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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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 ?

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?

[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

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.

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

[leonbloy]

... should die a slow and horrible death.

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)

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

[farnsworth]

but the print count continues to climb, every single year.

How are things going over there at the US Mint?

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!

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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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: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?

[halfnerd]

Maybe it's his scam.

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.

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: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.

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.

Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[master_p]

The major problem with Word is that it allows the creation of on-the-fly styles while typing. For example, when I type with normal style, using Ctrl+B will add a new style to the document: normal + bold. This easy creation and modification of styles creates a style nightmare. I have seen documents with over 500 different styles, as a result of the document being passed around in various home and abroad offices and partners.

Word should be strict about its types. Either you use an existing type or create a new one from the beginning. That will limit the amount of hacks people do in order to format their documents.

Re:Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[kklein]

YES.

This is the only (yes, only--I've never understood the Word hate around here) problem I have with Word, but it is a big one. For short, one-off documents, I've actually moved to using Apple's Pages, which doesn't do this. When I'm making a handout for class (I'm a university lecturer), I have specific styles that I use every time. With Pages (or, for that matter, OO.o), I can just set the style and off I go. The menu arrow next to the style turns red if the text deviates from the style, but it doesn't make a new style.

I honestly cannot figure out why Word does that. It makes the style list a horrible jumble, and is probably the #1 reason that people don't use styles. It looks daunting, even though it should simplify document creation!

Re: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%.