by the way) method to achieve the sort of flexibility you are requesting is to use LyX to generate your document, then save it as PDF as well as LaTeX. You can easily bundle the source with the compiled PDF. If you or someone else wants to edit the document, you edit the LaTeX in a nice GUI, and recompile the PDF. Moving from a 2-column to 3-column format is as simple (and fast!) as changing which style sheet you use. Now this won't work if you are sent a PDF file by itself, obviously, but for all internal documents where policy can require bundling the document source with its output, it would be fantastic. The trick to making it work is realizing Acrobat isn't the only way to get a great looking PDF.

Hmmm

[Wovel]

Huh?

Self-indulgent belly button gazing

[mschuyler]

For him, maybe. But I doubt the majority of the populace is going to switch to a wiki any time soon. Having started with some unremembered text editor for the Apple ][, the switched to Zardax (Does ANY one remember Zardax?) and flirted with Wordstar I finally settled on Word 1.0, when it came on two 5.25" disks and was shipped with a mouse. I haven't looked back since. It has become way too bloated with way too many features, IMO, but the fact is it is a journey-level program that I could not imagine being without. I know the MS bashers are already pointing out that Open Office and others are Word's equal in every way. I have to politely disagree. Try doing tables and indexes on a book length manuscript and you'll see what I mean.

Maybe the others HAVE changed for the better, but at a certain point it becomes a productivity issue. I can't afford to slow down and learn a different system any more than I can afford to learn how to type 'correctly' with more than two fingers. I type 60 wpm with two. Why would I want to slow myself down? 60 is functional. That's what I need.

I also notice that when another program is discussed, it's always couched in terms of Word. The MS basher will say, 'Open Office is every bit as good as Word.' In other words, Word is the benchmark by which others are measured. The nerd can certainly sit down and tell me feature for feature why something else is 'better,' but in the time he takes to do that I can have several chapters written.

In any case, the original article is talking about word processing in general and is using Word as the example. It could just as well be Open Office. Word and all its wannabes are 'Wordish' in their approach, so perhaps the argument shouldn't be about Word itself, the MS program, but about Wordish programs in general. Does his argument have any greater merit then?

I don't think so. The fact is that Wordish gives you nearly complete control of the appearance of your document. These other alternatives, from wiki to blogspot, from html to css, impose style upon you that is difficult to 'correct.' You wind up accepting the default simply because it is too hard to fight it. I think it's kind of funny to hear people complain about the monoculture of Word (they mean Wordish), and then claim wiki or Wordpress are their choices. You're kidding me, right? If you want versatility and choices, Wordish is your guy.

This fellow lives in a very web centric environment and perhaps for him his choice is correct, but that does not equate to the world in general. Most people using Wordish don't know Ars Technica exists or why. They don't like to read from the screen, and they don't live on slashdot either, which is why his argument is faulty.

Except for books, it's emacs

[wonkavader]

I completely agree with him. I use emacs for everything I can. When I have to write something for people who use word, I write in emacs then import into word. When I write for books or other heavy layout stuff, I'm forced to use word or openoffice, and as I write this, I find myself getting more more interested in LaTex.

Re:Except for books, it's emacs

[bcmm]

Word can open plain text files. Last time I checked, it didn't care if the filename happened to in .doc (to cause windows to use word to open the file).

If it isn't formatted, the solution for sending things to people who can't use notepad should probably be "mv".

I have a theory...

[neonprimetime]

Why did this end up on the front page of /.?

i believe /. is automated in such a fashion that if you submit a story that contains the text "MS Word" and "die", it skips the moderators and is automatically posted under the "ScuttleMonkey" account.

Re:I have a theory...

[krelian]

Slashdot was always the best place to get news about Microsoft.

Re:I have a theory...

[n30na]

Really, it's probably not even 'MS Word' but simply 'MS.' 'Apple' too, probably.

Word sucks, but it doesn't

[OrangeTide]

As long as you don't step outside of the capabilities of Word and WYSIWYG word processing in general (I am avoiding calling these systems an "editor") then they do just fine. Millions of people put together short to medium length documents on Word all the time, they didn't die from it. And they didn't find it so difficult that they had to search for a better way.

The learning curve to systems like LaTeX is very steep, but you have a tremendous amount of control over the formatting and layout. With WYSIWYG it can be a bit mysterious at times what formatting was applied where. In many ways I find structured documents more powerful than macro driven typesetting systems, although their features can also complement one another (like using DocBook or XSLT to generate TeX).

Personally I don't think printing versus not printing is some fundamental paradigm shift that it affects the popularity of Word. I think it is more because of the emergence of new software packages (like wikis, blogs, etc) combined with people being far more computer literate than they were 10-20 years ago.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions of people contract HIV/AIDS all the time, and don't die from it.

Source? I believe the mortality rate of AIDS is 100%

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[relguj9]

LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out.

It can handle very long documents just fine if you use the program appropriately.

Change the view to "Outline" to get a glimpse of some of the larger document capabilities and how to really control the formatting (which you can do, it's just a learning curve to figure it out). You can actually have subsections of a master document stored on separate servers with different permission levels for editing. I've helped make and used 1000 page manuals in Word without much trouble.

Combine that with how well it really does integrate with Excel and how easy it is to bring images in, etc... and I don't see Word going anywhere anytime soon.

Sorry to sound like a Microsoft fanboi or whatever, but Word is a more powerful tool than most give it credit for or bother to figure out, since a lot of its capability is kind of "hidden" to make it user friendly out of the box.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[turbidostato]

"Source? I believe the mortality rate of AIDS is 100%"

Well, it isn't. In fact, AIDS direct mortality rate is about 0% since you die from other oportunistic diseases. On the other hand even considering what you meant instead of what you effectively wrote, 100% would be *without treatment* and even then mortality is not that of a black mamba: without treament AIDS will kill you *eventually* not in five minutes or tomorrow. So I think, yes, you can make some sensible comparation between AIDS and Ms Word.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[elrous0]

The mortality rate of humans is 100%.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The learning curve to systems like LaTeX is very steep

Not to mention to install a system like LyX you have to set aside several hours - It makes installing Windows XP, Microsoft Office and Visual Studio on a laptop look fast by comparison.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[pwizard2]

The learning curve to systems like LaTeX is very steep

That's what tools like Lyx are for.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[clone53421]

Augh, you missed a perfectly good chance to use the "correlation is not causation" meme!

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'm sorry, but its hard to take you seriously if you want to compare the power of MS Word to that of LaTex. Agreed that LaTex has a harder learning curve, but then flying a supersonic jet takes longer to learn than riding a bicycle. You don't sound like a Microsoft fanboi, but then again it seems that perhaps you don't know much of that which you speak.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Lyx and Kile and TeXmacs (as well as extended Emacs) are all excellent tools for dealing with LaTex.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[serviscope_minor]

LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out. ...

You can actually have subsections of a master document stored on separate servers with different permission levels for editing

And this is why many of us perfer the unix way. LaTeX, for instance does nothing except typeset documents. If you want whacky permissioning and etc, then you can use one of many fine version control systems. As an added bonus, that knowledge can be re-used for programs and so on.

One tool one job, etc.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[commodore64_love]

LaTex? Isn't that the stuff my wife wears to bed? But seriously, I'm not really following this conversation. I just use a word processor to type stuff and then print it. Sometimes I don't even bother with that, since a quick scrawl in NotePad is sufficient. I, being a typical computer user, don't really care about the exotics of type-setting or desktop publishing or whatever.

That said I'm going to take a trip down memory lane:

#1 RUNscript - a word processor I literally typed out of a magazine into my Commodore 64 (kilobyte) computer. Yes kids we used to type our own programs! Time-consuming but educational. It served me well for turning-in my book reports, since the teachers didn't mind if the typefaces were pixelated, so long as it was neat and readable.

#2 GEOSwrite - turned my Commodore into something akin to a Macintosh with different fonts and sizes. Not bad for a machine that only cost 1/10th as much and had 1/8th as much RAM.

#3 WordPerfect Commodore Amiga and WordPerfect Mac - This was my favorite word processor, since it was easy-to-use and yet powerful thanks to macros. I used it continuously for almost ten years until I finally sold my soul to Microsoft (wipes away tears). - Laserprinter - My school bought its first laserprinter circa 1993. This is worthy of mention because the laserprinter was revolutionary, allowing people to eliminate the pixeled output from dot-matrix impact printers or deskjets, and replace it with pages that looked as professional as a textbook. It cost $2 a page! but dropped quickly.

#4 Microsoft Word 97 - Ugh. WordPerfect always felt "intuitive" to me and easy to use, but I've never got the hang of MS Word. I still have problems making a simple table of contents, much to my boss's annoyance - "What do you mean you just TYPED the table of contents?" "It was easier." "Wrong; you do this and this and..." (one hour later of using obscure menus and settings) "See how easy that was?" "Not really; it took you an hour. I did the same thing in five minutes."

#5 OpenOffice - I've been experimenting and after Word97 is no longer acceptable for submission to my boss, OpenOffice will probably be my next destination, not because it's great but because free is cheaper than giving Mickeysoft 200 dollars. I've come full-circle from a "free" type-in word processor to a "free" downloadable one.

The End. Wake up. Lecture over. (wink)

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Youngbull]

well you don't sound as much of a MS word fanboy as a MS software salesman... There are better options at lower prices, that are open source (such as open office.)

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[flewp]

He doesn't seem to be actually comparing the two. All he said that was LaTeX sounded pretty powerful, but that Word also has some powerful features. Nowhere did he seem to say one is more powerful than the other, or compare anything between the two.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[EggyToast]

One tool one job

I'd hate to see what your kitchen looks like.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

[MS Word] can handle very long documents just fine if you use the program appropriately.

In my experience, the longer the Word document, the more likely it is to become corrupt. Again in my experience, the likelihood of document corruption has increased with every new version of MS Word after version 5.1 for Mac / 1.0 for Windows.

One shouldn't have to concentrate on using a program correctly in order to avoid bad things happening. Good software doesn't do bad things, even if the user does stupid things.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[OrangeTide]

It can handle very long documents just fine if you use the program appropriately.

LaTeX has been used for typesetting multi-volume manuals. You could do an entire encyclopedia set easily with LaTeX because of the way it scales. Word tends to run out of RAM or get sluggish on very large documents. It also doesn't provide you the same level to manage many thousands of pages. Just dealing with the bibliography of a 1000 page paper can be a whole lot of work on Word.

Yes, Word has a bunch of advanced features nobody uses. LaTeX is just a collection of advanced features with no easy ones, I'm not sure if that means it is better or worse.

I did give Word quite a bit of credit. It's not the useless program that people make it out to be. And most of us don't write more than 200-400 page documents (I'd call that a short document, medium sized would be a novel length) once we're out of school, so for business use it seems a fairly useful tool.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah,
My team tried this - and it took two weeks to fix the document every time we updated it.
We called in the tech writer (who was damn good by the way, he knew how to work around most key issues). His advice was

- Don't use word for any large documents
- Word in general is an unreliable tool

I most wholeheartedly agree with him.
Btw, I want my 80hrs back for generating a TOC for a single version of a single document!!!!!

AC

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[gknoy]

It can handle very long documents just fine if you use the program appropriately.

What do you consider "long"? 100 pages? 200 pages? 500 pages? 800 pages?

I know a technical editor for a team of engineers. All of their reports are written (and edited) in Word. The several-hundred-page documents fail frequently enough to be a problem. When I say "fail", I mean that either Word crashes, or the document is corrupted and effectively unrecoverable enough to have wasted dozens of man-hours of labor on the document. Laying that at the feet of the users is NOT acceptible: it's a sign of program failure. Why is a 500-page document less stable than most 30-page documents? Why is it POSSIBLE for a user to "do it wrong"?

Word sucks much more often for Large Documents than a real document editing system.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[mapsjanhere]

Odd, the article would be much more fitting if it would ask for the end of LaTex, since the best part of LaTex was making beautiful printed documents. Word per se can't hold a candle in that respect, but the whole office suite, with the ability to have integrated excel parts to edit a graph on the fly, and then powerpoint the essentials, is pretty unbeatable as a package. As for the old "it's too expensive" argument, the real cost is in support and training, not in initial licensing cost. As such, converting a MS shop into an OO shop is just as expensive as keeping MS and buying upgrades every 5 - 10 years.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

It's silly to even compare the two, they are very different tools with only some common features, and the usual use-cases for Word are entirely inappropriate for LaTex.

LaTex users are generally too autistic to realize this, however.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[CorSci81]

I recently took on a new role coordinating documentation of a rather large software package. Having to work with multiple authors who have no real training in technical writing, I was searching for a way to avoid the nightmare of multi-author long Word documents. LaTeX was one solution I considered, but the learning curve would have been too steep for the other authors. In the end we settled on using Adobe FrameMaker and RoboHelp (since our manual also had to be turned into application help). We're a couple months in and I must say I'm very pleased. It's difficult for authors to do any strange formatting hacks, and dividing the work into sections is extremely straightforward. It also looks like this will be much easier to maintain over the long-term than a Word document ever would have been.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[colinrichardday]

LaTeX's integration with Gnumeric and Postgresql probably is not as good as the integration in Microsoft Office, but LaTeX has its own presentation macros.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[colinrichardday]

Why would it be inappropriate to write business letters in LaTeX (I'm assuming that's a use case for MS Word)?

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[michael_cain]

The learning curve to systems like LaTeX is very steep, but you have a tremendous amount of control over the formatting and layout.

Or in some cases, much less control over the formatting and layout, which can be a good thing.

Many years ago, there was a development project at Bell Labs so large that there was an entire department for maintaining the technical documentation. The department head wanted to dump troff and the macros then in use and go to WYSIWYG. To justify his decision, he had the research people set up a controlled experiment with two groups of new people that received equal training in their respective tools. The troff people were about 25% more productive than WYSIWYG, and had significantly fewer formatting errors. When the psych people got done with their interviews and examining keystroke logs, they concluded that with formatting control available to them, almost everyone spends 20-25% of their time futzing with fonts, line and page breaks, etc. All of which is wasted time until very close to the end of the process.

Personally, when creating new text, I feel like I'm more productive if I can write flat files with a mark-up language, because I do get distracted by an ugly line break in a WYSIWYG tool. But I'm an old UNIX geek, and I don't expect the rest of the world to ever go away from WYSIWYG.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[shaitand]

On a similar note, outlook also fails with no more than a few thousand emails.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[pz]

LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out.

There are two major issues I hit every single time I use MS Word (and given that I'm in a branch of Biology for my professional life, this usage is very frequent):

(1) It has a lot of bugs. Cross references get scrambled or just disappear. Moving figures around screws up the figures. The layout tools never seem to make sense, or to do rational things. It needlessly repaginates far too often. When I hit "PgDn" it goes not-quite-but-sometimes-almost a full page down. Fonts get continually screwed up. Formatting gets continually lost or weirdly modified.

(2) The default behavior on nearly every control is wrong. Not just a little wrong, but so brain-dead as to leave me often screaming: "in what world view is that the right thing to do, in what universe does that make sense?" I can feel my blood start to boil just writing this. When I start a new document, I half expect the language to be reset to Ancient Sanskrit (OK, that part about Sanskrit was hyperbole, but I can often be found screaming at MS Word because of the brain-dead defaults).

Contrast this with a program of at least comparable complexity like Adobe Photoshop. I know both of those programs about equally well -- which is to say casually. I think I've seen a bug in Photoshop maybe twice, perhaps three times total. Ever. (With MS Word, it's three every 10 minutes.) While the default behavior on tools might not be the best, at least they MAKE SENSE. With MS Word, I have the deep feeling that the program is fundamentally unknowable because there are no guiding principles to its operation. In contrast, with Photoshop, I suspect that with sufficient patience, I can learn to do amazing things because there is a fundamental organization waiting to be discovered.

There's no fundamental reason MS Word can't be a great program. All it needs is a pioneering visionary to thrash it down to a working core, to develop some well thought out guiding principles for how to organize the interface, to mercilessly eliminate the rampant bugs, to study how the current interface fails, and to rebuild it from that working core back up to a well-engineered product. But will that happen? Unlikely.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[JohnBailey]

One tool one job I'd hate to see what your kitchen looks like

At a guess, very efficient.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[gardyloo]

the usual use-cases for Word are entirely inappropriate for LaTex.

So what are the usual use-cases? Especially with something like LyX for the front-end, LaTeX is perfectly appropriate for letters, memos, books, scripts, code snippets, manuals, brochures (though layout isn't perfectly easy for the latter).

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[bigngamer92]

The worst formatting problems come with pictures. Nothing is worse than trying to get Word to format a mostly text document that then becomes a half text/half pictures and then you start adding text boxes and "drawing borders" into the equation...

Really a bunch of features 95% of users won't touch and making the interface confusing for 80% of your users, is not as important as fixing these formatting problems.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

So I think, yes, you can make some sensible comparation between AIDS and Ms Word.

Sig! But not mine.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Cloud K]

I've had a reasonable go at learning LaTeX myself, and can do a fair bit with the help of LyX, which at least makes writing a document feel a little less like programming. It's brilliant for documentation - with LyX it's actually easier than Word. Word is a bit clunky with writing multi-section documents with cross-references and keeping everything up to date - it especially has the habit of randomly deciding to turn a section header into a paragraph and vice versa of its own accord (to the user's point of view anyway).

The thing is, you probably wouldn't ride a supersonic jet down the road to work :) For a quick letter or memo or something, it's overkill, I'd just use Word or something lighter than that. Probably Openoffice, as the license fee for Word is also overkill if you just want to type a few letters.

Where LaTeX/LyX falls down is refined control over output formatting. Actually, to say that it falls down is wrong - it's not even the tool for the job. It's like saying a spoon falls down as an implement for eating spaghetti. LaTeX is designed for letting people forget about formatting and do the best job it can based on your structure/markup. Exact layouts can be done with effort, but a lot of it, compared to a more visual system like Word (or better, some sort of page layout app). For something like a CV, where presentation matters almost as much as content (a fact of life, even if we disagree with it) it's too much work.

Always use the correct tool for the job, and certainly add LaTeX to your repertoire, even if you "cheat" and use LyX :)

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[massysett]

Yes, thank you. Some of the other posts are talking about how powerful Word can be, but it is just awful. We use it at work to generate medium-sized documents (often around 100 single-spaced pages.) As far as I can tell, the people who actually set the documents up for distribution to the public (they aren't printed anymore, at least not by us) just take the Word documents that we work on, make a PDF, and post it to the Web site.

I've noticed all the bugs you point out and they drive me crazy. There are a couple others I can think of:

* collaboration features. Sometimes when using text boxes along with the comment boxes, the comment boxes pop up in the most bizarre places--nowhere near the text they are supposed to correspond to. Also, sometimes when using the "track changes" feature, some document editing features are stunted. Sometimes for example, pressing "Delete" while using track changes just does absolutely nothing. Move the cursor around, hit backspace, try again.

* References like footnotes can bounce around from one page to another. A footnote reference might be on one page, while the footnote text itself is on the next page. Then of course, my boss asks me to fix it! Sometimes I want to say that it is not my job to wrangle with the word processor.

I hit Word bugs literally each and every day. My first reaction is always "this program is way too expensive to be this buggy." For the big bucks that Word costs, it should be better. I don't think word processors are a great idea to begin with. I want to focus on what I am writing, not on formatting it. But maybe a word processor would be OK if it weren't the buggy mess that is Microsoft Word.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[seeker_1us]

It can handle very long documents just fine if you use the program appropriately.

No, it can't.

I'm extremely proficient in LaTeX and Word. I know those "powerful abilities" that you are talking about. I use them.

I had to write a 300 page book in Word (not my choice to use Word). The program is buggy as hell and those bugs start showing up heavily when your docs become big. Styles changing on their own. Margins changing on their own. My favorite bug, which took an entire night to fix, was when the @#$%ing program decided to change the font of every single one of my captions to symbol.

Near the end, I was spending more time dealing with the bugs than writing.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

One tool one job, etc.

tell that to emacs author.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[jma05]

And consequently, the user base of LaTeX to that of MS Word is just about proportional to the ownership of super sonic jet pilots to that of bicycle users :-).

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Lord of Hyphens]

Do you have a source for this story/study? I'd like to read it and use it to make a case for teaching LaTeX in my college (MS Word is the primary method of putting together docs here).

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[dbIII]

Simply becuase you can't teach a temp how to use LaTeX in half an hour (or maybe you could with the only the bits you'd need for a business letter), however they theoretically learned how to use MS Word in school and if they didn't they can cick on pretty pictures until something happens.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

So your main beef with Word is that it's a Microsoft product? I can relate to that.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

makes for an overflowing toolbox

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Gorobei]

That is a rather clever comment.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[7 digits]

I was about to tell you that afaik, circa 2006, framemaker was a dead product, but I checked and, hooray, Adobe changed its mind and released new versions. Great news.

Framemaker is the way to go for tech doc, IMO. I was so sad that Adobe was letting the product dying...

