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20 Years of MS Word and Why It Should Die a Swift Death
Ars writer Jeremy Reimer takes a stroll down memory lane, recalling over 20 years of (almost) constant Microsoft Word use and why, with current and emerging tech trends, he thinks his relationship with the program may be at an end. "So why don't I need Word any more? To figure this out, I tried to go back to basics and think about what Word was originally designed to do. In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out. As a student I needed to print out essays so I could hand them to my instructor. In the office I needed to print out reports so that I could hand them to my supervisor. The end goal was always the same: I printed out something to give to someone more important than me, who would evaluate it and, if I was lucky, give it back to me at some indeterminate time in the future. One didn't question this; it was just the way the world worked. Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much. Maybe it was the rise of office networking. Maybe it was when the printer companies kept raising the price of ink to ridiculous levels. Maybe it was when we realized we couldn't print out the whole Internet. Despite the fact that fewer things were being printed, we kept on using Word to create our documents."
With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.
Is that so? Good for him.
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."
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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 /.?
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.
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".
Just another ignorant American.
... should die a slow and horrible death.
Somebody's not living in reality here. I *wish* people were printing things out less. I could use the ~$10K I spend out of my budget every year just to feed two printers in a lot better ways, but the print count continues to climb, every single year.
That's just for single sheet- our poster printers are seeing 2x to 3x growth in use every single year.
I don't have a textbook for my course- I use one $18 trade paperback and electronic reserves for the rest of the content- book chapters, magazine articles, etc. All digital. And most everyone in the class just prints the damn things out instead of reading them online.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I 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.
/. is beyond me...
Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology made the front page of
Ooooo BTW guys, have you seen that video of a dancing baby?! Its ROTFLOL!
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
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
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.
Maybe it's his scam.
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.