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Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"
somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job.
So his publisher is forcing him to use Word. I would be annoyed as well. I know at least some publishers accept PDF (and some even LaTeX). So maybe he should just choose a different publisher.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, let's enumerate all the structural untidinesses of Word. Let's blame that application -- which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp) but because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do -- for the inelegance of its data model. Let's compare it to SGML, which is so much nicer and easier and so much more elegant if you're a programmer and can appreciate that sort of elegance, and if you're not a programmer, well then for god's sake why are you touching a computer?
If you want SGML, you know where to download it.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
TeX is horrible in the sense that it's a glorified macro processor state machine, with every character in the input stream potentially changing everything in the output DVI - text itself, formatting registers - you can't tell form the character other than by continuing processing the Turing-complete macros, all of them capable of changing every aspect of the processor state! Change that one character? Regenerate the whole document! Good bye, interactivity. Good bye, inspectable structure. It's perfect for the hard-core typesetting jobs, but lousy as a document platform in any other sense than the typesetting one. (But it would be nice to have good exporters for it in as many applications as you can get. And when I say "good exporters", I mean template-driven export engines with fine-grained tuning, not some "just export it, I'll tweak the styles by hand" thingy. Remind me, why do we have computers again? To automate stuff? I thought so.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Joel Spolsky has an excellent write up on why the Office file formats suck. A must read.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
He actually worked on Excel leading to funny anecdotes like this one
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Yes, I still pine for WordPerfect 5.1, and even the early Windows versions.
Three words: Reveal, Codes, and Acerson.
With just those you could do damned near anything.
To this day, likely close to ten years since I stopped using WordPerfect, I still find myself clobbered by strange MS Word formatting edicts, with no obvious way to get rid of them.
At least with WP you could see why something was weird, and fix it.
Three Squirrels
I've used Wordstar, Wordstar 2000 (or 3000?), WordPerfect, MS Word, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice writer and they all pretty much suck. Most people misuse them. They don't integrate well with other software. And they produce ugly results.
I wrote my master's thesis using FrameMaker which was quite a bit better. However, for my current document-production needs, I use LaTeX. I maintain the manuals for my company's software products and we have a great workflow for building the manuals. The same Makefile that builds the software also builds the manuals: PDF versions directly from the LaTeX and HTML versions using htlatex run on the LaTeX sources. Then a post-processor fixes things up so that our HTML documentation is linked context-sensitively from the web pages of our app, and special goodies like embedded training videos are placed in the HTML documentation at the right place.
The power and control we get from this workflow is unmatched.
That about says it. Nobody else cares. I've been using Word since it came on two 5-1/4" floppy disks and included a mouse and used every version since what? 1983 or so? (Before that I used Zardax on an Apple ][ and, of course, WordStar.)
There's not a damn thing wrong with Microsoft Word. It is quite adequate--superb, even--for 99% of the people 99% of the time. I've written several 300 page books with it, including extensive indices, sidebars, tables, graphs, and pics and it works just fine. No, you can't do EVERYTHING you might want to do with it. And you might actually have to put some time in learning how it works, but ONE thing is CERTAIN:
It's not going to go away. The chances of it going away are equivalent to the chances the United States will convert to driving on the left. Only the nerds care about the arcane details under the hood.
Nobody else gives a rip.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
enough said!
MS Office is designed for use by the 9-to-5 clerical worker --- not the outside studio or in-house team that designs your four color catalogs, print adds, brochures and annual reports.
My number one wish for any word processor, but especially Word, is a switch that says:
I'm writing a document that will be printed out on paper with black toner.
At a minimum, I don't want e-mail addresses or URLs changed to blue, or underlined, or hyperlinked.
My number two wish is a switch that says:
Anything pasted into this document will adopt the formatting of the line into which it is being pasted.
I cannot think of a single instance, ever, when I wanted the formatting from some web page to be carried over into my document. My final wish is to find a word processor that assumes, or at least makes really easy to specify, that the Page One Header will not be used on subsequent pages. I don't recall how Word does that these days, but in LibreOffice it involves creating a style just for the first page. Assuming that you've managed to Google the specific forum post that tells you that.
Three Squirrels
Gee, I can't imagine why people would use Word over this.
Christ. This article, like so many here at Slashdot, summarizes to: Usability matters. Usability matters A LOT. Open source developers still don't fucking get it.
Here's a thought: if you want people to stop using Word, why not make something better than Word? Shocking.
Comment of the year
So much this!
Word is popular because it is can be manhandled by just about anyone with basic computer skills into producing a passable document. Most people doing anything more complex have a variety of tools available with various trade-offs in functionality and learning curve.
This is largely true about most popular products. Tools which are technically inferior for a purpose are used because the gap in technical fitness is smaller and lest costly than the difference in skill required to use the better suited tool. Cheaper to have the hammer than can pound in most nails when you don't really care as long as it holds, then go get the specialized hammer when you do..
you are supposed to write things. Then you twiddle how it looks a bit at the end.
That's hardly how any business document in existence is written. Layout is considered at the same time as the content. Presentation is often more than 50% of the value of the document. It is essential to be able to make edits right in the final output. Nobody is willing to print the DVI, then mark it up with a red pen, and then to find corresponding code that programs that piece of the document, and then to change it ... and once you change something on page 1, things cascade down to page 100 - pictures and tables jump onto different pages, blank areas show up where none were before... this means you need to redo the DVI and review after every change. To compare, a WYSIWYG wordprocessor gives you exactly what you are going to print for given page settings. You just go from the first page down and make your changes. That's why MS Office (and WordPerfect before that) rule the office space, not TeX. Those wordprocessors do a pretty good job on having things done your way, with background pagination and other niceties.
With formal printed documents becoming less popular and an increasing emphasis on on-screen presentation and collaborative editing, is a word processor still a good model to manage business information? We have far more powerful (and systematic) formatting capabilities in numerous browsers that can render HTML+CSS content.
You must be kidding. Microsoft Word has far more formatting capabilities than any HTML + CSS content I'm familiar with. Try creating text with a multi-coloured gradient fill and a drop shadow. Try representing a complex mathematical equation. Try inserting a pie chart. Try inserting a date field that updates automatically. Try rotating a block of text by an arbitrary number of degrees.
Then consider that fact that many people using word processors in business today are capable of doing all these things without knowing a single thing about coding.
Sure, very easy. Just go learn MathML, SVG, and JavaScript. Apparently your idea of the "real world" is where everyone is conversant is 4 or 5 programming languages. As opposed to what actually happens in almost every business around, where people with minimal knowledge of computers and zero knowledge of programming can produce what I described with a single, widely-known application.
The assertion that Microsoft Word should be deprecated in favour of a hodgepodge solution like yours, in the majority of situations, is laughable.
Here's an imaginary scenario: As a consultant I go into any business and say "I've got a bright idea. Let's get rid of Microsoft Word and start using HTML + CSS + MathML + XML + SVG + JavaScript + whatever WYSIWYG editors I can find for them". You know what else would be imaginary? My credibility.