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[bursch-X]

Adobe comes from a Mac background, that's where they started to make software. They care about UI design. Microsoft comes from a salesman background. They give a fuck about anything once the deal is done. Two paradigms.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[LordEq]

One tool one job

I'd hate to see what your kitchen looks like

At a guess, very efficient.

If so, then it's an enormous—dare I say cavernous—kitchen. It would take a whole lot of room to efficiently organize and store all those single-use devices. There's a reason Alton Brown preaches the hatred of unitaskers.

Of course, comparing software to kitchen gadgets is pure folly anyway. "One tool, one job" makes sense for software, but not so much for most tasks in the physical world. Today's hard drives would be analogous to a far more spacious kitchen than even the richest of us could ever hope to have, and stringing together a series of single-use commands to accomplish computing tasks is altogether different than fumbling about with a handful of specialized utensils while trying to prepare dinner.

With all the ongoing debate about the current screwed state of copyright and "intellectual property", I thought it was a well-understood fact around here that information is different from material goods. This is just one more example of that difference.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[colinrichardday]

And temps can't click on pretty icons in kile?

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[civilizedINTENSITY]

You could easily teach a temp to use LyX in half an hour. Its much simpler than MS Word.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[ps2os2]

Hmmm doesn't this sentence seem like something is wrong:

"most people just never even try to figure out"

With the basic premise of the product? Word has gotten so bloated over the years that no one can keep on top of its capabilities. I am a user of Word Perfect and I am sure I do not understand all the capabilities of it, however, I can figure out 99 percent of the issues if I do a show/reveal codes. Approximately 18 years ago I started with WP and if I didn't understand why it was doing something I would do a reveal codes and all would be explained as it made simple sense.

My first attempt at WORD ended up in failure as I could not figure out how to so something simple. A call to the help desk gave no help and even the secretaries couldn't figure out something that would have taken me all of a minute to figure out in Word Perfect.

I do simple things like writing letters and creating envelopes is nothing like trying to get the same thing done with WORD. No embedded super features or anything. I would suspect that is what 90 percent of the people out there use it for. Why pay for all these blankity blank features when only 10 percent will use them (if that much).

If people want to continue to use a Word processing program to do really nifty things great have a Word processor that has all the bells and whistles for the 90 percent of the people and come up with a word processing feature for the 10 percent.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[flydpnkrtn]

There's no fundamental reason MS Word can't be a great program. All it needs is a pioneering visionary to thrash it down to a working core, to develop some well thought out guiding principles for how to organize the interface, to mercilessly eliminate the rampant bugs, to study how the current interface fails, and to rebuild it from that working core back up to a well-engineered product. But will that happen? Unlikely.

Switch "MS Word" with OpenOffice and this statement also applies, in my humble opinion...

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Actually I almost never print LaTeX. I use it to generate PDF or MathML. Gnumeric exports its spreadsheets to LaTeX, too. I admit that Office can do some of what LaTeX does, but right after I switched I had people approach me to ask how I had made my reports look so good. It looked like commercial printing, and they wondered what it cost to outsource it to get level of quality. It really looks that much better.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[darthvader100]

Well my company still uses MS word heavily. All of our testing is done in word and either printed, or moved to a share drive. And yes, we do all use windows here

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Samgilljoy]

That's Vedic Sanskrit, as opposed to Epic and Classical Sanskrit, or you can be really obscure and refer to Old Indo-Aryan. No one talks about "Ancient Sanskrit" the way you would "Ancient Greek."

If you do find a copy of Word that does Devanagari easily, with all the old ligatures and such, I'll gladly buy it from you.

This bit of trivia brought to you by your Friendly Neighborhood Philologist.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[catmistake]

nice trip, enjoyed that, thx.

And you bring up, first I've seen in the comments here, that there are alternatives (besides LaTeX).

I'd like to point out that if you're having something professionally printed, you are wasting time trying to format and typeset a document in Word for typesetting accuracy. Save the print operator a step and send plain text, because that's what a competant operator would convert to when coming upon a word doc. Send out text, and reformat and typeset in a PRO typesetting app like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. Word seems to randomly reflow content... no way to control how it looks on different machines.

And could someone plz tell job recruters that .doc is NOT a standard format available to everyone everywhere. pdf is what they should be asking for... but apparently Word doesn't manipulate them, even for just viewing, very well. And they just aren't saavy enough to know their browser can open it just fine. Nor are they aware of this new and difficult to master Adobe Reader... nor are they willing to purchase such an app.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[the_womble]

You could just use Lyx. Simpler than MS Word, beautiful Latex typesetting, formatting to publisher's requirements just by selecting a class etc.

Not all latex classes work though.

Lyx now as integrated RCS support

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[UnknownSoldier]

> Framemaker is the way to go for tech doc, IMO.

How does it compare to InDesign (which is pretty damn slick I might add!)

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[fbartho]

It's really unfortunate you chose to use Adobe Photoshop as your shining example of a "bug-free and intuitive" piece of software. Given that I watched it crash 3 times on unrelated files for my coworker over the course of just this afternoon -- and that's only discussing dataloss here, we're not mentioning odd or unexpected behavior -- I have to say I'm skeptical about what you've written.

[I am ignoring the "intuitive" part of my paraphrase of your words for the time being]

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[CorSci81]

As far as I can tell (having never used InDesign) FrameMaker is much more geared towards static vs. dynamic content. Graphics in FrameMaker are still somewhat of a PITA but it seems to have more support for structured authoring. From what I know FrameMaker is the way to go if you just want content done and someone else supplies the layout, InDesign is the way to go if your layout changes frequently.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[CorSci81]

When I was researching products for this project I saw a lot of FrameMaker hate, and as far as I can tell it was terrible for a while. Adobe seems to have cleaned up FrameMaker and worked on the interface with RoboHelp to turn it into something very useful for single-source print/application help authoring. It has some annoying bits to it, but the structured authoring tools have been a savior compared to what it would be like in doing the same thing in Word.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[icebraining]

For writing a quick memo, I use a text editor, not a word processor.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

It might surprise you, but in fact MOST kitchens have knifes for cutting, a can opener for opening cans, screwdrivers don't go into the kitchen unless something is broken.

I know Swiss army knifes are popular around here, but I've never seen anyone using one in a kitchen.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[grrrl]

The learning curve to systems like LaTeX is very steep, but you have a tremendous amount of control over the formatting and layout.

Yes... but also no.

The point of LaTeX is you don't have to control the formatting - the typesetting engine does that and worries about all the intricacies for you. You just type your document, using chapters, sections, references, etc, and LaTeX will lay it out for you.

You can choose to use a different style if someone has prepared all the formatting in a style file for you, but you just apply it to your (properly marked-up) plain text. Kind of how basic HTML/CSS (should) work..

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Spacelem]

My wife was taught to use LaTeX in the library where she worked. It was however for some totally inappropriate use, like generating business reports or something, with numerous tables (which are not LaTeX's strong point). She's normally pretty technically inept, but she managed to learn LaTeX, although she hated using it. Of course she has no love for MS Word either.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[marcosdumay]

But emacs is just a Lisp interpreter. The text editor you see is another script.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[7 digits]

You're not going to do a 1000 pages technical document in 3 different versions, released in 6 languages, and authored by 4 tech writers with InDesign.

Now, it would brain-dead to use FrameMaker to create your 16 pages flashy marketing magazine & 1 page foldable product flyers, in PDF and interactive web version...

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[michael_cain]

I have looked over the years, but it doesn't appear to have ever been written up for publication. I think that there are some arguments against teaching mark-up methods today, at least at the undergraduate level.

• With limited exceptions, it's not what the students are going to find when they go out into the real world. In many fields, a graduate who can't do Word/Excel is functionally illiterate.
• Unless it's a common practice used in several classes, the students' investment in time to learn a mark-up system (and a good text editor) will probably never be recovered.
• Students don't write every day. There are plenty of studies that show that user interface features that make infrequent users more productive get in the way of experienced users, and vice versa.

The obvious compromise is software like LyX, that has a GUI interface suitable for infrequent users but uses LaTeX to actually do page layout. I also think it will never be widely adopted because people who think in terms of WYSIWYG will be disturbed that the final page doesn't look like what they've been working on.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Cloud K]

Yeah, had that in the back of my mind - but it depends on the company. Ours is one of those that insists on a company logo on anything produced (yes even internal), in the correct position, specific to/from/subject/etc tabular layout... I agree in principle though.

Really I think the place for memos is email - but tell that to a busy director who never reads anything unless it's printed out and thrust in front of his face :)

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[nwf]

Fonts get continually screwed up.

Man, that's the one that ticks me off the most. I can't believe how bad Word is at doing something so basic. Even copy and pasting text between Microsoft applications will be screwed up 80% of the time. I can't even fathom how messed up it is.

 

I think a lot of issues come to how it tags formatting to the end-of-paragraph marker. If you delete the paragraph break by hitting delete from a previous paragraph, it will reformat your previous paragraph to be whatever the next paragraph is. That's just confusing and never what I want.

 

Anymore, I do most of my light word processing in Text Edit on the Mac. I just don't do much, so it's fine for an occasional letter or todo list.

 

Of course, the /. comment editor makes Word look well-designed... Paragraphs with NO spacing between them? Come on!

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[dublin]

There's no fundamental reason MS Word can't be a great program. All it needs is a pioneering visionary to thrash it down to a working core, to develop some well thought out guiding principles for how to organize the interface, to mercilessly eliminate the rampant bugs, to study how the current interface fails, and to rebuild it from that working core back up to a well-engineered product. But will that happen? Unlikely.

But in reality, as bad as Word's faults are, Word has seen far more of this sort of attention (especially with the new "ribbon" UI in Word2007) than any of its competitors. Although I think Word's UI is still light-years short of where it should be, it's also light-years *ahead* of it competitors, including OpenOffice, which from a UI perspective is a bad copy of Word's interface circa Word 4.3/95 with a dash of Word2000.

In fact, although I don't agree with many of the decisions MS made for the new Office ribbon interfaces, there's no question that they *really* did the work to completely re-think the interface. They even posted pretty detailed explanations on the web (Chan9, IIRC) describing how they reached the major decisions, and why the choice they made seemed to strike the best balance.

Also, keep in mind that MS is severely hampered in what it can do by its user base, who are extremely sensitive to change of any kind (inertia, training costs, institutional stupidity, macros, etc.), even if that change results in a far better product.

And Microsoft is at least *trying* to think about user experience and common look and feel across its applications, something that OO seems to be relatively incapable of - screaming about the UI dates back to the StarDivision days. It's not that OO doesn't suck, it's just that it sucks less than any other free alternative to Word. (WordPerfect also has its flaws, but it absolutely kicks Word's butt for stability in producing really large, complex documents, which is why it's been the legal industry's favorite WP until very recently.)

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[beguyld]

In the end we settled on using Adobe FrameMaker and RoboHelp (since our manual also had to be turned into application help). We're a couple months in and I must say I'm very pleased.

And the difference in price between a copy of Word and a copy of FramMaker and RoboHelp for each user?

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[vivaelamor]

And consequently, the user base of LaTeX to that of MS Word is just about proportional to the ownership of super sonic jet pilots to that of bicycle users :-).

But ironically, the price correlation is closer to opposite in that analogy.

Which costs more in the real world? The bike or the jet?

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[badkarmadayaccount]

I think that this site is getting to me. My earliest memories of using a computer was a 366 MHz PII, IIRC, and not only did I understand that lecture, I liked it. *worried*

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[pz]

I think a lot of issues come to how it tags formatting to the end-of-paragraph marker. If you delete the paragraph break by hitting delete from a previous paragraph, it will reformat your previous paragraph to be whatever the next paragraph is. That's just confusing and never what I want.

EXACTLY. That's what makes me scream: the default behavior is NEVER what I want or would expect it to be, and the reasons for the behavior always seem impenetrable.

To paraphrase what I wrote above, the difference between Word and Photoshop is that when using Word, the software clearly is the limiting factor in the generation of final product, whereas with Photoshop, the talent of the user is the limiting factor. Word gets in the way; Photoshop does not. Tools should never get in the way.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[CorSci81]

I don't think that's a very sensible line of reasoning. They're intended for vastly different scales. FrameMaker is overkill for a short one-off document. If you're maintaining a large amount of software documentation that you want to single source into multiple publication channels you'd be crazy to use Word.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Macgrrl]

I found the secret to working with large documents in MS Word is the Save As command. You can reduce the file size by up to 75% with a Save As on a large file, especially if there has been lots of change tracking, cut and paste etc...

Any time I've worked with large files in MS Word have have used strict version control protocols and done a Save As at the end of each day's work to reduce the file size and to stabalise the document.

Clean use of styles can also reduce document clutter. Keeping the file cooperative longer.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

What bizzare world are you living in where Outlook crashes with a few thousand emails? Do you have 64MB of RAM, or is it just that you've fucked up your computer to the point of it choking. I have about 65k emails in my Exchange mailbox, and Outlook handles it just fine. Even Outlook 97 had no problem with huge piles of email, and I think that was the first version I used.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[shaitand]

In other words, you don't have 65k emails your outlook mailbox. Thank you, move along.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[VoyagerRadio]

Sounds like friends (or associates, or whatever) aren't backing up their documents often enough to recover them. Perhaps they need to step up their backup procedure; that way the corrupted docs won't be a problem.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[VoyagerRadio]

Do you ever used the Mac version of Word? I first purchased the '98 version, then upgraded to the next Mac version but haven't used it since. Is it still a decent product?

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[Macgrrl]

I typeset an economics text book including full page integral matrices in MS Word 4 on a mac way back when (early 90's).

The most stable version of Word ever was 5.1a for Mac.

In recent years I have predominately used Word in a Windows environment, preferring to use a text editor and InDesign when on the Mac.

Emacs

[oldhack]

Word is the emacs of word processor, whatever it has become now.

Re:Emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd LOVE it if emacs contained the command 'M-x microsoft-word'. Not sure what would happen - maybe a dancy clippy would appear on screen?

Re:Emacs

[Anne Thwacks]

- maybe a dancy clippy would appear on screen?

Initial letters of all sentences would be converted to the background colour - so they are still there, but you can't actually see them, and any tables present would have their formatting rearranged in a random manner?

Heading levels -- OpenOffice does it better

[PsyQ]

I like how the original author had to add proper headings and subheadings to their Word documents after copy/pasting them into MediaWiki. This probably means they didn't use proper heading levels in the original document (Why? A technical writer should surely do this?). OpenOffice Writer is more in-your-face about that, or at least it seems that way. That still doesn't prevent the occasional idiot simply boldfacing a bit of text and manually changing the font size on every single "heading" they create, but at least the proper way is more visible.

Extra bonus, copy/paste from OpenOffice Writer to one of the JavaScript-based GUI editors in e.g. MediaWiki preserves those titles automatically. Also, there's scripts to export to MoinMoin if that's your kind of wiki.

Add two points for FOSS?

Re:Why dont I need word?

[palegray.net]

Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[TemporalBeing]

Because I have OpenOffice. It is just as good.

And free.

Um yeah, until Oracle kills it next year.

Oracle can't really kill OpenOffice. They could kill Star Office, but OpenOffice would be a lot harder to do since anyone else could quickly pick it up and continue on.
Yes, I realize that most of the devs for OpenOffice are part of Sun, but if they all got laid off, they could easily band together and pick up a fork of OpenOffice if they so desired.
Of if Oracle tried to kill OpenOffice some random group of people could fork OpenOffice and continue on too.

So no, it's not that easy.

Actually, no, MS Word Owns.

[pyster]

I love Ars. Ars is almost always on the money, but this guy really doesnt understand what people use word processing for. The "print out" argument is laughable at best.

MS Word is hands down the best word processing program that exists, and has been for years, and shall be for years to come. It will continue to evolve along the lines of user trends and continue to do it better than anyone else.

Easily dismissed

[east coast]

Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much

So all those Staples ads about toner and ink are meant for that small niche of people who still own a printer? Please.

This is nothing more than a misled anti-Microsoft troll. How did this ever make it to the front page?

Re:Easily dismissed

[Anita Coney]

"So all those Staples ads about toner and ink are meant for that small niche of people who still own a printer?"

Please indeed. First, you base your entire argument on one retailer's advertisements. That's so fricken absurd that a part of me thinks your comment was satire. (I certainly hope so!)

Second, your argument is nothing more than a straw horse. At no point did Jeremy Reimer ever argue that only a "small niche of people... still own..." printers. His argument, more of an observation, really, is that "we stopped printing things out so much." And I find that observation to be completely true.

Take the legal profession, which historically loves to kill trees. In US Federal Courts you have to file everything electronically. In other words, lawyers "stopped printing things out so much."

We no longer print out funny things to post in the office breakroom, we just forward them.

I never print out directions anymore, I just use my GPS.

"This is nothing more than a misled anti-Microsoft troll."

How was Reimer misled? And how does pointing out the simple fact that we print less make anyone an anti-Microsoft troll? But why bother to actually make arguments to support your conclusions when making bare conclusions is so much simpler?

Re:Easily dismissed

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing more than a misled anti-Microsoft troll. How did this ever make it to the front page?

That question kind of answers itself, doesn't it?

WordPerfect was better anyway

[wandazulu]

Th FA talks about laughing at WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS users, but as one of those users, I never ever wondered why the font suddenly changed (and always to Times New Roman, no matter what I set my default to), or why pages suddenly ended for no reason, or why widows and orphans basically just didn't work. "Reveal Codes" was WordPerfect's killer feature that saved me hours of frustration (that I got back and more when I had to switch to Word) in that I could tell exactly where the "bad" code was and remove it.

When the Web and HTML came along, I initially thought the designers had used WP as their inspiration.

The other thing WP 5.1 had was the ultimate in minimalist interface; the lower right hand corner had the page, line and word position and nothing else. The closest to a blank sheet of paper I've ever had in writing software. The FA also laughs at all the function key combos, but in reality you only used a few (Shift-F7 comes to mind...).

Also, WP had, at the time, the best support...an 800-number and all the free tech/user support you could want. It's no exaggeration to say that their support helped me learn WP macro programming.

Sigh, okay, everyone off my lawn...I have to get back to my TPS reports; I accidentally saved them in docx format and have to re-save them all as .doc so people with Word 2007 can read them.

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... Word 2007 was the beginning of DOCX format.

Are you thinking of Word 2003 - which can read DOCX with an update? Word XP? Word 2000? Same update.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[Maimonides]

Here Here !!!
Things just worked or were easily fixed (Reveal Codes) if it didn't.

\begin{frustration}
I spend too much time getting frustrated with Word:

• when I copy/paste text in from another source
• try to reset numbered lists
• or worse still change it's style.
• opening up a document in Reading Layout (NO it is not handy), Outline?!

\end{frustration}
(yeah, so there is something higher than WP as well, but let's keep the Formatter vs Processor debate out of this;)

If it weren't for the fact that I had to use Word for work...

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[rdebath]

Sigh, okay, everyone off my lawn...I have to get back to my TPS reports; I accidentally saved them in docx format and have to re-save them all as .doc so people with Word 2007 can read them.

Damn, my sarcasm detector must be wonky, I can't work out if that's a typo or not.

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[clone53421]

I find that Paste Special, Plain Text comes in very handy at times.

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh, okay, everyone off my lawn...I have to get back to my TPS reports; I accidentally saved them in docx format and have to re-save them all as .doc so people with Word 2007 can read them.

Or you could point them here:

  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

> all the function key combos

I found many WP 5.1 users who never knew what ALT= did. Actually an add-on gave ALT= functionality to WP 4. I never needed to remember all those combinations, nor have the 'ribbon strip' card above the function keys.

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[IntlHarvester]

Th FA talks about laughing at WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS users, but as one of those users, I never ever wondered why the font suddenly changed (and always to Times New Roman, no matter what I set my default to), or why pages suddenly ended for no reason, or why widows and orphans basically just didn't work. "Reveal Codes" was WordPerfect's killer feature that saved me hours of frustration (that I got back and more when I had to switch to Word) in that I could tell exactly where the "bad" code was and remove it.

Except those kinds of problems were far worse with Word Perfect, because editing actions would accidentally delete the invisible codes. So essentially WP was only usable for either very simple documents, or you had to keep the ugly-looking codes turned on all the time.

I guess it's natural that people who love editing HTML by hand would prefer the WP model, but IMO the Word system of object-level formatting is more natural to how most people think.

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[DNS-and-BIND]

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx Microsoft's .docx converter for Office 2003 and before.

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, Word Perfect 5.1, Borland's great adventure into office products. I remember that. Or was that when it was Corel? Anyhoo that was a great product. I fondly remember wading through twenty page reports using 'Reveal Codes' trying to find the one @#$% place where some lame-ass had select-formatted something twenty times and WP had kept each format. In order.
WP is the reason I work in IT today.
Damn you Word Perfect!

Re:WordPerfect was better anyway

[dkf]

I find that Paste Special, Plain Text comes in very handy at times.

It's exceptionally useful. Why it has to be hidden away where only tinkerers would find it, I don't know. OTOH, it being hard to find makes it much easier to spot people who are stupid enough to plagiarize as those who are stupid enough to do that are also stupid enough to not change the formatting. (Yes, I really have caught people that way, though it also helped that they stole some of the paragraphs of text from things I'd written...)

