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

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.

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.

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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.

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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).

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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

[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.

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: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

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.

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.