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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."
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.
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
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.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
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.
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.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
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?
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
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.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
The cited article is actually putting forth an argument that ALL word processors are obsolete.
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...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
This guy's the limit!
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If I had any mod points, I'd mod you -1 Flame.
/.. 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.
You seem to be getting bent out of shape because of a pointless story on
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe it's his scam.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.
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.
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)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Common Sense
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.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
Penny - plain text accounting
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.
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.