It hasn't died

[Anonymous Coward]

About two minutes before seeing this article, I received an email from my boss saying, "Be sure to open the [email] and print/review the attached documents."

I.e., print it then bring it in to the meeting.

It's a 17 page document, of which 1 is relevant to me. Knowing him, if I don't print it he'll make some comment such as, "I thought I asked you all to print it. Strange."

Word is useless for professional printing

[ammorais]

Disclaimer: I'm not an english native speaker, so I'm sorry for some lack of English technical terms.

I've worked many years on printing industry and Word was useless. Well to be frank I've develop a anti-word kind of felling since many clients tough they could save some bucks by sending us their Word formatted previews, and saying things like: "We already did the job of the document so you can just print this.". The truth is a word document is completely useless for professional printing, since Microsoft word is not good with outputs. As a matter of fact, is garbish. I never understood how 20 year of "improvement" couldn't make MS Word better on one of the supposed areas of Word. Printing. We had to convert all documents to Quark or In-Design before sending to offset.

Anti-word-ism apart, I know what word-processors are for. And I know they are very useful to many bureaucratic institutions. Although I think the modern word processors are bowed with what people are used to in the interface, and I think a break from the current interface to a new one is the way to go. Of course, vendors are very afraid on innovating on this field, since probably they will loose many clients.

Anyway, the article is stupid. It's a narrow view of a single user usage of word, and I agree that it shouldn't make Slashdot main page.

Realists vs idealists

[zerofoo]

Every day I read about how the world should be: wind and solar farms generating electricity, no more fossil fuels, everyone living in cities and can walk/bike to everything they need - and no more commercial, closed software - free and open software for all.

These are all nice ideas, but they fail in the exact same way - they aren't practical for most people.

We are going to burn every drop of financially viable fossil fuels that are in the ground - the sooner engineers and environmentalists accept that fact, the sooner we can start working toward REAL solutions to our energy problems (nuclear has my vote).

A world without Microsoft office, or Microsoft products in general might be a nice vision of your utopia, but for the vast majority of computer users, they are happy shelling out the cash for a refined product that they are comfortable using.

I like free and open products whenever possible, but replacing many Microsoft products, that people are comfortable with, has enormous costs beyond mere dollars.

-ted

Re:Realists vs idealists

[nyctopterus]

"The lesson is... never try." - Homer Simpson

Re:Realists vs idealists

[phillipsjk256]

In my view, the so-called "realists" are being short-sighted.

A memory dump is not a good, inter-operable file format. I have heard stories about how Microsoft word for the Mac really couldn't inter-operate with word for the PC. There is a reason MS jumped on the XML bandwagon (developing a standard that basically included every word quirk from that last 20 years).

Fossil fuels have practical uses that don't involve burning them. I wear nylon while riding my oil-lubricated bike in adverse conditions (for example).

Why just MS Word?

[space_jake]

Why not get rid of all word processors? Oh wait, people use them to write documents.

I know its fashionable to bash Microsoft,

[Phizzle]

But come on! Anyone who would have made a thread with that title would have been modded a TROLL in a second. Hows this - I started using MS Word when it came out, used it on Mac and PC, and it WORKED JUST FINE. I still use it on Mac and PC and it still WORKS JUST FINE. I believe mourning its demise is premature at best, mmkay?

Public useage vs intended usage

[Kral_Blbec]

One thing I have noticed about all of the office suites, is that almost nobody uses them correctly. In one of my classes we had to share tips and tricks for MS Word with each other, everyone person making a presentation to the rest and making them "cheatsheets" to hand out. A pathetic amount were about how to copy and paste, or insert a picture. I did a short intro to style sheets and got a lot of glazed looks.
My mother does volunteer work for a club she is in handling membership records. The entire thing is done in excel and they email the file back and forth to each other. Backups consist of saving the file to a different name. I've tried to get her to use an Access database, and even designed one for her, but she doesnt want to use it and the rest of the club is scared of it.
Computer literacy has a long way to go before the public use even the features we have correctly much less adding new ones.

Re:Public useage vs intended usage

[vlm]

My mother does volunteer work for a club she is in handling membership records. The entire thing is done in excel and they email the file back and forth to each other. Backups consist of saving the file to a different name. I've tried to get her to use an Access database, and even designed one for her, but she doesnt want to use it and the rest of the club is scared of it.

Look on the bright side, they were probably using a spreadsheet because they couldn't figure out how to use tabs -n- columns and such in their word processor. The ability to sort and delete by row is just an extra spreadsheet feature.

Several jobs ago, like in the mid 90s, I worked at a network operations center in a major financial services outsourcing company (back when outsourcing meant hiring Americans not Indians), and the customer database was a text document edited using the Lotus office suite word processor, whatever it was called. SQL INSERT and DELETE commands were emulated by coworker Ms. Patty typing in the new customer and then printing the file(s) out. SQL ORDER BY was emulated by Ms. Patty maintaining multiple text files, each sorted by hand into a different order, sort of like multiple SQL indexes. SQL SELECT was emulated by hand paging thru printouts, until you find what you needed. Our customer service database using such crude technology was often compared to our data center, which was one of the largest and most advanced in the region (think, machine room size measured in acres). Note this story was not set in 1905, but just a little over a decade ago.

The moral of the story, is that your Ma advanced from a "simple" word processor to a spreadsheet, probably because the word processor is simply too complicated to use, can't figure out how to make tables. So, if you want to get dear old mom to move from "simple" spreadsheets to a relational database, all you have to do is encourage the addition of useless features to the spreadsheet until its unusable, resulting in a forced move to a relational database.

Maybe add three (heck, four!) dimensional support instead of 2-D, maybe add help files in Klingon, etc. Eventually the spreadsheet program will be harder to use than a simple mysql prompt. Then you can have the conversation, "see ma, you need a semicolon at the end of your CREATE TABLE line.". And that, is how the non-free software world defines progress.

Re:Public useage vs intended usage

[Kral_Blbec]

Actually a few days ago I found a commercial app called MemberTies that advertises itself as a customizable membership data for clubs and organizations. I've been begging her to do that route as it is exactly what I've been designing in access, but ready made.

Its agravating and amusing to watch people get frustrated doing something the wrong way, then go and show them how to do it correctly in 30 seconds, then next week repeat over again the exact same steps.(Not that I have ever had to mail merge address labels for said club...) If people would invest the time to learn it right the first time, they would save way more later on.

The main reason

[aaandre]

The main reason to use word is that everyone else is using it already. Oh, and its overcomplicated, obsolete-by-design "feature" of file format incompatibility.

And an anecdote about it: During a computer science course one of the tutors told us about his visit to the MS Word engineering team. There he saw a white board with bug numbers. The white board was titled "Not fixable."

MS has owned the market for this for a while, controlling it's market share via FUD and broken file formats, ultimately installing MS tax for business decision makers that are too scared to lose compatibility with their old documents and interoperability with other business.

It's working.

Yes, we don't really need it, but we can't kick the habit either.

Re:The main reason

[Anonymous Coward]

BWAHAHAH!! that's so fucking funny. MS is completely out of touch with their white boards and unfixable bugs. They should use bugzilla to mark things as "will not fix" or maybe just ignore them for years.

Edit conflict!

[tepples]

But the real question is if we shouldn't drop the "document to send back and forth" paradigm. Jeremy Reimers reports that his company had good results from moving to a wiki.

Until the price of an always-on connection to the Internet drops below $60 per month, even in the country or on the road, we'll need to consider offline use somehow. And that means either e-mail or an offline application that can "sync" to an online repository and provide an easy way to resolve edit conflicts whenever the user comes online.

Re:Edit conflict!

[civilizedINTENSITY]

But the topic at hand is businesses which will have broadband, so that half of your argument isn't really applicable. What is, however, is the idea of breaking the model by requiring it to allow offline work. A key concept was to avoid multiple incompatible versions by having just one document. However, it would be simple to download the HTML which makes up the document, so you could work on it anywhere. Its the "sync"/edit conflict resolution that seems inappropriate. I'd rather see you first check the real (and only) document to see whats changed and then you determine the appropriateness of the changes you wish to introduce. Automating this seems like a mistake, unless nothing has changed.

Re:Edit conflict!

[onemorechip]

With a Word document, you first need to *find* the document, and make sure you have the latest copy. The one on your hard drive might be 6 weeks out of date. The one in your e-mail folder for that project might be a week or two old, the one on the server a day or two old. There might be a copy your co-worker is editing right now.

Revision control software can help, but I've got an aversion to using CVS/SVN-style revision control for binary files. Yes, it can work, but the software was created for text, and you still need to let others know if you want to make changes, so they don't try to at the same time, or you'll have conflicts that can't be resolved since it's binary. And you need to have a local copy of the workspace just to get that one file. In my case, the svn client is on Linux/Sun machines, but I need to edit on a Windows PC. It's just a pain all around.

From that standpoint, wikis are so much easier. We use them to write up tutorials and theory-of-operation types of documents and the like. Too bad my company wants all official documentation (product specs, designs specs, etc.) to be in Word.

Re:Edit conflict!

[Bert64]

Maybe in the US wireless connections are pricey and patchy...

In small crowded european and asian countries like the uk, holland and japan 3g is ubiquitous, fairly cheap and widely used.

As for syncing, we used to use mysql replication to sync a copy of a wiki to every user's laptop.

crap

[Sir_Sri]

this article didn't deserve to be run on arstechnica, it certainly doesn't deserve to be pointed to by /.

Try to keep Slashdot subjects accurate

[harlows_monkeys]

The cited article is actually putting forth an argument that ALL word processors are obsolete.

Re:Try to keep Slashdot subjects accurate

[foniksonik]

No, not all... just Word and Word clones... the article is arguing that there is no longer a place for a general purpose word processor whose goal is to create a document formatted to be printed.

Wikis and blogs and all other online publishing tools ARE word processors - but their target is not print. They provide the features needed to format for online publishing.

Who needs a word processor for print? Magazine publishers, book publishers, etc. and even they don't use Word except maybe for drafting and editing purposes... when it comes to the formatting they use InDesign or some other full featured publishing tool - not Word.

Who uses a word processor for print... all kinds of companies that never print anything - which is the point of the article. If you're not going to print and instead you need collaborative editing, online publishing, version control, indexed search, etc. then there are way better options available, such as WikiMedia.

Somebody mentioned a paper trail... yes there is that... but it seems that when you're accounting is all online, your banking is all online, your payroll is all online, your invoicing, purchase orders, time tracking - all online - there's not much left. Why would you want to keep a paper trail of memos, reports, research, articles, press releases, etc. which are the least legally important documents?

Besides, you get version control and offsite backups... much better (if you set it up that way, if not it's likely your paper trail wasn't going to do you much good either as you obviously don't put much effort into records management).

It's likely that 90% of the uses for word processors are no longer relevant and should be updated to use an online, networked collaborative tool.

more to the point

[hypergreatthing]

Not needing to print out things would be the death of printers, not ms word. Creating documents is still necessary, just not printing them out. I think the point of ms word was to be a word processor, not to print things.

How many times can i say print and yet make a case about the death of something else?

I agree - few are left that know what DTP is..

[cheros]

I agree with you 100% - and I'm no expert like you :-). There is so much more to creating a good looking document with positioning, spacing, kerning etc etc - on the few occasions I need to do it I tend to use Scribus or (if it really has to be to) I pay someone to do it for me.

Ironically, however, its PRECISELY the (ab)use of Word for layout purposes that has kept it installed against cheaper alternatives such as OpenOffice. People get upset if the layout is subtly different, indicating a worrying increasing importance of presentation over content.

I am not convinced about the positive effect of break in interface approach. People like to use what they're used to, and it's only the "you must use what we shove down your throat" power of executive decision that has allowed the new MS Word interface to survive.

For anyone who has been using Word over time and has developed a degree of sophistication in their uses (i.e. go past the normal 5% of functionality) the new interface was an unmitigated disaster - it was the time I switched permanently to OpenOffice instead. I could not afford to lose all that time to look for functions which used to be easy to find (I tried for a good 5 months before I finally had enough).

Re:I agree - few are left that know what DTP is..

[ammorais]

I'm sorry about the interface thing, since I was not very clear(I guess i choose the wrong word). What I've meant was not the menus and buttons, but a something like the object positioning. Since word was primarily to print text the features of including images and other type of media were implemented after. It's very difficult to exactly position a object in Word. Word tries to have a dynamic layout to be compatible with Web Page publishing. But the nature of printing is not dynamic at all. Word tries to do all, and at the end is not very good in anything. If you used Scribus, you know what I mean, although I think Scribus is not yet mature for production purposes, it's way better than word(I'm very optimistic about scribus, but I can't yet recommend my boss to switch).

It's true when you say:

...PRECISELY the (ab)use of Word for layout purposes...

MS Word only survival at this time is because of compatibility issues(mainly caused by MS). Beyond that, MS Word doesn't really have any features that justify is price. Their is still very fear and ignorance about this. People are afraid they would not be able to open Word documents if they switch to the free alternatives, and MS makes sure MS word would not ever be 100% compatible.

Re:I agree - few are left that know what DTP is..

[hughk]

The funny thing is that once you take a Word document away from its Normal.dot and so on, layouts fail poretty miserably. This can happen especially between companies. In-Design and Quark are designed to address that by allowing you to ship everything you need to recreate a document.

Re:I agree - few are left that know what DTP is..

[SpryGuy]

I was listening to someone a few cubes over bitch and moan about 2007 over and over again.

Hey, I was sympathetic to a point, as I went through the same pain. So I ended up walking over to help out.

I pointed out that if you knew key combinations, those hadn't changed for the most part. So just keep typing if you're using to keyboarding it.

And if you want to learn to keyboard it? Just hit ALT. Everything on the ribbon can be accessed from the keyboard that way, and it's easy to learn.

I then pointed out the few things that were the most used and most difficult to find: where the options were, for example. Or how to convert text to a table.

Beyond that, once you learn where it is, there are usually a few 'ah-hah' moments, and you re-wrap your brain around the slightly different way of thinking about it, and its' really not such a pain in the ass any more.

I still find some things annoying, how like some ribbon commands are hidden if you're not positioned on a certain object (sometimes I'm just browsing for how to do something), and the header-footer stuff, as well as field codes, are all far more arcane in this UI than previously. But for probably 80% of the population that uses Word, including all new users, it's a vast improvement over the old (once you get past the learning curve for those who AREN'T new).

At least that's my take on it, and my experience. There were a few times I wanted to put my first through the screen while struggling to re-learn some things, but it's pretty clear to me now how and why they changed things, and its' really not nearly as bad as the nay-sayers claim.

Of course, for some, old habits die harder than for others, and I definitely have empathy there, but MS really was in between a rock and a hard place with the UI, and it was a bold and intersting step. Not super-successful, as your experience illustrates, but then if they'd just kept the old stale UI and kept trying to load new shit into it... it would have been worse for new users. So... trade-off.

Re:I agree - few are left that know what DTP is..

[cheros]

I've spent 8 f*cking years fixing other people's mistakes in Word (I used to be a consultant) - the mess you can get yourself into with Word is unbelievable:

1 - Approach. Content / format, but in Word your thinking is disrupted continuously by formatting, grammar and spelling questions which is incredibly counterproductive.

2 - Templates. Good idea, but try to change as little as possible. Not this consultancy, it had someone permanently working on "updating" the corporate report template and it had fantastically dangerous features in. Oh, and there were, of course, no instructions to go with it, nor were users consulted in the creation.

3 - Styles. Use them or not use them - you think. First off, users are not instructed on how to write in Word, so only a few people understand how styles work (the basis of structured formatting). Secondly, cut & paste can carry foreign style formatting into the document which can create an incredible mess. This is what I liked about WordPerfect, you could open up that can of worms and take the ones out that were causing the problem - not with Word, it just does the traditional MS thing to destroy hours of work: it crashes. Which brings me to the final point:

4 - Automatic save - doesn't. Only the latest version of Word has a recovery feature that works to some degree - Word "recovery" after the numerous crashes (increasing as the size -and thus criticality- of document grows) meant swearing and prompted a frequent use of Ctrl-S to keep a working file.

So, all in all, it has my vote for dying. It inhibits creative writing by getting in the way with constant interruptions and mothering to a degree that even the UK government cannot match, and it doesn't do the job it was meant to do. What saddens me is that OOo is trying to imitate this pile of dung, but I guess they need some starting point. Oh, and irony of irony: what do you use to fix a Word document that has gotten itself into a mess to the point of crashing on load? Yup, OpenOffice. Unwieldy as it is, for me It Just Works..

a few things

[roc97007]

He's absolutely right about printer ink. If anything would drive us to the paperless office, you'd think it'd be that.

Since the eighties I've been hearing about that-there paperless office, but strangely, my cube is still piled high with paper. Email has not eliminated paper -- it's just supplemented it. We use both Wiki and Sharepoint, (often with different versions of the same doc in each) and still our cubicles drown in paper.

There is a drive in many companies to eliminate paper in the office space -- at my company part of this effort is to insist that people use on-line reference documentation instead of physical paper. This increases PC desktop requirements if you have the kind of job where you do operations online and now have to refer to docs online as well. IT, of course, fights these new requirements because they're expensive. So you end up on a 1024X768 screen flipping through reference, entry, tickets, and email, unable to see enough of any two objects at the same time, a process not unlike building a ship in a bottle. You'll see people look up something in one screen, then *write it down* on a notepad, then bring up another screen to use the information. Where's the "paperless office" in that?

There is a BIG difference between "I don't need to use Word anymore" and "Word should die a swift death". One may agree with both statements, but they are separate issues.

It is true that Word isn't well suited for the electronic world. You can use it as a half-assed html editor, but last time I checked the code it produces is extremely messy and difficult to maintain. There are many better ways to produce web content. Word isn't really useful here.

As far as wiki is concerned, what I've observed is that wiki tends to be an out-of-date online copy of information on a word document which... is also online... Therein lies madness. The tools are there -- it's a social, not technical problem.

So, his general conclusion, that Word is less relevant in the digital world, is accurate. I don't think it's demise is any time soon. Whole paradigms must change, (IT needs to give me a bigger monitor, for starters) and that probably won't happen until a lot of people retire.

I loved the "endless stream of toilet paper" remark. That's an apt description of so many reports...

Re:a few things

[owlstead]

If you still have a 1024x786 resolution your IT is criminally bad. At least our developers all have 2 screens with 1280x 1024 resolution. When I'm working at home my single screen (1680x1050) already seems small. And since I develop on both, I can see that the time won by a second monitor is really large (estimates on the internet are about 10% increase in productivity - mine is probably higher). So that little monitor of yours is costing the company hundreds of dollars each *month*. Add up some saved paper to that (some dollars) and you could pay for about 6 monitors *a year*. I'm only printing out a few pages a month now.

Collect some figures and show them to your boss. But don't bitch about it since that won't work to your advantage.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[117]

That link you posted isn't to the free openoffice.org, it appears to be some scam site trying to get people to pay to download openoffice.org

Fatal flaws in all Word Processors (IMHO)

[Anonymous Coward]

are:-
Word - stupid capitialization of the first letter on a line
Others - Autocomplete (aaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh)
Word - not realizing that the world does not use Letter sized paper by default. It could dtetect that I'm not using a US Keyboard or Language
Word & Others - Defaulting to US English when it could check the local language settings

I know these are probably silly to some but they are really frustrating in actual use. I want to write. I don't want to write and have it changed because some idiot somewhere in Microsoft and OpenOffice etc things you want it.
Go away. Let me do it how I want and don't get in the way.
So I only use word now for the final draft. I create using a normal text editor (not notepad/wordpad)

Re:Fatal flaws in all Word Processors (IMHO)

[owlstead]

Gods, if we would go and post all Word annoyances; I've written 4 pages in 30 minutes. All out of the top of my head. But if we are talking about i18n (internationalization):

A header is a header is a header is a header. If you type a document in a German version of Word and edit it in a Dutch version and edit it in an English language version you should *not* have all your formatting duplicated three times. You don't want to see the formatting that we got when our Dutch company hired a German firm that had a Australian consultant.

Oh well, at least I understand both languages. Now the parent company is French...4 languages. Now this is going to be "fun".

So now I haven't written about.
Bookmark handling, crashes, the related "document recovery", variables that don't update, the logging of each small change in formatting, the lack of paste special -> unformatted unicode key, impossible to find print settings, table management, image handling, missing version management, missing file formats, missing table import, handling of headers and page breaks, the inconsistency with the delete and backspace keys, mis-formatting of lists, incorrect print previews, missing visio interaction, blocking pop-ups, page redraw while scrolling, text block handling, tables and page breaks and anything involving page breaks in general. For starters.

