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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[eldepeche]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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

Oh, he doesn't need Word anymore?

[mnemonic_]

Is that so? Good for him.

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

[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

[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

[genner]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.

You mispelled Vi.

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

[Tsaot]

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

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Tsaot]

Emacs, you insensitive clod.

You mispelled ed.

Fixed that for you.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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?)

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?

[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.

I printed his article...

[oahazmatt]

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

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...

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.

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.

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: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!

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

[leonbloy]

... should die a slow and horrible death.

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

[mikeage]

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

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...

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".

[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.

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

[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

[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)

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

[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

[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

[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...

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

[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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Emacs

[oldhack]

Word is the emacs of word processor, whatever it has become now.

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.

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.

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

Try to keep Slashdot subjects accurate

[harlows_monkeys]

The cited article is actually putting forth an argument that ALL word processors are obsolete.

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: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?

[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: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: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: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."

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Tubal-Cain]

OpenOffice already has several offshoots: NeoOffice, OxygenOffice, Go-oo...

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.

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?

[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".

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.

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]

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: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?

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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!

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

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: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.

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: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.

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?

[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%.

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.