Missing the point

[modestmelody]

I agree that Word is far from dead, that many of us print out documents, and even more of us are not so stupid that we think that Commenting and Track Changes in Word doesn't work well and easily.
However, I think that the call to move toward Wikis for collaborative writing deserves a little criticism as well. First of all, Talk pages are not nearly as convenient as the highlight and comment system in Word. Second, ==subheader== doesn't work well for transferring to other formats.
What I've been wondering for some time now is how can I, a casual user, start writing using XML so that my writing actually can be attractive in various settings while still being content based (and perhaps even more searchable). We have a format that's way better than the Wiki format, and far more extensible. Wikis may be great for collaboration and even for "archiving", but really, I want my writing to be in small files without markup that can be instantly made viewable with the application of some simple rules.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[gothzilla]

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.

And yeah I've heard the whole "just keep one copy around in case" argument and it does not hold water in a business. People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable.

God forgive me but...

[kellyb9]

I actually like Word 2007... is there some kind of support group I can join?

Re:God forgive me but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Err.... So do I.

Re:God forgive me but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, get in touch with the local psychiatric department in the nearest hospital. They might be able to help you out.

Very few people will happily change how they work

[jimicus]

How many of us (particularly those who have worked in larger organisations) have seen emails flying around which consist of little more than a word document?

While these are still being sent, Word will not die.

How many of us have been asked to install Sharepoint, done so and found it gets used as a glorified (and, if you buy the full version rather than just using Sharepoint Services, rather expensive) shared drive to store Word files on but with a web GUI, often for documents that are unlikely to ever be printed?

While this is still happening, Word will not die.

I had a class with digital materials. . .

[JSBiff]

I recently took an English class where we were analyzing some written materials for rhetorical purposes (the class was about understanding rhetoric), and in that class, the teacher actually specified we were *supposed* to print out the digital materials and bring them to class.

Oh well, paper is a renewable resource.

re:dear jeremy: scott mcneally

[ed.han]

and to think i've incorrectly been attributing that to reality TV and youtube all this time!

More importantly...

[AndersBrownworth]

"... I printed out something to give to someone more important than me ..."

What really happened here is that "we" are now inhabiting the senior positions and not requiring subordinates to hand us paper.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[prozaker]

what a nice disclaimer AC...

from the org-suite.com
Disclaimer: This website has no affiliation whatsoever with the owner of these software programs, and provides only links to the software programs. This software may be obtained freely. New computer users should find our services valuable, and a time saver. If you are an advanced computer user, you probably don't need our services. Membership is for unlimited access to our site's resources. We provide an organized website with software links, technical support, tutorials and step by step guides.

Word should have been killed...

[nocaster]

...the moment a user decided it was a good idea to put a screenshot in it and send it to the help desk.

calm down

[neonprimetime]

i don't think he is singling you out for not being part of the group ... i think you've misunderstood

i believe what andrewneo is simply implying is that the /. moderators suck

i'm sure you've come to learn that /. posters don't actually RTFA, well ... i believe the same goes for the moderators

crap like this gets to the front page of /. daily because certain moderators do a terrible job at their job

Re:calm down

[ae1294]

i don't think he is singling you out for not being part of the group ... i think you've misunderstood

Don't get me wrong, I didn't take it as a personal attack. It's much more automatic than that but it still doesn't serve any other purpose than to deflect a valid question 90% of the time.

i believe what andrewneo is simply implying is that the /. moderators suck

That may or may not be the case. People here are afraid of just saying what they think because anytime they get modded down they seem to cry else why wouldn't people just say something like. 'Yes - I agree' instead of turning it around and being all douchie sounding...

I'm sure you've come to learn that /. posters don't actually RTFA, well ... i believe the same goes for the moderators

Honestly, are there really moderators here? I've never really noticed. I've looked at CmdTaco's account and he goes three months between posts and even then really says nothing of value.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[westlake]

Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.

There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.

It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.

Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.

Client - Server - The Web - each has its place.

This solves so many problems for the office manager that I don't think the geek really understands what he competing against.
     

Re:Why dont I need word?

[ByOhTek]

I've had too much trouble with OO.Org and saving page margins properly, superscript and subscript formatting, and, in spreadsheets, saving the foreground color of tooltips from the OS/UI default, but not the background color (I change tooltip colors because of my vision).

These, while seemingly small, has elimnated OO.Org from use as a spreadsheet editor, and limited my use of it for word processing.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[palegray.net]

I don't think you understand how these things work. It's the same as the fear-mongering over the fate of MySQL. There is no issue; OpenOffice is deployed by default on a huge number of Linux distributions. It's a certainty that dev teams from a variety of backgrounds would maintain it even it Oracle completely stopped caring.

This has nothing to do with "Client - Server - The Web."

"see who made which change with a single click"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's that feature in Mediawiki? Maybe there's a plugin that does it, but in the standard install you have to browse through all the page history to find out who wrote a specific chunk of text. It's a pain. Real version control software is better at that. Even Microsoft Word is better at that once you enable edit tracking.

learn word and its full functionality

[Anonymous Coward]

Before going on ranting about word and why it shoud die, learn all the areas it is being used and how effective it is to the business user.

1. integration with other tools like excel, power point.

2. mainly for business users , built in share point integration (workspaces, versioning etc).

amongst others.

I would very much like to see your reply on how you propose to replace these.

Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had problems opening files created with newer versions of Word than the one I have. I end up opening them in Open Office instead.

First Book

[scotbuff]

I cannot wait to buy my first book written in wiki markup!

Word isn't just for printing

[mnemonic_]

I keep Word because I still need to format documents. Notepad isn't appropriate for a 100+ page document with a table of contents, figures, equations, tables etc. Is there a more convenient way of formatting a complex technical report that doesn't involve some kind of word processor? It doesn't matter if it's being printed, organizing such a body of work and conveying the information clearly requires more than a text editor.

Re:Word isn't just for printing

[rekenner]

Easy and obvious answers: A wiki or LaTeX.

Re:Word isn't just for printing

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"I keep Word because I still need to format documents." Well, then, why don't you use a tool that is good at formating documents? It was pulling my hair out over trying to format technical documents with Word that made me quit. Yes, there are more convenient, faster, better looking methods. While I agree that documents require more than plain text, MS Word isn't a very good solution.

Re:Word isn't just for printing

[CorSci81]

Depending on the nature of your technical work, LaTeX is a good option. I used that throughout undergrad and grad school to write scientific papers/documents. The learning curve was a bit steep and it was occasionally frustrating, but the end result was quite nice. Another alternative I've just started using is FrameMaker. It's basically a fancy GUI for what is in essence XML and CSS under the hood, but writing a technical document as a structured document is quite handy. This is especially true for long documents. If you can find a nice template to start from (or learn to make your own), you never have to worry about the formatting and can use the same style across multiple documents.

Re:Word isn't just for printing

[onemorechip]

He keeps it because he still *needs* to format documents, and *wants* to do so using a WYSIWIG editor -- and *doesn't* want to (or can't, maybe, due to company policy?) use an open-source one.

Re:Word isn't just for printing

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"He keeps it because he still *needs* to format documents,"

as do I

and *wants* to do so using a WYSIWIG editor --

and I use a WYSIWYM editor, which seems to have every advantage of WYSIWYG, so there is no functional loss, and a lot to be gained

and *doesn't* want to (or can't, maybe, due to company policy?) use an open-source one.

which is the most honest reason I've heard yet: irrational bias.

(Now don't get me wrong, I respect irrational bias. Not so much for myself, I mean, but it is especially good when employed by those I'm competing with.)

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Tubal-Cain]

Even if OpenOffice dies, we still have KOffice and Abiword for our ODF files.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has achieved lock-in.

[Futurepower(R)]

'And yeah I've heard the whole "just keep one copy around in case" argument and it does not hold water in a business. People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable.'

That's our experience, also. The cost of changing is so high that companies will pay more or use inferior software.

A lot of the problem is not only with employee training, it is that training resources and employee time for training are inelastic. There is simply no arrangement that can be made that allows switching, other than hiring new employees.

However, if governments force standard file specifications the problem can be made to disappear.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Tubal-Cain]

OpenOffice already has several offshoots: NeoOffice, OxygenOffice, Go-oo...

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Darkness404]

How isn't it simple? A web browser isn't exactly simple, yet we have hundreds of small, independent forks of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.

Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.

It scales nicely until it doesn't, which for some people happens pretty fast. A word of advice, don't try writing a long-ish book on Word, eventually the file becomes nearly unreadable. Similarly, a well-used Excel spreadsheet will become super-laggy in time due to lots of hidden objects. Office does not scale well. Sure, you can use the same thing at home or at the office, but both end up being about the exact same thing: Short documents that sometimes require formatting.

Why

[mtemmerm]

... is this even on /.?

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey did you know it's 2009 not 1999 anymore. Your bullshit about the mythical margins dancing around on the screen probably never happened. Maybe if you guys didn't treat spreadsheets like AJAX pages as well, spreadsheets would be more compatible across the board. Why don't you blame incompetent employees rather than software that works as designed.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[TheRaven64]

Currently, Novell is the second-largest OO.o contributor. I think if Sun / Oracle decided to stop supporting OO.o then the developers that they currently employ could easily find homes at Novell, IBM, and a few other places, probably without having to physically relocate.

Why I agree

[whitroth]

But maybe not for the same reasons.

In '95, I remember a review, perhaps in PC Mag, that noted that 90% of all the users of word processors used 10% of the features; of the 10% of users that used more, they used them perhaps 10% of the time.

That was 14 years ago.

How many of the "advanced features" do any of you use? Are you writing documents, or are you doing desktop publishing for printing out?

The real point of a word processor was not to "ready documents to show to someone higher up than me", it was to replace a typewriter. My old criteria for evaluating word processors was whether I could sit down with it for the first time, never having seen it before, and could type up a letter and print it out in five minutes.

Which, of course, was why I *loathed* Wordstar. WordPerfect, I didn't like... until 5.0. Then, I loved it. If I could, I'd use WP today. For one thing, there was the 'reveal all codes" function, that showed ALL CODES, inline, not some codes (say, not including "this paragraph is right justified") and on, and on, that Word does, where I've had to *fight it* to edit a document. For that matter, the way WP did codes, I'm astounded that they didn't go to saving and markup using HTML, since their codes could have almost gone 1-to-1.

Oh, that's right, their marketing and management couldn't market their way out of a wet paper back with the Terminator's help.

And they keep "improving" it, because even though most of us will *never* use the NEW, GREATER FEATURES (tm), they can sell more copies, rather than people using the same program, year in and year out.

So, let's see: how many years did typewriters, all of which did the same thing, last? 90 years or so, and the only real "improvement" was going electric, so you could type faster?

Why do we need a word processor to sing and dance? Are you creating something for Youtube in it?

          mark, who'd like a non-M$ emulator word processor

Why we don't need Word?

[Orion Blastar]

Well I guess since documents are basically PDF files or HTML file or Text Files on the Internet we really don't need Word to read them or create them anymore.

Microsoft Word came about late in the game, Word Star, WordPerfect, DisplayWrite, Framework, and many others like Lotus Symphony did the same thing as far as word processing would go. Just that hardly anyone would make a Macintosh version in 1984 when Apple released the Macintosh, and Microsoft made Word and Excel for the Macintosh because it lacked software. Thus formed an unholy alliance with Microsoft and Apple that would lead to Mac-Office later. But Word and Excel existed for MS-DOS and then later Windows. Microsoft eventually bundled MS-Office with Windows pre-installs until MS-Office 2007 that is a trial that needs a key to unlock it. Which forced MS-Office on any PC buyer.

There were many competition to MS-Word. IBM/Lotus had Lotus SmartSuite and Lotus Word Pro but each new version of Windows would break it and the current Windows Vista won't run it anymore, and Windows XP runs it but has printing issues and other problems. IBM gave up on SmartSuite and licensed the OpenOffice.Org code to make a new version of Lotus Symphony based on the OO.o code and using the new Open Document Format or ODF.

WordperfectOffice exists, but hardly anyone uses WordPerfect anymore, and they priced themselves out of the market. Some people still use the DOS based Wordperfect 5.1 software because modern Windows Word Processors are too bloated and run too slow for them. Also WordPerfect 5.1 has a reveal codes mode to make editing a document a lot better.

Honestly I stopped using MS-Office since MS-Office 2003 because I didn't need the MS-Office 2007 features and they keep changing the UI and it confuses people. I use OpenOffice.Org 3.1 and am trying to ween myself off of MS-Office.

Of course now their are web applications for Word Processing like Google Docs and Zoho, etc that provide a free web based Word processor in the Cloud, and they save and read MS-Word formats, so basically one doesn't need MS-Word if they have an Internet connection and don't mind storing documents in the Cloud.

MS-Office and MS-Word jumped the shark when Microsoft added in the Clippit and other Office Assistants that become more annoying that useful, and when I install MS-Office I usually disable them. It was a good idea but poorly executed and poorly coded.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[halfnerd]

Maybe it's his scam.

Re:Why don't I need word?

[Deep Orange]

I love Open Office

In many ways it's superior to MS Office but it does have one great downfall and that is MS Office, more to the point the MS Office format. I've used both programs extensively for the last couple years and one thing that I've found is that if you modify a .doc file with Open Office and then pass it off to someone who's going to use MS there is a very good chance that the .doc will have some horrible formating issues. I know lot's of OOffice lovers (read as MS bashers) will tell you that it looks just fine when they open it up and have no problems but thats not the issue, if you if you go MS with that document thats when it's messed up and makes you look like a fool. If I'm going to build a PDF or make a document to be printed I'll use OOffice every time but I've been force to use MS Office most of the time just to keep my documents from getting mangled.

The only way to fix this would be to get MS to open up the .doc format (not going to happen) or to get the whole world to switch off MS Office (honestly think that opening up .doc would be easier). Yes yes I'm sure lots of MS bashers out there love that second option but with the entire US government and the vast majority of businesses everywhere locked on MS it's not going to change anytime soon and wishfully thinking isn't going to change it.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[amorsen]

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened.

It sounds like OpenOffice did quite a bit better than a different version of MS Office would have done. Exchanging documents between Office versions is a neverending source of "fun".

Re:Why dont I need word?

[steltho]

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

I would say Open Office is "just as good", the only complaint I have ever heard about it is just what you said. It does not open Word files correctly 100% of the time. This fact really has nothing to do with its quality as a word processor.

It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.

This is only true if your business relies on storing its data in a proprietary format. If businesses stored all of their documents as ODF files, you would probably have the same complaint about Microsoft Word.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[turbidostato]

"In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch."

That's plain bullshit as facts themselves demonstrate once and again. Companies have gone through the Microsoft Office upgrade mill once and again since the days of Office 4 onwards (about 1994) and you can bet those upgrades were far away from 99.9999% compatible and even 99.999%, 99.99%, 99.9%, 99% or even 90% (you haven't gone through the Word/Excel/Access macros/apps upgrade nightmare, have you?) and still companies did it just because "it's time to do it".

Seems like...

[Slash.Poop]

Seems like a completely impartial headline to me.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think that Borland Sprint was the best word processor ever written. Unfortunately, they never updated it from version 1

Re:Very few people will happily change how they wo

[phillipsjk256]

How many of those word documents are little more than plain-text?

Re:Why dont I need word?

[MightyYar]

Exchanging documents between Office versions is a neverending source of "fun".

Yeah, to counter his story... a couple of years ago, back before OO.org compatibility with MS was as good as it is today, I used to keep a copy of OO.org around. I didn't use it much, since we had a site license for MS Office. But it was invaluable for opening up corrupted MS Excel spreadsheet files.

You're a biased source

[Anonymous Coward]

of how "good" Word is and how "bad" OOo is.

Yet you still come up with all that shit.

You will just refuse to listen to anything that doesn't LOOOOVE Microsoft, since they are automatically "biased" in your eyes.

The Author's Mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

he is confusing document management with document creation

/ yes everything he says is true and yes maybe word or a competitor should have full fledged doc mgmt features but it is true... what he is lamenting is the lack of proper our of the box directory integrated document management

The first bug I found in MS Word.

[jcr]

Back when it first showed up on the Mac, I found that if you have a heading and a paragraph with different font characteristics, and you place the cursor before the first character in the paragraph, and then hit backspace and delete the newline between the heading and the paragraph, the whole paragraph suddenly gets the heading's text attributes.

Since that time, several Microsoft apologists have tried to tell me that it's supposed to work like that. Sorry, but if I can affect the typeface ahead of the cursor by hitting backspace, that's a monumental fuck up by the software vendor.

-jcr

Re:The first bug I found in MS Word.

[clone53421]

<p class="h1">Paragraph Heading</p><p class="body">Paragraph text</p>

Position the cursor right at the beginning of the "Paragraph text", backspace a few times.

<p class="h1">Paragraph HeadingParagraph text</p>

Now, you were saying?

Re:The first bug I found in MS Word.

[jcr]

Are you trying to make some kind of point?

-jcr

Re:The first bug I found in MS Word.

[clone53421]

Yes... in block-structured formatting, this sort of thing is somewhat to be expected. Erase the "end" code and the format of the subsequent section will change to match that of the previous one.

I agree that it would be nice if hitting "return" would, after splitting it into two p blocks again, automatically determine that "Paragraph Heading" should remain a "h1"-class block, while "Paragraph text" should default back to a "body"-class block. However, then you'd just as likely have problems where somebody expected it not to do that.

Re:The first bug I found in MS Word.

[jcr]

Yes... in block-structured formatting, this sort of thing is somewhat to be expected.

Umm... NO.

We're talking about WISYWG editing, and every word processor before MS word, including MacWrite and the first multi-font text editors at Xerox, got it right. MS botched it, and since that time, far too many people have accepted their lame excuses.

If I wanted the whole paragraph to have the heading's attributes, then I would select the paragraph, and apply the style. Inserting or deleting characters should never affect the font characteristics of existing characters.

-jcr

Re:The first bug I found in MS Word.

[clone53421]

That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it. However, once you know the block formatting scheme that Word uses, you expect this sort of behavior. If you really want half of your paragraph to be formatted like a header and the rest to be formatted normally, you can do that, but you're in the extreme minority (most of the time people don't want that) and you'll have to work around a bit to accomplish it.

Re:The first bug I found in MS Word.

[jcr]

However, once you know the block formatting scheme that Word uses, you expect this sort of behavior.

Yes, I know that people have gotten used to it. That doesn't excuse botching it.

-jcr

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Dan Ost]

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

MS Office isn't even 99.9999% compatible with it's previous versions, so by your definition, it's not worth using...and yet you clearly think it is worth using.

It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.

"completely useless" is clearly too strong a description. The people in our org who are constantly transferring documents between other orgs don't use MSOffice. They use MSOffice AND Openoffice.org AND Word Perfect AND...anything else they need to open. I've heard them comment that OOO will sometimes do a better job than MSOffice at opening old Word or Excel documents.

And yeah I've heard the whole "just keep one copy around in case" argument and it does not hold water in a business. People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable.

If you think your people are being 100% utilized, either you're misinformed or nobody wants to work for you (or both). 3 minutes out of a day gets lost in the noise of the work day. Do you allow your workers to take "potty breaks" during the day or only on their lunch hour?

Less and less word-processing

[toesterdahl]

In fact I tend to use Word and word-processors very little nowadays. At work our work is organized to be self-documenting. For collective information we use Wikis. For exchanging information we use email. If we want to publish something we use PDF's or the web. The keyword is document management. The use of Word is dimishing and wherever possible we try to use media that enables easy sharing and distribution something that a desktop-bound application using it's own proprietary file format does not. Torbjorn Oesterdahl

Author doesn't understand what MS Word is

[Anonymous Coward]

Word is not a document preparation tool, it is a word processing tool for creating a document. Adobe and Publisher are document tools because they are intended that how you lay it out on the screen is how the end product will look like. The main purpose of a word processor is to help write and prepare content with some basic formatting capabilities. The author should be arguing that Adobe and Publisher are the ones to die, not Word. This is also why there can be differences in how Word renders documents in different versions, layout has never been guaranteed, only the content being there is.

Solution: monitor-sized "paper"

[jonaskoelker]

But pages are for more than print-outs. JSTOR made a decision to keep their journal articles in page format, because that's what people are used to and like. Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts.

What the world needs is widescreen paper ;-)

Seriously, I agree that most things laid out with a sheet of paper in mind looks better than things laid out for web consumption.

But the things that really matter for paper presentation (at least in my LaTeX documents) are margins and page breaks (with respect to orphan/widow avoidance).

Monitor sizes (and probably more importantly ratios) being what they are, would it be so damn difficult to prepare two versions of the document, one for 210x279 mm and one for 1600x1200 px?

(okay, maybe three or four, depending on how many aspect ratios people use.)

Widescreen "paper" for the win!

Re:Solution: monitor-sized "paper"

[marcansoft]

ISO 216 A4 is 210x297 mm, not 210x279 mm. DIN called, they want their 18mm back.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

So I take it you are still using Office 95? I've never yet achieved even 95% from one version of MS Office to another. That includes Word and Excel files.

I call Bull Sh!t

[mpapet]

the people that pay us like Outlook

Huh? In what world does the customer care what email client I use?

What I think you meant was an employer typically rewards conformity over innovation. PHB's are typically strict conformists themselves. NOT using Outlook inspires uncertainty, so you won't be as well rewarded come annual evaluation.

its simpler to have them use the whole Office suite than just part of it.

And the cost of wasted productivity fixing the myriad of rendering bugs are not borne by PHB's either. This is a variation on the Broken Windows parable.

The article only begins to touch the more important point. The nature of document workflow is changing and think ordinary schmoes like this are catching onto the changing and how irrelevant Microsoft has become. They are still relevant for their biggest customers, so it won't happen in my lifetime. But the beginning of a long, slow decline of the relevance of Microsoft is upon us.

Re:I call Bull Sh!t

[evilkasper]

Call BS all you want, it doesn't change the fact that users like it. It doesn't matter why; even if they only like it because they are comfortable with it. Sure Microsoft will eventually be less relevant; given a long enough time span most things go this route.

Re:I call Bull Sh!t

[DrgnDancer]

Huh? In what world does the customer care what email client I use?

In the world that the company Exchange server manages everybody's calendars, a corporate address book, shared task lists, and isn't configured to serve people's e-mail in anything other than MAPI. There are precious few groupware clients that work with all of that as served up by Exchange. Assuming that you find one (and they do exist, they just tend to be nearly as costly as Outlook, and IMHO not much better) that you like better than Outlook, you then have to assume that you actually have the privileges to install the client on your workstation (not many people do in corporate environments), and you're not breaking any IT regulations by doing so.

Once you've overcome those hurdles, no one cares what e-mail client you use. In most large companies and many medium sized ones however, those hurdles are pretty much insurmountable. Unless you happen to be the director of IT or something. Even then, you better be prepared to defend your choice to your boss. Even as a systems admin with some seniority, I was pretty much unable to use anything other than Outlook at my last job. I was the Unix systems guy for the lab, but my day to day workstation was completely Microsoft, because that's what day to day IT support dictated. Looks like they're going to let me have a Linux box at my desk for testing and experimentation at my new place thankfully.

Please kill it.

[Narcocide]

You can even blame it on me.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[ByOhTek]

Yep. It's 2009, in Open Office 3.0, I didn't say that the margins bounce around, I just said it didn't handle them well, and by that, I mean it doesn't seem to accept margin info from a saved file in word.

As for Excel, where did I mention anything about any kind of programming in spreadsheets? I talked about tool tips. No formulas in them yet, not defiled with VBA, just tooltips. You know, cell annotations? Simple stuff.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

A web browser isn't simple, but word processing is on a whole other level in terms of complexity. Pause and think about how many more features a word processor has than a web browser. By and large, a web browser presents information. On the other hand, a Word Processor has all of the complexities of handling layout that a web browser does (and I would argue it has more when you get to adding things like symbols and formulas), but in addition has to handle the editing of all these bajillion permutations of input in a sane and efficient way.
As a case in point, consider that a KDE team of a few people managed to produce KHTML which is a passable rendering engine even now that it has been overshadowed by webkit. On the other hand, a large KDE team with some corporate backing has failed to produce a word processor (KWord) that can even be said to be in the same league as OO.o, let along MS Word.

Word doesn't format it's own docs well

[Jim Hall]

I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking.

Sure, Word isn't bad ... but it's not that great, either. The big offender lately: sharing documents. We are a large enterprise, and not everyone is on Office 2007. And due to the environment, some people run Windows, and some run Mac. I work in an office, and we've found that Word doesn't always format it's own document formats the same across different versions and different platforms (Mac vs Windows.) Here's a comment I posted a few weeks ago about this:

It's true that sometimes Word will fail to render a document properly. But it's not the fault of OpenOffice - sometimes, Microsoft Word fails to properly display other Microsoft Word files. Just this morning, I saw an example in action in a meeting:

Last night, one of the attendees sent out some notes for us to read before the meeting. We all dutifully printed out our copy of the document, and brought it with us to the meeting.

Despite the fact that the document was created with Microsoft Office, and that we all run Microsoft Office, there were 3 different versions of the printed document at the meeting. You could tell by looking around the table that one version of the notes (printed from Microsoft Office for Macintosh) arranged the text around a table in a weird way. Another version (printed by Microsoft Office 2007) put a page break in a different place and put an extra blank line between a table and its caption. The original version (Microsoft Office 2003) was formatted as intended.

This was a simple 3-page document in "DOC" format, with an enumerated list of paragraphs, so it didn't take long for us to realize our copies printed out differently, and to figure out the correlation between versions of Word and how the document printed out.

I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.

Re:Word doesn't format it's own docs well

[langelgjm]

The big offender lately: sharing documents. We are a large enterprise, and not everyone is on Office 2007. And due to the environment, some people run Windows, and some run Mac. I work in an office, and we've found that Word doesn't always format it's own document formats the same across different versions and different platforms (Mac vs Windows.)

Indeed, I have a Windows desktop and a Mac laptop and have noticed that too. The same document when opened in Word 2007 vs Word 2008 will look different, and sometimes the changes add up enough that it actually has a different page count.

I dealt with it by using Word 2007 as my "official" copy - this is what I would send to others, or print out, etc. Word 2008 on the laptop was just what I used to type while at the library or away from my desk. (I actually really dislike Word 2008, and wish there wasn't such a distance between the Windows and Mac versions of Word. It really feels like using two totally different programs)

Re:Word doesn't format it's own docs well

[uniquegeek]

When I worked at a print shop, we'd always hold our breath when someone came in to print a thesis that was done in Word. Formatting issues were very common, even when opened with the same version at our office.

The multiple versions/multiple platform of Word don't play nice with each other. Printing from PDF is better, though there are multiple ways to make a PDF from a Word document, especially if you include the ways different versions do it too. The multiple ways *still* may give you inconsistent results.

I always felt sorry for those poor buggers because hey... they're using a word processor... an expected tool. It was tough to explain to them there wasn't a whole hell of a lot we could do.

But even funnier are the people trying to design invitations and cards with Excel and Word. Even Publisher is pretty inconsistent, and can fail at simple things like making things that are 2" on screen actually 2" long in print.

Want professional-looking documents and design? Use professional tools (and maybe even pay a professional who knows what the hell they're doing)!

(That being said, the vast majority of the population could probably suffice with a word processor that has font styles, sizes, b, i ,u, and tabs).

Re:Word doesn't format it's own docs well

[Bert64]

Sometimes the formatting issues occur even on the same version, depending on how your printer is configured for instance, a well known issue which doesn't occur often in most companies since they typically use the same printer.
Installing security updates and service packs has also been known to modify the formatting...

What's hypocritical is that such problems are considered normal, and yet when openoffice exhibits similar issues (which are clearly unavoidable) it's cited as a reason why openoffice is unusable, but considering the format some formatting errors will be unavoidable... What version of word should openoffice try to emulate, or assume files are from?

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Foredecker]

Yes they could. But would they? If they tried, then how would they get paid? Contrary to popular believe - nobody works for free. Yes, someone may get paid for doing something other than contributing to a project, but they have to do something for a living. If a person is not getting paid to contribute to a project, then the time they get to spend on the project will be limited.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

I'd dispute that. If it can't open one file, then it's a trade between the cost of the switch and any headaches involved (your spreadsheet) vs. the cost of staying with MS office. Were you able to clean the spreadsheet and submit it to someone on the project for analysis *assuming the formulas aren't trade secrets or something)?

The vim paperclip

[jonaskoelker]

Try ":clippy" --- http://pix.mybll.de/vim.gif

Funny Quip Modded Flaimebait...

[bledri]

Must be the work of J. Jonah Jameson of the Daily Bugle.

Documenting...that's for powerpoint!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody uses word for creating documents anymore because the only documentation tool you need is powerpoint.

Once upon a time, you created a document with details and salient points. Then, you would summarize that information into a coherent mail to express your conclusions. Finally, you would build a presentation to illustrate the key points for your audience.

Today, all everyone cares about is the presentation. So why bother with all the fluff...just create your bullets (remember to include significant text in each bullet ... we don't have a document anymore) in a pretty presentation and send that around!

I even get mail that's just a powerpoint file with paragraphs of text in it.

I wish this wasn't true...

Re:Documenting...that's for powerpoint!

[argent]

I've gotten mail that's an Excel spreadsheet with the text entered into all the cells. So I believe you.

In Korea

[corsendonk]

A lot of people mentioning email here but in Korea, email is only for old people

Paper versus Screen

[Tablizer]

I'm currently tearing my hair out over this issue. We have an old, rickety in-house app the generates the paper pages for a 500-page book of summary numbers and statistics. I presented a web-based demo of the system that is far cleaner and efficient. However, nobody knows how the "paper fans" will react to it.

I've tried to find a compromise, but it just seems that paper-rules and screen rules are too different. Four other IT'ers tried to find a compromise also. Things that make sense on paper are confusing on the screen or via web interfaces and vice verse. One or the other needs to back off and let the other dominate. For now, I'm stuck in the 1980's until enough paper-heads die off. Sounds disrespectful, but that's the story around here. Maybe I should pick up COBOL :-P
       

Re:Why dont I need word?

[IntlHarvester]

and still companies did it just because "it's time to do it"

Not really. One of the main drivers for businesses to upgrade Office is to maintain interoperability with their customers.

Arguing over whichever is better or worse misses rather misses the point that OpenOffice creates a ongoing compatibility issue, rather than something that that is resolved once and then forgotten about. Unless the whole business ecosystem moves over to OpenOffice, its always going to be a valid complaint.

The sagely words of the doctor

[jonaskoelker]

Well, according to Doctor Word, "It looks like you have frustrations with emacs."

Re:Why dont I need word?

[gothzilla]

We've never had a problem opening an ms office document with ms office. Ever. We have however had problems opening office documents with open office. All the rhetoric in the world does not erase the facts. Open office failed in the first day it was tested so it was thrown out the window. This is common sense in business. If you have a choice of two tools and one works and one doesn't then you use the one that does. Doesn't matter that it's free if it doesn't do what you need to do.

When your job is to make it possible for other people to do their jobs then there is no room for fanboyism. You use what works, period. I'd love to switch to linux but some of the work we do cannot be done on linux. In a business you cannot confuse your fantasies with reality. In my fantasies we use linux and open office. In reality we use windows and MS Office.

You also fail to understand the reality of the business place and human nature. It doesn't matter that people are not utilizing 100% of their time. That is completely and totally irrelevant to their reaction, and the reaction of the owner, when you tell them you are going to make it take longer to do their job. Even if it is only a few minutes, it will not fly.

notepadword

[chucklebutte]

i use notepad =/

OneNote

[TheTick21]

I know it isn't word, but is there anything more awesome than OneNote (and the way it integrates with outlook, excel, and word) combined with a tablet PC? I type rather quickly, but for working ideas out nothing beats a whiteboard for me. Onenote + tabletPC is the ultimate whiteboard. Is there anything better? Of what I've used nothing else comes close. Really wish openoffice had great tablet support.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is not "just as good." ... We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough."

Well, then I guess you shouldn't ever upgrade from one version of Office to another. Word 6 to 97, 97 to 2003, etc...they all have minor incompatibilities and formatting changes.

That being said, I generally find OpenOffice's spreadsheet to not be good enough. Its macro system is less sophisticated (though it is getting better), and charts aren't as sophisticated (even for the basic x-y plot, which is pretty much all I use). I like the word processor and presentation component, though.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[gothzilla]

The problem isn't with opening our own documents, it's with opening everyone else's which is why I said "when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies." We only use office docs for a short time anyway so compatibility between versions doesn't really matter, but if we can't open a document from a customer then that's lost revenue. If all our customers used open office then we would use open office. They don't so we can't.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't Thank You..

[davidsyes]

Very Much... I prefer to stick with Lotus WordPro. It has a friendlier GUI, has non-modal dialog boxes, is WYSIWYG even in print preview. It STILL has a better sections/divisions multi-document container/tab metaphor interface than most versions of word (maybe even compared to the latest one), even compared to OpenOffice.org.

As long as IBM lets Lotus breathe, and as long as Lotus develops maintenance fixes for SmartSuite, i'll keep using SmartSuite (Approach, WordPro, Lotus 1-2-3) for all my database, word processing, and spreadsheet needs that don't need direct pdf output.

You have chosen...

[Anonymous Coward]

'Slow and Horrible'.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your example is horseshit, you think word opens up old versions or corrupt files 100% of the time? Word beats oo.o, in my opinion, because it is a seamless suite of products. While the word portion is about as good, the excel and powerpoint clones aren't, and there isn't even an equivalent to Outlook. That is why companies do and should stick with word, for now.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[gothzilla]

MS Office really doesn't cost that much if you look at the cost over time. We used office 2000 until 2008 when we started getting Office 2k7 documents. That's pretty damn cheap when you look at the cost spread over 8 years. I expect Office 2k7 to be good for at least 5 years, maybe more. Hard to predict the future.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[rvw]

OpenOffice already has several offshoots: NeoOffice, OxygenOffice, Go-oo...

And many projects or offshoots like that often have a very small team, with probably one key person who cannot be missed for the survival of the team. On the other hand, the fact that only a couple of people are needed (fulltime) to maintain a project like this probably means that companies like Oracle and IBM will keep on sponsoring it.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'd say the "scales almost effortlessly" you purport is what this geek doesn't understand.

WTF?

[dzfoo]

From the article:

Because Wikipedia managed to efficiently store--at the time of this writing--all human knowledge, speed and scalability weren't a problem. Finally, the price (free) was acceptable.

"All human knowledge". Really?

          -dZ.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Agreed. In terms of

There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale. It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.

they said that writing a free C compiler and libraries just wasn't feasible. Afterwards, they said using the C compiler and associated libraries to write a free Unix clone wasn't feasible. Its been one thing after another, after another, after another... What the poster doesn't seem to understand is that the history involved indicates that geeks are especially good at tackling projects about which office mangers would say, "nothing is simple". I'd even go so far as to say that for office managers to tackle the job would be approaching the impossible.

Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[Theovon]

Back when I was young (I graduated highschool in 1991), I recall people who migrated from WordPerfect to Word complaining about the missing "reveal codes" option. I looked into this, and this is what my friends with Ph.D.s at the time told me: Word didn't have "reveal codes" because it didn't have codes.

Let me step back and explain this a little better. Word Perfect used in-line codes to indicate formatting. There was an "italics on" code and there was an "italics off" command. It's not quite like HTML or XML, because it wasn't hierarchical. A document was a linear stream of bytes, and the word processor displayed the formatting by traversing the bytes to figure it out. On the processors of the day (386's), this had some major performance disadvantages, when the program had to scan back thousands of bytes just to figure out what the correct formatting was for what was being displayed on the screen. This was okay for the DOS version (can't see most of the formatting, so don't need to look for it), but it became a major liability for the Windows version. It was also a liability because documents that had been edited and edited tended to crud up with lots of superflous codes that WP simply didn't have the smarts to clean up. The only "advantage" was that you could reveal the codes, and that was only an advantage because people got used to it, and they got used to it because WP became problematic to use if you didn't reveal the codes to clean up problems.

Word did things differently. We all like to complain about Microsoft's behavior, and we like to complain about how crufty their software is. But now and then, their engineers (who are people like anyone else) did manage to do something that had intelligence behind it. Mind you, sometimes something has intelligence simply because someone thought about it and made an engineering decision. I'm not trying to claim that this was necessarily BETTER. Anyhow, Word didn't have reveal codes because it didn't have codes, per se, to reveal. Not in-line anyhow. Word was object-oriented. Word documents contained data structures that themselves indicated formatting and contained text. Paragraphs were objects. Sections were objects. Text within italics was inside an object. In a way, this is neither here nor there compared to reveal codes, but it made a practical difference in that when Word needed to determine the formatting of an object, rather than scanning back to the beginning of the file (which WP didn't always have to do but did sometimes which made it slow), Word worked its way up the object hierarchy, a much more efficient process. This also had advantages in that the object tree could be optimized to contain the formatting that was actually there. In WP, if you un-italicized a sentence that had been italicized, it wouldn't necessarily remove the old codes, instead inserting extra codes so that you got on's followed immediately by off's. Word would just delete the object.

So, to summarize, the reason Word didn't have reveal codes was that there were no in-line codes to reveal. Word's equivalent would have been some way to display the object hierarchy, which wouldn't necessarily have been intuitively useful to users. And of course, it would have been silly to emulate codes just to imitate a "feature" of WP that only existed in the first place because WP didn't automatically manage its codes properly.

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[bcboy]

err... Word docs crud up with invisible mark-up, as well. It isn't relevant that the underlying mechanism is different. With no "reveal" option, it can be infuriating trying to find and delete the invisible things so the formatting will be correct.

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[colinrichardday]

Does this make it more difficult to write software that manipulates Word files? Are there Python (Perl, PHP, whatever) modules that grok these objects? One can generate LaTeX output in any programming language that has string processing.

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[Anonymous Coward]

Show paragraph markers (and other hidden symbols) has to be the most underused feature in word. Spaces, line breaks, page breaks, section breaks are also displayed using their respective symbols in addition to the paragraph markers. Additionally, by selecting and right-clicking a paragraph marker it is quite possible to change the attributes of an entire paragraph with just a few clicks.

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[Theovon]

I thought I was clear in saying that it wasn't necessarily a superior design. By no means is it perfect. (It's from Microsoft, after all.) But it IS interesting and it IS vulnerable to a different set of frustrations.

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[mibus]

In WP, if you un-italicized a sentence that had been italicized, it wouldn't necessarily remove the old codes, instead inserting extra codes so that you got on's followed immediately by off's. Word would just delete the object.

I've seen huge waste out of Word that says otherwise - objects or streams, Word is just as capable of keeping waste around. Just look at its HTML export as proof. (I haven't looked at it recently, but you're talking about a day-one difference here so I think I'm still justified :)

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[lennier]

"Word's equivalent would have been some way to display the object hierarchy, which wouldn't necessarily have been intuitively useful to users"

On the contrary, I think this would have been an excellent feature. HTML's DOM does much the same thing. Being able to view the REAL source of your document (which can be defined to never change regardless of your ever-changing display platform) would have been a huge win.

But I imagine it was problematic to do in Word because the *way* they defined their object-orientation was probably in raw C++ or assembler optimised to low-level byte storage with no thought for canonical serialisation or data - so they never imagined any way of interacting with the object tree other than instantiating it in a live document.

I could be wrong, but that's my impression looking in from the outside as a user and wondering why so much of the data I work with on a daily basis just isn't 'friendly' to work with beyond really basic functions - it provides 'rich media interfaces' which do what the programmer has let you do - but doesn't make *itself* available. In fact, there was a whole school of OO design in the 80s (and still today( which actively taught that letting raw data be made available for user-level remix was a Very Bad Thing. Closed boxes all the way up! Only access via methods! Preserve the right to randomly change data formats and semantics at will! Components! Don't let the user SEE anything, only let them DO! And strongly restrict what they CAN do, to prevent errors!

And because of this we reduced our interfaces to Playskool GUI verbs, which meant we lost the ability to manipulate critical documents like Word .doc using third party tools because the data formats simply weren't defined at any level between 'hardcoded CPU-specific C++ ABI' and 'sequence of visual operations and mouse clicks'. Look around: you can see lots of Unix text-file manipulation tools, but very few, even now, for manipulating data structures with more structure than text but less platform-dependence than a Word document.

HTML's 'everyone can see the source code of the document all across the Internet' approach was wildly old-school in comparison, but I think it's why it worked so well, and we still haven't wrung all the juice out of that idea yet. XML is the logical successor, but... well, possibly didn't make the best design tradeoffs it could have for a universal data structure language.

Any other takers?

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[7 digits]

> By no means is it perfect. (It's from Microsoft, after all.)

Of course, "Word" & "Perfect" can't be from Microsoft.

It was from SSI, then WordPerfect Corporation, and then Corel. /pun

Re:Why dont I need word?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Don't forget the current state-of-the-art for spreadsheets, Gnumeric!

Re:Why dont I need word?

[flewp]

Well said. I can't speak on the Open Office/MS Office side of things, but I'm sick of people who aren't in a related industry telling me (out of fanboyism for open source projects) that the gimp and Blender are just as good as their commercial counterparts. Even worse is when you explain that you've actually tried the open source software and found it to be lacking.... only to be told that the problem(s) is with you and not the software,or that your problem(s) is somehow an anomaly.

So, some guy is giving up Word after 20 years

[ClosedSource]

I'm sure you could find many Slashdotters that gave up on Word a lot sooner. Why is this guy so special?

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough.

MS Office isn't 100% compatible either, either with other office package's file formats (included some of OO.Os, I would assume), and even sometimes earlier versions of its own.

Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[master_p]

The major problem with Word is that it allows the creation of on-the-fly styles while typing. For example, when I type with normal style, using Ctrl+B will add a new style to the document: normal + bold. This easy creation and modification of styles creates a style nightmare. I have seen documents with over 500 different styles, as a result of the document being passed around in various home and abroad offices and partners.

Word should be strict about its types. Either you use an existing type or create a new one from the beginning. That will limit the amount of hacks people do in order to format their documents.

Re:Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[kklein]

YES.

This is the only (yes, only--I've never understood the Word hate around here) problem I have with Word, but it is a big one. For short, one-off documents, I've actually moved to using Apple's Pages, which doesn't do this. When I'm making a handout for class (I'm a university lecturer), I have specific styles that I use every time. With Pages (or, for that matter, OO.o), I can just set the style and off I go. The menu arrow next to the style turns red if the text deviates from the style, but it doesn't make a new style.

I honestly cannot figure out why Word does that. It makes the style list a horrible jumble, and is probably the #1 reason that people don't use styles. It looks daunting, even though it should simplify document creation!

Re:Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[tftp]

is probably the #1 reason that people don't use styles

IMO people don't use styles because styles are a programming concept that they have no knowledge of and no educatonal base for. People use WYSIWYG because it's easier for them, even when it requires tons of manual, hopefully coordinated changes all over the document. It is infinitely easier for anyone but a programmer to select a word and then click on "Bold" and "Red" instead of first creating a Red_Bold style and then attaching it to the word. A style is such an OOP concept that even an early C coder could be confused, let alone a non-programmer. This is also one of several reasons why [La]Tex is used only by scientists - they understand its logic far better than a mess of invisible formatting in Word.

Re:Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[indiechild]

oooh yeah. The on-the-fly styles thing annoys me as well!

I prefer using iWork Pages on OS X, it's far nicer for most word processing jobs, and the page layout tools are top notch. I only use Word if I have to share the document with Windows users.

Re:Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[melikamp]

Yeah I remember one program that got styles right: FrameMaker. Whenever I try to make a text document with OOO, I start cursing. For chrissake, vanilla CSS has better styling system. Don't reply, I'll go read the manual...

Re:Why dont I need word?

[zap0d]

In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

Apparently you never had issues between different MS-Office versions. Its not even 99.9999% compatible to itself.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[rantingkitten]

. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

In what way is Microsoft Office any better? It has trouble opening its own documents sometimes -- especially if, god forbid, the document was produced on an earlier version of Office. And how fun was it when 2007 was released and we all kept getting .docx and .xlsx with no way of opening them until Microsoft grudgingly released some plugin for earlier versions, which barely worked? In my experience, Open Office is actually better at reading most of Microsoft's formats than Microsoft itself is half the time.

Dude, nothing is free

[Anonymous Coward]

When you use an application of any extended period of time, the upfront cost are neglible. Take how much you make an hour (lets say $25) and divide that into the cost of Office (say $300). WIll using Office cost your or save you more than 12 hours of time over the lifetime of your use.

Its obvious what the free software zealots will say. If you're answer it cost me more time to to use Office, thus its actually more than $300...fine use what you want.

Most people value thier time and aren't perplexed by "you get what you pay for"

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately you're right:- there's an utter intolerance for any poor technology when users are given a choice about changing from what they know. Its just a tool and its doing the job now just fine.

But compare this with the apparent appetite for wasting hours in pointless meetings where they are invited without an agenda or know what the purpose is. And you can think of other gross inefficiencies which don't get addressed in your work environment - they cost hours and days rather than minutes per employee per year but nothing changes.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Hymer]

You really think uncle Larry bought Sun just for the OS or Hardware or Java ?
No, uncle Larry bought Sun because he now can be a complete paine in the ass for cousin Bill & cousin Steve. Uncle Larry bought a complete multiplatform office suite, a very competent dual platform OS and Java. Uncle Larry became cousin Bills & cousin Steves worst nightmare and that is why he bought Sun. Oracle just want to put Microsoft where they should be... somewhere very far behind Oracle.

--

If Outlook is so fucking great why is it not ported to OS X ?

It should die. It won't. Ever.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Word doesn't matter.
MS Office or any office doesn't matter.
Software doesn't matter.
.
What people know and understand enough to USE matters. It's a human issue, not a technical one.

I third this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep a copy of Open Office around - just in case.

I've had times where my wife couldn't convert between versions of MS Office. I used Open Office to open/save - and it fixed the issue. However, I don't believe Open Office is the bees knees (mind you, I like the fact that you can modify the XML directly using notepad to recover corruptions, which I needed to do once).

I've worked for large organisations for the last 15 years that primarily deals with large and complex documents.
I can guarentee you that almost EVERYONE I work with has wasted significant effort due to Microsoft mal-formatting, incompatibilities, normal.dot corruptions, etc.

To the grandparent poster, you've got to be kidding me that most businesses would not tolerate wasted time. Most engineers waste their time on a weekly basis in Word. My current project has over 100 people on it - and people periodically ask "why do we use this crap"... The usual cry of frustration heard is most often another "Wordism".

For the record, the project "know it all" says that it's peoples' ineptitude that breaks MS Word. I showed him a clean document, using "paste as text" that caused documents to corrupt. His response was "well, that's not the way I would do it". I need that advice like a hole in the head.

Ditch this crap product. I've suffered this fool too many years.

AC

Re:Why dont I need word?

[badasscat]

If you think your people are being 100% utilized, either you're misinformed or nobody wants to work for you (or both). 3 minutes out of a day gets lost in the noise of the work day.

It's not about 100% efficiency, it's about trying to prevent annoying and unnecessary inefficiency "creep" in the workplace.

3 minutes here, 3 minutes there, eventually you've got people wasting literally hours out of every day just on trying to get stuff to work on borderline-compatible systems. I've seen it happen. I've seen people waste entire *days* trying to get documents open by downloading and installing various things, waiting for the IT dept. to clean out and edit their registries (to remove traces of old apps), etc.

Not being able to open a file because you're trying to open it on an app other than that which created it is just an unnecessary distraction that hurts both productivity *and* worker happiness. And I've had this experience myself with OO. When I first got my work Mac, it didn't have Word installed, so I tried installing OO myself and experienced literally nothing but frustration trying to get my Word 2004 docs to open. Granted, this was really my company's fault, but it was their fault for not installing Word, not any other reason. I wasted several days waiting to be able to open these docs, even though I had OO on my computer. (I did other work in the meantime, but it was still annoying.)

The bottom line is this: a worker should spend literally 0 seconds of every single day worrying about trying to get a document open properly. This is not my job, and I don't want to deal with it. I don't care about being 100% efficient, but there is just no reason why I should need to waste a single second of my time on this.

I'm not saying you never have to worry about compatibility with an all-MS setup either, I'm just saying your argument that a little frustration and inefficiency doesn't matter is wrong. It matters to me because the extra time that I have to waste on stuff like that ends up coming out of my time, not company time. Because the work has to get done regardless of whether or not I can open those files, so it's in my own interests to be able to open them immediately without fuss.

Cost is not Value

[benwaggoner]

But "a bargain" when other free office suites, text editors, and numerous word processors are available? I'm also just not sure what "sophisticated features" it has that a "professional writer" needs. If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX). If you have need for footnotes, citations, cross references, etc., I would say that (a) Word's bibliographic support is pretty bad by itself, though when used with other software and plugins, it becomes useful, and (b) the support for cross references, etc. is minimal compared to the options given in some other software. If you collaborate, you need to track changes, but any good word processor does that today. What else does someone just producing text need?

ValueCost.

What does the Student/Home version of Word cost? $80? If you use it for 10 hours a week for a year, that works out to $0.08 an hour. Total rounding error for anyone who makes money writing, and pays for itself many times over even if it only boosts productivity 5%.

As for Word, I'd say its deep strengths are in easy, productive composition of structured prose, plus great revision and collaboration features. And it's not just about feature-to-feature checklist, but about how all the features work together and are preseted. I've never seen anything that can easily defork two different revisions of the same document like Word, comparing and letting you pick change-by change with all the variants on screen at once.

While it's no layout powerhouse, it works very well for making structured documents if style sheets are used correctly, which can them be enhanced in LaTeX, InDesign or whatever.

Re:Cost is not Value

[Nicolay77]

I've never seen anything that can easily defork two different revisions of the same document like Word, comparing and letting you pick change-by change with all the variants on screen at once.

I do that all the time to my source code. It's just a version control service, diff and merge tools and it has been a standard for ages.

dead simple

[bbands]

I have been looking for a dead-simple word processor, something to facilitate the process of writing much the way sitting down at a typewriter used to. Suggestions? jab

MS Word and Oo should die because ..

[roguegramma]

MS Word and Oo should die because both encourage you not to use styles for formatting your document.

A Word document prepared by an average person is usually impossible to reformat as quickly as it would be possible if people had used global styles instead of highlighting everything with its own custom formatting.

I noticed one of the posters said how well Word worked for him when he was using styles consistently.
That poster is an exceptional Word user, not a normal one.

Word for writing, PDF for distribution?

[benwaggoner]

Well, yes, of course you'd use PDF if you want to get the exact fonts and layout on the other end. .docx is a content creation format. It can work somewhat for that scenario, but it's not its whole reason for existence.

But nor are you going to write an article in Acrobat. Note that the Office apps now have an excellent "Save as PDF" mode that's much faster than Distiller.

just to dampen the hatefest

[vorlich]

I use open office for almost all my regular documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Then I use emacs for scripts and interesting text documents. Then I use Latex for layout (it is just so beautiful). For less aesthetic concepts Indesign is great. To comply with my work I use (makes the sign of the cross) Publisher. To cope with our website I use Dreamweaver - especially to hash out some database form and the re-write it. Then I use php for more leisurely times to produces database forms I can understand. To search and replace all the crap out of of text documents their is no easier alternative to MS Word's search and replace. Doing the same in OO requires the brain of a theoretical physicist. Doing it in vi or emacs requires the memory of an elephant. So I would miss dear old word if it went. But since I seriously doubt the chances of that ever happening are close to zero, I am not worrying too much. So I guess it's a case of nothing to see here, eject the warp coil and move on.

Normal FTW!

[benwaggoner]

If OpenOffice doesn't have Normal/Draft, it's dead to me. I don't want to see page breaks when I'm still writing the darn text! That's bugged me about other tools for getting on 20 years now.

That killed Pages 1.0 for me as well.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[TemporalBeing]

Yes they could. But would they? If they tried, then how would they get paid? Contrary to popular believe - nobody works for free. Yes, someone may get paid for doing something other than contributing to a project, but they have to do something for a living. If a person is not getting paid to contribute to a project, then the time they get to spend on the project will be limited.

Probably. It would probably be pretty easy to setup something like the Linux Foundation for OO if there isn't something similar already. Then it's just a matter of getting the existing sponsors to contribute to pay their salaries, etc. Given the existing install-base, that probably a simple task if it was necessary to do; and I wouldn't be surprised if Sun/Oracle did that as part of letting them go if they were to do such a thing and try to shut down OO.

Oracle probably has bigger ambitions - like making OO-Base work with their one of their DB products (e.g. BDB, Oracle DB, etc.) better, perhaps in a way similar to AccessMS SQL Server; i.e. make it easier to people to migrate up the chain.

Oracle could gain a lot from having OO in their back pocket.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[shaitand]

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1323991&cid=28931489

Printer drivers, not Word versions...

[nuckfuts]

Different versions of Word is not what usually causes formatting to change when opening a document on a different machine. It's having different printer drivers installed (especially for the default printer) that causes problems. In fact, merely selecting a different printer on the originating computer can throw page formatting out of whack. Printers often have different printable margins, and even the list of fonts available changes depending on the printer selected.

Re:Printer drivers, not Word versions...

[bryan1945]

So why is a printer driver tied into formatting in Word? I would say that is a problem with Word. There is no need to tie the two together.

Re:Printer drivers, not Word versions...

[nuckfuts]

Did you even read my comment? Different printers have different printable areas / margins, and different fonts. What the driver does is a Windows issue, not a Word issue.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[shaitand]

Most companies don't actually exchange anything on the level of a word document with third parties regularly, it just doesn't make sense. How often do you need someone outside your company to send you a document you can edit? For that matter, how often do you send editable documents?

Most companies I have worked with exchange communications in emails and documents in PDF files or the appropriate graphics file for artwork. Word just isn't a reasonable expectation for interchange, you simply can not expect your customers to keep a copy of a $250-400 program on hand that barely offers an advantage over a free download and for most users doesn't even offer an advantage over wordpad.

If you really need editable documents sent back and forth than simply post a required format. People rarely object if your required format is an open standard and all they need is a free download.

There are thousands of companies (including at least half the law offices out there) that use word perfect for their word processing and they don't seem to have issues with no ms word compatibility.

One of these things is not like the other

[westlake]

they said that writing a free C compiler and libraries just wasn't feasible. Afterwards, they said using the C compiler and associated libraries to write a free Unix clone wasn't feasible. Its been one thing after another, after another, after another...

You did notice that not one of your examples was an end-user application?

"Linux is the kernel..."

Knowing how to code in C is not the same as understanding office work well enough to design and execute a competitive office suite - and MS Office is itself only one component of the MS Office system.

Microsoft has - quite literally - billions to spend on studies of office work and the office worker. It has had the guts to trust in what it has learned and make a commitment to The Ribbon UI across the board.

OpenOffice.org through almost the whole of its existence has been - for all practical purposes - a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun.

Firefox - the Moz Foundation - began with an hefty infusion of cash and IP from AOL and still receives tens of millions of dollars in subsidies each year from Google alone.

That buys organization - planning - discipline.

It buys talent and resources beyond those of the programmer himself.

 

Re:One of these things is not like the other

[omb]

Can I say CRAP!

Re:One of these things is not like the other

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Sounds to me like you've been drinking the kool-aid. You say, "not the same as understanding office work well enough to design and execute a competitive office suite", which indicates you think that MS sells because of inherent quality. Design of better products has gone on, and is going on, and will continue to go on. What does matter is execution. Implementing better technology (than Microsoft) doesn't seem to be the challenge. Doing anything with that technology other than sell it to Microsoft, however, is a risk. Its rather like you are complimenting "the fastest sprinter in the world", after they've been convicted of systematically murdering everyone who could run faster.

Also note, the whole point of the linked article, "The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world", was to offer a solution to the old methodology which MS has spent so much money studying. Specificly, these problems:

Here are just a few of the problems:
* People sometimes forget to attach the document to their email.
* The document can be too largeâ"especially long documents with lots of imagesâ"and can clog up the email server.
* Nobody knows what edits were made and by whom. Sure, you can turn "Track Changes" on, but as it transforms your document into a horrible illegible mess, most people very quickly turn it off again.
* Nobody has any idea which is the most recent version of the document. This leads to amusing email flame wars where people insist that you adopt version control for your file names, which nobody ever does because they are too busy arguing about what the syntax should be. Even if you do manage to get version control, you are still never sure if you have the most recent version.
* People save the document in some directory on their hard drive and then forget where it is. The usual solution to this is to email the author again and ask them to resend it.
* People miss the email (usually because there are far too many emails in a day) and claim to have never received the document in the first place.
Even if you somehow manage to survive all these pitfalls and your document reaches the Holy Land of $some_random_network_share, your troubles are just beginning. Now nobody knows where your document is, so they have to pester you to tell them. Once you tell them, they'll usually find that they don't have access to that network share. If they do manage to get access, they'll typically open the document and leave it open for an extended period of time, and now you can't edit your own document because it is locked for "Read Only" access. So inevitably you'll save your own modified copy on your local hard drive, and the whole agonizing dance begins again.

The author then goes on to describe a real world solution as implemented in a real world company, and how it worked. The advantages MediaWiki exhibited over MS Office, he stated, were obvious:

* Everyone was always reading the most recent version of any document.
* The entire history of changes was tracked, and anyone could revert any change, so nothing was ever lost.
* Many people could work on the same document at the same time, thanks to built-in source control and the ability to edit small chunks of a document without affecting the rest of the page.
* You could see who made which change with a single click.
* Documents could be linked together in sensible ways.
* The entire database was searchable and always fully indexed, so anyone could find any document instantly.

Sounds to me like an interesting alternative. But then again, I don't even like kool-aid.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[ubrgeek]

Who would write a book in one whole file?? One chapter = one file. Reduces the chance of losing everything in one-fell-swoop. And easier to edit, send around for notes, etc.

We use Word at work... and perhaps always will

[mark-t]

We used to use openoffice... but the word came down from up on high that documents created with it, even though they could be exported to Office documents, were not formatting the same way in Office, and we needed to be able to exchange documents with clients in a format that they could both read and write with no compatibility issues.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[node 3]

Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.

There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.

He didn't mean the process is simple, but that that's all it takes. If Oracle drops OpenOffice, someone else will pick up the project, simple or not. People do non-simple things every day.

It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.

Not really. If he said that someone else would just write their own free office suite from scratch, you'd have a point. Geeks get this wrong all the time (product X sucks, I could write something better in my sleep). But to continue an orphaned project? This happens all the time. Some worthy projects do die in the process, often being resurrected later, but sometimes not. However, something as important as OpenOffice would not possibly be left to die. In fact, the instant news hit the wire that Oracle has abandoned OpenOffice[*], there would be a large number of projects started to pick up where they left off.

Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.

Client - Server - The Web - each has its place.

This solves so many problems for the office manager that I don't think the geek really understands what he competing against.

Rubbish. OpenOffice is just as scaleable and integrated as a suite as MS Office is. MS Office isn't special other than it got critical mass at the time when computers were themselves gaining critical mass. It could have happened just as easily to WordPerfect, Lotus, or (had it existed at the time) OpenOffice.

[*] This is a rather silly notion to begin with. OpenOffice is far to valuable a property for Oracle to just drop it. They might sell it, or spin it off, but they aren't just going to issue a press release one day saying they've suspended all work on the product and just leave a CVS server running to satisfy the LGPL.

Re-learning MS-Word, over and over and over and ov

[lanner]

It occurs to me that the primary problem I have working with MS Word, and the other MS Office apps, is that they are inconsistent version for version. You have to re-learn MS Word over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. They move crap all over the menus just to confuse you. Since they had already moved everything around in different places about three times, they had to invent the ribbon because moving things around the menus got old!

I've been using word since the Windows 3.0 days. The most recent version of Office, 2007/2008 (I use both a Windows and OS X computer) is once again inconsistent with the previous version.

I much much prefer Neo Office on OSX over Word 2008.

I appreciate good progress in an application, but Microsoft doesn't care about progress -- they care about re-selling you the same damn thing you had as before, but promising to fix all the bugs they introduced in the first place! It's a real criminal racket -- they create the problem and keep selling you a "solution" that has more problems than the last time. They re-invent the file format, re-invent the interface, re-invent the packaging over and over and over and over...

Reimer's a fake troll (no degrees/certs/hands on)

[Anonymous Coward]

Per your subject, Jeremy Reimer doesn't even have a college degree around computers, or even a cert like an A+ (much less an MCSE or others like it) or years to decades of actual professional experience in them in the trenches doing actual tech, admin, or programming. He has zero on all accounts. He also likes to impersonate, libel, and troll others online. For example, Jeremy Reimer had parts of his personal osy website forcibly removed by his hosting provider, and his friend Jay Little doing the same, albeit his website was removed by Crystaltech.com in its entirety for libelling and impersonating others and making death threats to them via their personal websites (this occurred for 2 arstechnica forums members in Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little). Did some googling and found that out about Jeremy Reimer and his arstechnica friend Jay Little. This is what I found for starters in regards to the above, see here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22APK%22+and+%22affectionate+clone%22&btnG=Google+Search where Jeremy Reimer was forced to admit he impersonated others on his website to libel them with his stating this on his osy website: "Jeremy Reimer - "Anyway the "APK" registered here is just an affectionate clone of the original. In fact I prefer him to the original." ..." so Jeremy Reimer could avoid email harassment penalties for which his isp shaw of canada put Jeremy Reimer on a tracking ticket for also, in addition to his libelling others on his osy website as well for which a Detective Fenton in (near Reimer's actual residence, British Columbia in Canada) were contacted as well for death or violence threats being issued on Reimer's website to others. We don't need MS Word, Reimer says? Beg to differ: We don't need the likes of Jeremy Reimer or arstechnica. He's out writing biased so called "articles" now like this one (usually they are only re-reporting plagiarized news others have already put out before him) to hopefully drum up some views for the arstechnica shithole online which Reimer himself said was falling apart no less.

You just made the other guys point!

[Anonymous Coward]

When you used the line "One of MS' biggest problems has been people not willing to upgrade." you just lost the argument. The worst thing about MS Word has always been that the default (.doc) format has changed with every version, with the goal of making older versions unable to read documents created in the newer versions. This is Microsoft's way of trying to force users to upgrade to each new version. That is the ONLY reason the format changed between versions. In WordPerfect for example, the basic format did not change. Features were added without making it impossible for older versions of the program to open documents created in newer versions.

So why should the user HAVE to upgrade? If what they have works for them, they shouldn't have to upgrade because someone that has a newer version might send a document that they can't open.

And Microsoft really does not care about interoperability, even with their own software!

And the MS implementation of ODF is a joke!

Re:Why dont I need word?

[NoOneInParticular]

I have, on three seperate occasions, saved the work of some poor student that wrote some math-heavy document in MS-Word. What happened was that Word saved the doc, but couldn't open it anymore. The freaking program was not even compatible with itself! What I managed to do was open the document in openoffice, and save it again. At that point Word could open it again.

Apparently this never happened to you, because you would have thrown out Word right away. Right? Right?

Of course you wouldn't, despite your rhetoric about business actually being rational, you would have been thrown out before they would even consider moving away from ms-office.

Astroturf

[omb]

No, WORD, having started out very well is now a hopeless mess. Most large teams have a WORD specialist, whose job is to mentor users and pick up the regular WORD failures due to instability, as clearly set out above.

Never use WORD for big > 50 page documents, for large ones use LaTeX, which will go to > 100,000 pages without problems. For everything short <1000 pages you can use OO, which is much, much more stable.

I have used OO for nearly 10 years now, and even when it was much better than WORD, and had far fewer mis-features, which is the real problem, WORD encourages on-the-fly formatting, which is OK for a 1 page poster, but disasterous for long and complex documents.

Long documents need to be designed, which is what Tech Writers did before they became the Wicked Witch form the West for WORD. Then yoy can use NOTEPAD, VI or EMACS to write and spell check text without worrying about format, and they can develop their text using a simple editor and standard version control tools.

And before the usual M$ fanbois start up I have Win-7 plus most versions of IE and WORD virtualized, and I normally only use them to make the management clear on the risk of committing to WORD for large documents. Each generation brings a new crop of MBA managers who swallow M$ Koolaid, and it is interesting when you showcase the (dead) careers of their predecessors.

LaTeX or FrameMaker are the only ways that really work, and FrameMaker has gone down hill since V2.

Another moral is that you cannot design software by "the wisdom of crowds" which leads to endless feature creap.

"Almost Perfect"

[westlake]

You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them

WordPerfect was the perfect word processor - but the word processor was no longer enough.

In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.

WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process. Almost Perfect
 

The authot is slightly off base here

[Luscious868]

Word isn't just used to print documents, it's used to create, format and revise them. The author is correct that now instead of printing documents users tend to e-mail them or transfer them to their recipient by some other electronic means, but that doesn't negate the need for a program like Word that allows you to put the document together, format it and revise it later as necessary.

I use Word at the office to put documents together every day. Ultimately they go to clients as protected PDF files so their contents can't be easily modified, but we do use Word to initially create them or to go back and edit them if we need to send a revised PDF to the client.

OpenOffice has progressed to the point where we could probably phase out Microsoft Office internally, but since we send and receive files in other Microsoft Office formats frequently with both clients and vendors and since we're a small technology company with a Microsoft Action Pack subscription the software and licenses costs us next to nothing.

They're horrible!

[glasn0st]

These PDF tax returns might look cool, but can cause a lot of headache.

The Dutch tax service experimented with them, a few years back. I could only do my personal income returns through one of these dynamic PDFs. The results:

1. All the different "pages" in the PDF were no actual pages, you had to navigate them using on-page scripted buttons and the PDF would dynamically overwrite a "page" into the content. Result: you couldn't PRINT the document! You would only get the first page! To workaround this, you could use a report generating button built into it, but its output did not match the screen layouts and it required data validation, so you couldn't easily copy inputs or send half-filled-in stuff to the accountant for review.

2. The PDF document seemed to append anything you did to itself. If you worked with it for a long time, it grew and grew. Even if you only corrected previous input it would grow in size. At some point Adobe Reader would take minutes on open or handle a keypress. I had to start over with my tax returns once, which was a pain because of (1).

3. When a new version of Adobe Reader came out, ALL THE OLD PDF'S WERE UNOPENABLE! Apparently, some scripting inside the document could not run anymore. All that was left was the static front page of the document. Very nice if you want to fill in a new return with your old stuff as a template. I wouldn't have cared to open this garbage if I could have printed it, but nooooo!

This stuff was the worst of the worst. And all while solving a non-problem. Arguably some of these issues were caused by a bad implementation, but some of them (the new Adobe not opening them) are fundamental. I never want to touch any scripted PDF again. Fortunately our tax service abandoned them next year. I cried tears of joy.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. Maybe be business world is totally different but at university I have found that the only person in group projects who can open everybody's documents is the one using Open Office. With all the different versions of Word and the rest there's always somebody who's a patch behind or an upgrade ahead.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the real world, 99.9999% compatibility is awesome. If one (or a small few) document holds you back from using better or cheaper technology, then you will never be able to keep up. Using different technology is always a risk, and the point is in business you can never remove risk. The smart ones are able to work with a reasonable amount of risk on a daily basis.

Here is my advice. Use your brain and figure out a way to alter the documents that are not compatible. Perform a simple cost analysis and measure the difference between the cost of modifying a few documents and switching to free software versus not switching. I bet in the long run switching would be cheaper, and your documents are actually better because they conform to a smaller set of special features and are therefore more maintainable in the future.

What a stupid article

[Herby Sagues]

The author first claims, based on nothing at all, that the sole purpose of Word was to create documents for print, and then he claims that now we don't need to print stuff, ergo we don't need word. THere are so many fallacies in this argument that I won't go into detail in listing them. Enough to say that what is going down is this author's reputation.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[turbidostato]

"Not really. One of the main drivers for businesses to upgrade Office is to maintain interoperability with their customers."

So "it's time to do it". I never entered on the "why it's time to do it" issue, did I?

"Arguing over whichever is better or worse misses rather misses the point that OpenOffice creates a ongoing compatibility issue"

Not at all. It is those that say that migrating *off* of Ms Office it's a point the ones the miss *the* point: that migrating from Ms Office version to Ms Office version is not less painful than migrating off Ms Office (and they still will have to pay for the new usage licenses).

Sobbing about Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the funny thing- FOSSies always whine about standards... but what they really want are THEIR standards.

It doesn't matter one iota that businesses and consumers have willfully standardized on MS Word. Oh no, the FOSSies HAVE to have THEIR standard, and that means everyone else is wrong.

Like the FOSSies say, it's all about choice- meaning THEIR choice. So you can choose whatever standard you want, so long as it's not anything Microsoft uses.

Lack of consistency

[nexttech]

What Word and other WSYWIG Wordprocessors lack is the ability to put your thoughts on paper without having to worry about what it will look like in the end. I use docbook to write technical papers at work. Each one of my papers has the same look when they are formatted. I am able to get my thoughts on paper without having to click 3 dozen menu items. I am not bothered by suggestions made by assistants that pop up. With Word I found myself more worried that a line might be orphaned or that the image is centered correctly. In other words Word and other Word Processors require too much knowledge from the end user.

No wonder you threw it out

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeremy Reimer is a blatant fake and forums troll. Jeremy Reimer doesn't even have a college degree around computers, or even a cert like an A+ (much less an MCSE or others like it) or years to decades of actual professional experience in them in the trenches doing actual tech, admin, or programming. He has zero on all accounts. He also likes to impersonate, libel, and troll others online. For example, Jeremy Reimer had parts of his personal osy website forcibly removed by his hosting provider, and his friend Jay Little doing the same, albeit his website was removed by Crystaltech.com in its entirety for libelling and impersonating others and making death threats to them via their personal websites (this occurred for 2 arstechnica forums members in Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little). Did some googling and found that out about Jeremy Reimer and his arstechnica friend Jay Little. This is what I found for starters in regards to the above, see here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22APK%22+and+%22affectionate+clone%22&btnG=Google+Search where Jeremy Reimer was forced to admit he impersonated others on his website to libel them with his stating this on his osy website: "Jeremy Reimer - "Anyway the "APK" registered here is just an affectionate clone of the original. In fact I prefer him to the original." ..." so Jeremy Reimer could avoid email harassment penalties for which his isp shaw of canada put Jeremy Reimer on a tracking ticket for also, in addition to his libelling others on his osy website as well for which a Detective Fenton in (near Reimer's actual residence, British Columbia in Canada) were contacted as well for death or violence threats being issued on Reimer's website to others which Jeremy Reimer's hosting provider forcibly removed from Reimer's personal osy website. We don't need MS Word, Reimer says? Beg to differ: We don't need the likes of Jeremy Reimer or arstechnica. He's out writing biased so called "articles" now like this one (usually they are only re-reporting plagiarized news others have already put out before him) to hopefully drum up some views for the arstechnica shithole online which Reimer himself said was falling apart no less.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Draek]

Your problem is that you're using a propietary, undocumented and ever-changing format to store information that you don't want altered. Office 2001 opens incorrectly Office 2000 documents more often than not, despite being theoretically just a port to the Mac platform of the same codebase, with the 2003 and 2008 versions its only worse.

The only format I know of that actually guarantees your documents will still look the same a decade from now is TeX. No, not LaTeX, pure, vanilla, Knuth-sponsored TeX. Use anything else and you'll be lucky to get something 95% compatible in the next version, let alone 99.9999%.

You have this ASS BACKWARD

[omb]

Oracle likes M$ just as much as I do, Ellison has a consistent history of OPPOSING M$ where ever he can. So:

1. Change OO to encourage community support and kill SUN's crazy management influence, this will at least, triple OO's rate of progress, and royally piss off M$ especially if someone outside M$ implements OOXML, preferably as a plugin.

2. Do a real, as opposed to Yahoo ZIMBRA, Exchange Server+Client, which means we will be able to tell the PHB's that "I want all my team on Linux", why not, without getting the I can't schedule meetings shit any more.

3. Work to improve Enterprise collaboration in Linux and make security, ie strong encryption, seemless, support USB dongles aand SMART cards in distributions, and make sure that VPN connections work seemlessly.

A tiny investment for Oracle, and one which would bring real Linux acceptance for many, (there are too... many) Oracle core technologies.

Re:You have this ASS BACKWARD

[palegray.net]

I completely agree with everything you've said. I think you missed my point, which was that continued development on OpenOffice wouldn't be impeded in the slightest if Oracle decided they didn't care about it.

In no way was I implying that Oracle would actually take that course of action.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I expect the docs stored in PDF to be compatible for pretty much all time, while word docs tend to be less robust. You can argue that they're more feature rich, but that's really not relevant to me - PDFs provide what I want without compatibility issues, so anything that needs to be kept around for a long time is a PDF.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[wampus]

Apostasy is punishable by death in most fundamentalist societies.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[omb]

ONLY if you are foolish to use M$ software!

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

"People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable."

But we don't count the several hours or days spent retraining from the familiar menu interface to the new patent pending interface of Office 2007.

At least Windows XP gave us the choice of Fisher-Price mode or Business mode Guis. Office 2007 requires you to retrain or die.

Re:Styles?

[runningduck]

It is funny that you point to styles as being a reason to keep MS-Word around because styles is the one feature that every other competing product does better the Microsoft. When people complained how difficult Microsoft's styles were, instead of fixing styles Microsoft introduced the formatting brush. One small step forward for Microsoft, one giant leap back for mankind. OK, I realize that the article is talking about word processors in general, but I am just saying . . .

Re:Why dont I need word?

[dbcad7]

It depends where your spreadsheets come from doesn't it ? .. Open Office is 100 percent compatible with Open Office.. I have been thinking on the instances where I had to deal with spreadsheets that were not generated by our own company.. I only can think of one (Kind of).. We had vendors who would supply us with updated pricing.. Some had their own price lists that were usually not in spreadsheet form. Others (usually smaller Vendors) We created a list of products for them in spreadsheet form and they would have to fill in the current pricing... So if I look at it from our point of view, we forced them to use Excel, but we could have just as easily forced them to use Open Office.. On the flip side if we were a vendor and someone requested documents in Open Office, well then the customer is king and you can be sure we would do it.

If customers would start requesting documents in Open Office, it would go a long way towards making it a true alternative, as companies who want sales will comply. Once installed, then they can even project "value added" customer service by asking people if they would like an Office document or an Open Office document. The whole idea that you have to pay Microsoft to be "professional" then goes out the window.

TFA

[mambodog]

The article is a huge turd, I thought that someone would have commented on this already, the Ars commenters were all over it.

Oh wait, you can't tell from the summary. This is Slashdot, was I thinking?

People use "enterprise environment" a lot

[dbIII]

I think people are calling it an "enterprise environment" simply becuase they feel like they are wearing a red shirt every time something goes wrong.
Severe incompatibilities between slightly different versions of MS Word 97 that came in indentically marked boxes didn't kill the platform. The problem that none of your macros will run on newer versions did not kill the platform. Not being able to deal well with images in documents did not kill the platform even though there is no sign of fixing that. Also the truly major WTF, athough just about everyone does it, is why editable documents are being transfered back and forth to places you wouldn't trust as far as you could throw them - documents where it is so easy to add a zero or remove a "not". PDF was supposed to solve that but now everyone and their dog wants to edit PDF.

corpse bride

[epine]

Sorry to sound like a Microsoft fanboi or whatever, but Word is a more powerful tool than most give it credit for or bother to figure out, since a lot of its capability is kind of "hidden" to make it user friendly out of the box.

The number one skill for getting along with Word "out of the box" is learned helplessness. Let it randomly move everything around whenever it gets the whim to do so. If your fonts mysteriously change, just call it art.

I often help other proficient computer users unmangle their Word documents when they get a corpse bride formatting artifact. Sometimes I just have to use the mouse to delete something that the keyboard delete fails to fully remove, or use a left delete instead of a right delete. Sometimes I boil the corpse in Open Office, then return it to the scene of the crime, where it behaves fine ... until the next corpse bride resurrection.

Why should a simple word processor have a steep learning curve before one achieves any semblance of predictability? AmiPro made it possible to write a quick ten page document without encountering a single undead artifact. WordStar made that possible. Back in 1985. Why not Word?

The commentary track for Last King of Scotland notes that foisting your failures onto the shoulders of others is a symptom of megalomania.

Idi Amin: Yes, you are my advisor. You are the only one I can trust in here. You should have told me not to throw the Asians out, in the first place.
Nicholas Garrigan: I DID!
Idi Amin: But you did not persuade me, Nicholas. You did not persuade me!

Amin was a difficult man to work with. Word is a difficult program to work with. They both have a fondness for dancing bullets.

I'll happily add Word to my toolkit the day Microsoft publishes a suite of 10,000 regression tests enforcing predictability, not for the benefit of some obscure legacy macro package, but from the perspective of the end user writing simple documents.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would write a book in one whole file?? One chapter = one file. Reduces the chance of losing everything in one-fell-swoop. And easier to edit, send around for notes, etc.

When it's time for "assembly" of the chapters into a book, it's pretty handy to have it either in one file, or in files that are logically linked from a master file. Then the computer can handle all the chapter/section/subsections & page numbers (including internal cross-refs, index entry page numbers, etc). I've done it both ways and the TeX/LaTeX way with a master file that prints the whole book is really nice. When I did a book (600 pages, 300 line drawings, hundreds of equations) in Word the only way was as separate chapters, and the one long chapter had to be split in half--the whole operation was like pulling teeth, annoying right to the end and lingering pain afterwords!

+4 Insightful? Really? nt

[Anonymous Coward]

i guess i have to put real text here. huzzah. you got me slashdot.

You are wrong also

[dbIII]

That is not the case. I have software with superior text formatting ability to the current MS Word in my dusty old Atari ST, as do people with a 286 and an old PageMaker, or an old Mac, or the many more modern equivalents. MS Word is the replacement for the office typewriter for writing up memos and shouldn't be considered to have pretentions of desktop publishing.

Congrats!

[dbIII]

You managed to squeeze a nuclear troll into comments about a word processor!
As for the "enormous costs beyond mere dollars" - oooh, scary but ultimately utter bullshit in a world of email, PDF and programs that can read a wide variety of formats. We are talking about a very simple glass typewriter here and despite ribbons there is really very little difference in most operations between the newest version of MS word and the first version of WordStar. Now get off my lawn and please stop smoking it.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[hairyfeet]

That is why I have had good luck switching folks to Oxygen Office. It and Go-OO are what Open Office SHOULD be. I don't know why in FOSS the most popular is usually the crappiest. Meh, maybe its a taste thing.

Anyway, for those that have had problem with Open office I would suggest Oxygen Office or Go-OO. Oxygen Office if your users miss the extras that MS Office has like layout and clip art, and Go-OO if you need more features like better macro support. Either one of these IMHO will beat OO.o when it comes to giving your users what they want, and both have the nicer 2K3 layout (on screens which are 1024x768, which many offices have here, the ribbon in 2K7 is just painful) enjoy!

Re:Why dont I need word?

[muindaur]

They would be wise to add some small but important features. In word you can highlight a specific word or group of words for a comment and Word will show a light background behind them. In OpenOffice the note feature puts an arrow under the first letter and doesn't make it clear if its that one word or the entire line. It also doesn't make clear the note that belongs to each one in a sentence with OpenOffice even if it's highlight like Word: unless you have good eyes to see the dashes in OpenOffice. A professor may be tech-savy enough to use Word comments that are a bit clearer during paper grading but they might prefer one standard format that most students use for convenience: most schools have MS Office installed on all systems. The University I attend only has OpenOffice installed on the Sun desktops in the engineering department. The rest is all MS Office and Windows XP.

I like the free and open concept but for me OpenOffice is just not mature enough for regular use; OpenOffice doesn't even have a method for tracking changes or one that isn't clear. In a collaboration environment that's important. I won't use OpenOffice until it adds some useful features like that or improves upon them since it's poorly done. I need to play with Formula some to see if it does any calculations or is just for making printable formulas that's under the insert tab of Office 2007.

Oracle has some work to do with it in order to make it a better competitor with Office.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Alpha830RulZ]

Most companies don't actually exchange anything on the level of a word document with third parties regularly, it just doesn't make sense. How often do you need someone outside your company to send you a document you can edit? For that matter, how often do you send editable documents?

Every company with lawyers and accountants in it does so on a daily basis. It's extremely common to send editable red-lined versions of contracts back and forth in the negotiating process.

Word is very confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

My problem with word is that the program itself doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a text editor? Is it an outline editor? Is it a word processor? Is it a desktop publishing program?

It tries to be all things to all people and ends up being an over complicated mess. They could strip out about 80% of the features and have people that need to do desktop publishing use a desktop publishing program. The most annoying thing is the arbitrary way you have to try to find things when the version changes. It is like trying to look through a maze to find the exit.

This is one of the reasons I like open office better. It is so much more simple and strait forward.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

(...) they could easily band together and pick up a fork of OpenOffice if they so desired

Yeah, right: if and only if, and if only by adding a few more ifs, that could maybe perhaps work... sure. Granted, Oracle still has to kill Open/Star Office but... I'm counting the days Java has left.

Reimer needs an education and experience 1st

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeremy Reimer doesn't even have a college degree around computers, or even a cert like an A+ (much less an MCSE or others like it) or years to decades of actual professional experience in them in the trenches doing actual tech, admin, or programming. He has zero on all accounts. He also likes to impersonate, libel, and troll others online. For example, Jeremy Reimer had parts of his personal osy website forcibly removed by his hosting provider, and his friend Jay Little doing the same, albeit his website was removed by Crystaltech.com in its entirety for libelling and impersonating others and making death threats to them via their personal websites (this occurred for 2 arstechnica forums members in Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little). Did some googling and found that out about Jeremy Reimer and his arstechnica friend Jay Little. This is what I found for starters in regards to the above, see here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22APK%22+and+%22affectionate+clone%22&btnG=Google+Search where Jeremy Reimer was forced to admit he impersonated others on his website to libel them with his stating this on his osy website: "Jeremy Reimer - "Anyway the "APK" registered here is just an affectionate clone of the original. In fact I prefer him to the original." ..." so Jeremy Reimer could avoid email harassment penalties for which his isp shaw of canada put Jeremy Reimer on a tracking ticket for also, in addition to his libelling others on his osy website as well for which a Detective Fenton in (near Reimer's actual residence, British Columbia in Canada) were contacted as well for death or violence threats being issued on Reimer's website to others. We don't need MS Word, Reimer says? Beg to differ: We certainly don't need the likes of Jeremy Reimer online, or the blatant attempts at being "profound" from arstechnica. Jeremy Reimer's out writing biased, or stupid like this one, so called "articles" now like this one (usually they are only re-reporting plagiarized news others have already put out before him) to hopefully drum up some views for the arstechnica shithole online which Reimer himself said was falling apart no less.

Value added

[BancBoy]

But didn't you see the graphic on that site?

http://openoffice.org-suite.com/images/girl.jpg

Apparently, this version makes charts that will get you pussy!

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

that is sooo wrong! communicating with other companies with docs is an admin nightmare. at least ask for rtf's or something really standard. Do you also get files with macro/scripts embedded? A DOC file is not even compatible with all versions of its own s/w. Do you standardize fellow companies to the same version of m$ office?
And then people complain.....

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for pointing that out. I had to follow back the thread from your +5 post to find the offending post. I've just finished reporting the phish.

The host is a Windows Server somewhere in Antarctica (yea right, i'm sure) lmao. The DNS server is in the USA. Looks like they used networksolutions.

Somebody else might want to take the additional steps and contact http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/ (the nameserver host) and file a report with them.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

"MS Office isn't special other than it got critical mass at the time when computers were themselves gaining critical mass. It could have happened just as easily to WordPerfect, Lotus, or (had it existed at the time) OpenOffice."

Wrong. WordPerfect owned the word processing world. Lotus only had 123 spreadsheet until much later. Several challengers moved against WP. Microsoft won only because WP failed to embrace Windows 3.1 at the key moment. In fact, early adopters of WP like law offices held on for many, many years after MS Word had won the battle.

WordPerfect was a fine product. But there was an arrogance of market dominance that doomed the company. They had tons of money yet didn't push development on Windows. End of story. Bye, bye. Novel made the same, probably worse, mistake.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Bert64]

99.9999% compatibility is a lot better than you get from MS, especially if you have a mix of different versions. Most businesses accept a much larger array of problems as simply being normal costs of doing business.
The number of businesses i have been to where compatibility problems, kludgy workarounds, downtime due to crashes/reboots etc are considered a day to day part of business.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[shaitand]

Fair enough (even if that is only a small portion of larger companies and not a portion of smaller ones, and if law firms weren't using word perfect rather than ms word), but I covered that:

"If you really need editable documents sent back and forth than simply post a required format. People rarely object if your required format is an open standard and all they need is a free download."

So: Paperless Office yet again?

[KlausBreuer]

Well... it's been about 25 years since I heard about the Paperless Office Coming Real Soon. High time we hear about it again.

Look, we don't really *need* all these printouts. But our bosses do. They print out everything, put it in binders, place these in a huge bookshelf, and are happy. When a program is done, they print another copy of all that stuff, and give it to the customer, who's bosses are also happy. Bingo.

Besides... I am officially an Old Fart, and thus use LaTeX to write all letters and reports ;)

Ciao,
Klaus

It's like saying horses are obsolete

[coder111]

RTFA. It says that Word has been primarily designed about creating documents that have to be printed on paper. Nowadays, we need less and less documents to be printed on paper, and more and more documents that must be made available on-line or emailed or shared etc. Word is NOT designed for those tasks, and using it for those tasks (as it is done in multitude of organizations) is hard, non-intuitive and counterproductive. It is the wrong tool for the job.

The gist of the article is that with new tools like wikis, content management systems, revision management systems, something like Google Wave, etc. Word will become used less and less. They attach a doc file, when you can format email itself? Why write a doc file and stash it on a shared drive, when you can edit a wiki page? And so on and so forth.

Of course Word will have its uses and it will not go anywhere anytime soon. But the world around is changing, and Word Processing itself is slowly becoming niche/obsolete.

--Coder

People just don't get it

[itedo]

There is still a purpose for MS Word. Sure, if you want to create a simple text or letter, it's much easier to use Word (or even open source alternatives to it). When it comes to scientific works, LaTeX IS the one thing you're looking for. I use ocassionaly Word to write some stupid letters or view my fellow students' documents they send to me. But that's my personal preference, I wouldn't badmouth Word that much. I just don't use it.

Die die die

[jandersen]

MS Word may be about to die - one can only hope - but I don't think it is because it isn't useful; it may not be objectively useful (whatever that means), but there is a lot of people that think it is. Now a days it seems that when you look for work, you need to download an application form written in Word; so obviously the employers thought it was a good idea.

But this situation perhaps highlights the inadequacies of Word more than anything else - because in my experience something like most of those application forms turn out to be unreadable in whatever version of Word I use; and the newest version only augments the problem. I don't know why anybody has put up with it, and for so long. If I ever broke the compatibility that badly of any program I make, I'd be out on my ear in a trice.

I suspect that perhaps people are getting wise to this now that Ooo is a serious alternative; why pay stupidly for something that is really hindering rather than helping?

Re:Why dont I need word?

[SenseiLeNoir]

wrong.. actually WP's downfall was also due to MS marketing.

Back in those days, Microsoft very publicly announced that ALL their development for high end/ premium users will be for OS/2, and that Windows will be relegated to simpler/legacy computers.

As such, all the big guys (WP, Lotus, etc) started developing for OS/2.

A year later, MS made the huge u-turn, and annouced their relationship with IBM and OS/2 had ended, and a couple of weeks later, released a new version of windows, released Office for WINDOWS, and announced NT. During the 1 year or so that the others were working hard on OS2 ports, Microsoft was secretly working on Windows versions, and were at least a year ahead in development to the other companies.

Word ran on UNIX

[thogard]

I remember Microsoft Word was the only program that would routinely crash on an AT&T 3B2 in 1986. The Vt100 style AT&T terminals weren't fun but deep at its core Word was nasty then and its nasty now.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

We've never had a problem opening an ms office document with ms office. Ever.

Yeah, right. Then you're not using bullets and numbering, all your documents are under 20 pages, you don't care about formatting, you don't include any images.

I once wrote a simple, short manual for a demo product, to be given at a potential customer. A lot of screen shots with a little text in between. Saving after each insert - it was crashing every 10 minutes and repositioning the images at the beginning of the document several times - I finally gave up and used OpenOffice instead. That was in '03 - Word 2000 IRC, complete and utter crap.

I once could not use Outlook (OK, not Word) anymore due to the fact that while typing the enter key activated the 'OK' button on an 'Installation on demand' dialog for some image or dictionary component. On a laptop. From then on Outlook crashed every time until a reinstall when I returned. And the pst file was corrupt. That was the final straw, I decided MS products raised my TCO beyond 'reasonable'.

Open office failed in the first day it was tested so it was thrown out the window.

BS. Word failed in the first second, so I threw it out the window with Windows. There you go. That's not a factual statement, that's FUD.

Word To That

[jman.org]

Hear hear!

WP 5.1 All The Way!

The best typing program ever produced ran rings around Word. If only the good people of Provo, Utah had snapped to that "Windoze" thing...

Re:Why dont I need word?

[walshy007]

I'm in the group project situation at uni atm. When I mentioned 'typesetting' and 'version control system' they all had no idea what I was speaking of, so now i'm in charge of putting it all together and formatting it.

Easiest bet was to just briefly introduce them to LaTex, have them send me in their bits, I'll fix the markup, then commit changes.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish, yourself - you've obviously never tried to recreate extremely complex spreadsheets, especially large ones with multiple sheets, in Open Office. Doesn't work, period. OO can't handle it.

That said, Word sucks, and Open Office is a fantastic replacement for Word - but to say the entire suite is superior is just nonsense. Both suites have their strengths and weaknesses.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

"In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch."

That's plain bullshit as facts themselves demonstrate once and again. Companies have gone through the Microsoft Office upgrade mill once and again since the days of Office 4 onwards (about 1994) and you can bet those upgrades were far away from 99.9999% compatible and even 99.999%, 99.99%, 99.9%, 99% or even 90% (you haven't gone through the Word/Excel/Access macros/apps upgrade nightmare, have you?) and still companies did it just because "it's time to do it".

Yes. Because we can all get by on Word Perfect 1.0's elaborate feature set in 2009. I'm being 100% serious. Actually, I see no reason why you all shouldn't STFU and go back to paper and pencil drafts and pens for final versions. "Wah *cry* wah *sob* my wrist hurts from doing actual work :("

Re:Why dont I need word?

[NickFortune]

It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.

That's a coincidence. It's westlake's attitude of referring to the entire Slashdot readership as if they were a single person that makes it hard for the "the geek" to take westlake seriously.

Go to WUA

[rrohbeck]

"Hello, my name is Bob and I'm a MS Word user."
"Hello Bob."

You have to get it out in the open and talk about it. It's the only way.

Reimer's a troll and charlatan (and no expert)

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeremy Reimer doesn't even have a college degree around computers, or even a cert like an A+ (much less an MCSE or others like it) or years to decades of actual professional experience in them in the trenches doing actual tech, admin, or programming. He has zero on all accounts, and is far from an expert or authority on the subject of computing (and therefore is nobody to listen to on the subject period). Jeremy Reimer also likes to impersonate, libel, and troll others online. For example, Jeremy Reimer had parts of his personal osy website forcibly removed by his hosting provider, and his friend Jay Little doing the same, albeit his website was removed by Crystaltech.com in its entirety for libelling and impersonating others and making death threats to them via their personal websites (this occurred for 2 arstechnica forums members in Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little). Did some googling and found that out about Jeremy Reimer and his arstechnica friend Jay Little. This is what I found for starters in regards to the above, see here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22APK%22+and+%22affectionate+clone%22&btnG=Google+Search [google.com] where Jeremy Reimer was forced to admit he impersonated others on his website to libel them with his stating this on his osy website: "Jeremy Reimer - "Anyway the "APK" registered here is just an affectionate clone of the original. In fact I prefer him to the original." so Jeremy Reimer could avoid email harassment penalties for which his isp shaw of canada put Jeremy Reimer on a tracking ticket for also, in addition to his libelling others on his osy website as well for which a Detective Fenton in (near Reimer's actual residence, British Columbia in Canada) were contacted as well for death or violence threats being issued on Reimer's website to others. We don't need MS Word, Reimer says? Beg to differ: We certainly don't need the likes of Jeremy Reimer online, or the blatant attempts at being "profound" from arstechnica. Jeremy Reimer's out writing biased, or stupid like this one, so called "articles" now like this one (usually they are only re-reporting plagiarized news others have already put out before him) to hopefully drum up some views for the arstechnica shithole online which Reimer himself said was falling apart no less. The only relationship coming to an end, is that of Jeremy Reimer playing wannabe expert in computing, when it is clear he is anything but that.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[nixkuroi]

I've written two books and several film scripts in Word, all with one file per piece. It was also an easy way to take a mailing list of Literary Agents from a table on the web, drop it into Excel and then mail merge the entire thing into a letter template I wrote in Word, because yes, you do have to print things when you're submitting to most publishers. It was never a nightmare and I never lost the whole thing in one fell swoop. Sounds like FUD. While I'm not saying that TeX/LaTeX isn't a good way to go, writing a book in Word, applying styles and publishing all worked pretty seamlessly and effortlessly for me.

Re:Very few people will happily change how they wo

[jimicus]

Probably about 40%. The other 60% should have been plain text.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[bryan1945]

"People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable."

Really? There's 9% to 10% of people in the US that have a lot of free time on their hands right now. And yet I still see employed people playing Solitaire or Minesweeper in the office every day. How odd.

Big red IDIOT tag

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a big red idiot tag for stories like this.

If you don't like Word DO NOT use it. Whiney stories like this are pathetic. Actually, let's not call this a story because that is insulting to actual stories.

Agreed, & here is something about Jeremy Reime

[Anonymous Coward]

" This isn't news, and this article doesn't even make sense... Why did this end up on the front page of /.?

Agreed. Per the subject above, here are some very interesting facts about Jeremy Reimer. Jeremy Reimer is a blatant fake and forums troll. Jeremy Reimer doesn't even have a college degree around computers, or even a cert like an A+ (much less an MCSE or others like it) or years to decades of actual professional experience in them in the trenches doing actual tech, admin, or programming. He has zero on all accounts. He also likes to impersonate, libel, and troll others online. For example, Jeremy Reimer had parts of his personal osy website forcibly removed by his hosting provider, and his friend Jay Little doing the same, albeit his website was removed by Crystaltech.com in its entirety for libelling and impersonating others and making death threats to them via their personal websites (this occurred for 2 arstechnica forums members in Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little). Did some googling and found that out about Jeremy Reimer and his arstechnica friend Jay Little. This is what I found for starters in regards to the above, see here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22APK%22+and+%22affectionate+clone%22&btnG=Google+Search where Jeremy Reimer was forced to admit he impersonated others on his website to libel them with his stating this on his osy website: "Jeremy Reimer - "Anyway the "APK" registered here is just an affectionate clone of the original. In fact I prefer him to the original." so Jeremy Reimer could avoid email harassment penalties for which his isp shaw of canada put Jeremy Reimer on a tracking ticket for also, in addition to his libelling others on his osy website as well for which a Detective Fenton in (near Reimer's actual residence, British Columbia in Canada) were contacted as well for death or violence threats being issued on Reimer's website to others which Jeremy Reimer's hosting provider forcibly removed from Reimer's personal osy website. We don't need MS Word, Reimer says? Beg to differ: We don't need the likes of Jeremy Reimer or arstechnica. He's out writing biased so called "articles" now like this one (usually they are only re-reporting plagiarized news others have already put out before him) to hopefully drum up some views for the arstechnica shit hole online which Reimer himself said was falling apart no less. He's a nothing nobody & I agree, what is his crap doing on the front page here?

Re:Why dont I need word?

[node 3]

"MS Office isn't special other than it got critical mass at the time when computers were themselves gaining critical mass. It could have happened just as easily to WordPerfect, Lotus, or (had it existed at the time) OpenOffice."

Wrong. WordPerfect owned the word processing world. Lotus only had 123 spreadsheet until much later. Several challengers moved against WP. Microsoft won only because WP failed to embrace Windows 3.1 at the key moment.

If I'm wrong, then so are you as you seem to be just saying same thing in a different way. Your "key time" is my "at the time", and I said Office got critical mass and you just stated why it got critical mass.

That's not much of a refutation. Quite the contrary, in fact...

Re:Why dont I need word?

[ubrgeek]

> Sounds like FUD.

Right. Because there's never been a person who has lost a file when Word crashed and the *.tmp files are entirely reliable and very easy to search through. In fact, it's so reliable, there was never any need to build recover functionality into it. Come on - just because you've lucked out and it's worked " seamlessly and effortlessly" for you doesn't mean a ton of us haven't lost important files because of Word's lack of 100% "uptime."

Jeremy Reimer is nothing but a forum troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"Th FA talks about laughing at WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS users

First, you have to realize that Jeremy Reimer doesn't even have a college degree around computers, or even a cert like an A+ (much less an MCSE or others like it) or years to decades of actual professional experience in them in the trenches doing actual tech, admin, or programming. He has zero on all accounts & calls himself a "writer" (my little nephew could call himself that in 1st grade too, since he learned to write then) & he is nothing more than a plagiaristic hack trying to play wanna be computer guru and is far from that. Jeremy Reimer also likes to impersonate, libel, and troll others online. For example, Jeremy Reimer had parts of his personal osy website forcibly removed by his hosting provider, and his friend Jay Little doing the same, albeit his website was removed by Crystaltech.com in its entirety for libelling and impersonating others and making death threats to them via their personal websites (this occurred for 2 arstechnica forums members in Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little). Did some googling and found that out about Jeremy Reimer and his arstechnica friend Jay Little. This is what I found for starters in regards to the above, see here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22APK%22+and+%22affectionate+clone%22&btnG=Google+Search where Jeremy Reimer was forced to admit he impersonated others on his website to libel them with his stating this on his osy website: "Jeremy Reimer - "Anyway the "APK" registered here is just an affectionate clone of the original. In fact I prefer him to the original." ..." so Jeremy Reimer could avoid email harassment penalties for which his isp shaw of canada put Jeremy Reimer on a tracking ticket for also, in addition to his libelling others on his osy website as well for which a Detective Fenton in (near Reimer's actual residence, British Columbia in Canada) were contacted as well for death or violence threats being issued on Reimer's website to others. We don't need MS Word, Reimer says? Beg to differ: We don't need the likes of Jeremy Reimer or arstechnica. He's out writing biased so called "articles" now like this one (usually they are only re-reporting plagiarized news others have already put out before him) to hopefully drum up some views for the arstechnica shithole online which Reimer himself said was falling apart no less.

Agree and Disagree

[GrantRobertson]

I agree that Word and other word processors are not as useful as they used to be in an age where many documents are not necessarily printed out. However, that does not mean that nothing will ever be printed again. I also agree that a Wiki is a great way to store business intelligence however, MediaWiki does not have a very easy to use editor. Other wiki servers offer much better editors. I also agree with many posters in Slashdot and ARS that without the ability to easily embed things like spreadsheets into wiki pages then we will still need word processors to generate the documents the way we really want them to look and then post those as .PDF files.

But why is everyone just sitting around whining about how his idea won't work instead of getting together and figuring out a way to make it work. HTML and CSS provide a great way to display a document with almost all of the features people usually want. The problem is that editing the documents - and the styles used within them - is still more difficult than it should be for regular people. Word allows a user to easily create, name, and update styles. CSS not so much. Users have to learn arcane concepts such as CSS Selectors, inheritance, etc. Why can't someone write a "document editor" that simply saves it's files as HTML with CSS styles? Not a web-site-design-tool for professional web developers, but just a document editor that works kind of like a word processor for regular people. These could be available as stand alone programs or as plug-ins for browsers.

Has anyone ever seen a web page with an active embedded spreadsheet? They may exist but I haven't seen one. Why not? Because they aren't readily and easily available. Why hasn't someone taken some existing standard for spreadsheet data like ODF (or even - heaven forbid - Open Office XML) and created a standardized way to embed that into a web page. Then others could create standalone or browser-plug-in-based spreadsheet editors to work with that standardized spreadsheet data format. Users should be able to open and edit that embedded spreadsheet just as easily as they can edit a table in some wiki sites. In fact it should be even easier.

And wiki software designers really need to get off their duffs as well. I am an experienced network manager. I have been working with computers since 1976 and posting online in various forms since the 300 baud bulletin board days. But I don't ever post anything on WikiPedia. Why? Because I don't want to have to learn yet another stupid formatting system (that is about three levels of jury rigging deep) instead of some formatting system I already know and is an industry wide standard. Users really need editors that will edit a wiki page just as if it were a word processing document, or at least a regular web page. The user should be able to embed whatever they want into the page and the software should handle the difficult formatting. There should be templates that can be easily called up (rather than downloaded and copied and pasted and modified to fit in this wiki and hacked and rehacked until they work) so that users will get the look the want (or a corporate standard look) without much effort at all. I am sure some higher end wiki servers have some of these features but they must be locked up in proprietary systems or protected by some kind of patents because I haven't seen them in use out in the real world. How hard can it be for the community to settle on some standards for these things so that developers can get started working on various FOSS and commercial applications to make use of the standards. I mean really! People have been bitching about this for years now.

And before anyone jumps in and asks me why I am not fixing all this myself... It is because I am already working on saving the world in my own way. See www.demml.org and www.ideationizing.com. But someone, somewhere must have some spare time to solve some of the major issues

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Foredecker]

I'm not so sure: Companies like Oracle and Sun (who has not been succesfull for many years) would only invest in this if it would make them a decent return -and- if it was a better investment than other places they could spend the money.

How would companies like these profit from funding OO development? This is especially true if they do not have product level control over the project (features, schedule, quality, etc.)

Irrational bias?

[mnemonic_]

Well, I work in a team engineering environment where everyone already HAS Word and KNOWS Word, and no report is a solo effort. I can't force everyone to spend weeks learning my cool pet app/language and let other projects fall by the wayside. These people aren't programmers. I don't know, is lost productivity due to cost of switching rational enough for you? Not everyone is a contract programmer working from home, which is something a lot of Slashdotters seem to miss.

Oh, and I've run linux for seven years (Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, then Ubuntu), most recently for six months as my only OS - until I switched to Mac. Before OOo (which I use at home without issue), I used StarOffice in high school to write my chemistry reports. The lack of understanding from FOSS advocates, and their presumptuous attitudes impedes their attempts at inroads more than the quality of their software. New solutions MUST play nicely (more like FLAWLESSLY) with existing solutions if there's to be ANY change, unless the existing solution is obviously flawed to users. Most of the time, it isn't. Corporate inertia. It sucks, but that's the real world.

Re:Irrational bias?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

What you describe is a valid reason: sticking with the status que in a team environment where the team has already chosen tools.

Throwing away a set of tools, however, because he *doesn't* want to use an open-source one, without further qualification, is a bias.

The difference is that you explain why moving to a different tool chain would be hard. He presented as a reason merely that it was open-source. See the difference?

Its one thing to hire Sally instead of Fred because Sally speaks 4 languages (lets stipulate these languages matter for this job description). Its another thing to hire Sally because he *doesn't* want to hire a guy.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[TemporalBeing]

How would companies like these profit from funding OO development?

By not spending the money on MS Office.

Seriously. MS Office is blasted expensive - even for volume licenses. So you take a portion of what you would have spent on those licenses and invest in OO or KOffice, etc.

Sure, IBM have Symphony - but if I recall correctly they base part of it (it's ODF support) on code from OO.

Give them a way to save money and they'll do it. If they want specific features, they can fund those specific features - companies do that with the Linux kernel all the time. In the end, it's a win-win situation. That's one of the reasons Linux is really big in the data centers - and with HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle, etc.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Foredecker]

hi temporalBeing,

sorry, I should have worded my question more clearly. Yes, I understand that some people belive that MS Office is more expensive in terms of total cost of ownerhip than OO. (that is a different argment....) What I'm asking is how would companies that invest money in OO development make a reasonble profit - this also means one that doesn't have high oportunity costs.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily there are other companies heavily involved in deveopment of OpenOffice, like Novell and IBM.I tend to use the Novell fork, because is appear more curent with the official OpenOffice version, and usually is available for both Windows and Linux simultaneously.

SDML

[mangusman]

Way back in the day (80s and 90s) there was a markup language called SDML (structured document markup language) and was used by large corporations for writing and publishing technical documentation for their enterprise products. Extremely powerful, but like LaTex, had a large learning curve. When the WYSIWYG editors hit the streets, we realized we had nowhere near the control or flexibility of the markup language. I'd like to have that option today to produce white papers and such, but it's not cost-effective any longer.