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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?"
No sane metamodel. No access from multiple applications. No sane way of creating compound documents. When you see the landscape of modern IT and you notice that the closest thing to that is the XML ecosystem, you know something has gone horribly wrong.
Ezekiel 23:20
enough said!
LyX does the handholding for you.
So everyone should be using LaTex I take it?
LaTeX
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."
More abstractly, there are lots of tools which have sprung up to address the issues raised in the article.
Word has kind of become the lowest common denominator. Just about everyone can open a word document, and just about everyone can make one. As soon as more features are needed, people turn to tools like Scrivener (popular with authors), LaTeX (popular with technical people), or even bafflingly painful but powerful tools like Adobe's Framemaker (tech writers in certain industries).
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
I'm not sure that's true. I keep thinking of different systems that use both style sheets and control codes. HTML does essentially the same thing, so does LaTeX; allowing local edits and style-sheet based edits. How are they fundamentally incompatible?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's called Lyx - http://www.lyx.org/
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.
This critic just comes across as whiny to me. I use Microsoft Word to typeset complex multilingual documents, and it works great for my needs. I've occasionally tried to use Scribus and some other OSS tools, and have been blocked by limitations, typically related to non-Latin text handling. Word is also very scriptable from pretty much any programming language via the ActiveX interfaces, which is how I use it.
If he has a better idea of how to set up a word processor, he didn't see fit to share his thoughts with the rest of us. But serious suggestions only, please. If the author wants Microsoft to make Word more like vi, I think then we'd really see some "loathing both understandable and contagious" from ordinary users.
because Word is the quintessential example an app where you need a large paid development staff with varying skill sets, including many (UI design, usability, localization, QA, end user support, documentation, incorporating specialized features for customers such as law firms, integration with legacy enterprise software...) which historically have not been the strengths of FOSS.
And here's something that's often overlooked: even if FOSS could put together a team to do this (perhaps with some resources loaned by IBM or Red Hat or someone else), it's not enough to do it once. Or twice. The software has to be maintained year after year and upgraded to reflect the ever-changing requirements of businesses and consumers, and people expect professional UI design, usability, localization, QA, and doc.
Ref. Fred Brooks' article about the difference between the level of effort required to produce a "neat little tool" vs. a commercial product. Brooks came up with a factor of 9, and it wasn't just about having more folks involved... it was different kinds of folks too.
Features (or lack thereof) are not the problem. It's the incessant bugs, some of which have remained untouched since word 97.
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
I always wanted to try Interleaf, but never worked anywhere that it was installed. On the other hand, any text editor (like emacs) + the text formatter Scribe from CMU was a great combination. Used this on a Vax running Berkeley Unix and then later ran the CP/M and MS-DOS versions from Mark of the Unicorn. First Mince and Scribble, later FinalWord II, which was then sold to Borland and had one last go as Sprint wordprocessor.
In the late 1980's I produced a 900 page engineering book with quite a bit of math. Source was edited on a DOS machine, printed on an Apple Laserwriter (Postscript sent through the serial port). Automatic table of contents, figures and tables. Auto page renumbering when chapters were re-arranged. Automatic changing page headings, to match chapter and section numbering. Automatic footnoting and cross referencing, including forward references (two pass formatting). Like TeX, it took a bit of work to figure it out, but then everything just worked from that point forward.
Biggest problem I have with Word is constantly fixing the same problems, over and over.
... and since discovering it, I have felt no need to use MS Word for anything anymore. Particularly good about LibreOffice Write? The PDF export function works flawlessly, exports quickly, and also gives control over how the PDF document appears in Acrobat Reader (Zoom level, page order, thumbnails, et cetera). To me, Word has had its day. LibreOffice Write works well, is free, requires no internet-licensing shenanigans and does everything one could expect from a good word processor, including auto spell-checking and thesaurus functionality. My 2 Cents. =)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
My problem with [MS] Word is this: If you have a table as the first item/object in your document and you'd like to type above it, it's impossible to do this! Moving the table lower moves the document margins as well! Solution is to delete it and "reserve" space for text with an invisible text box or type some irrelevant text first, which text you can replace with the text you want.
It's as pathetic as it is frustrating!
Me 2 :) Interleaf became FrameMaker. I started with the former in 1996 and wound up in the later as late as 2003. To me they both live on in today's XML and Epub editors. I haven't touched WORD in over 5 years now. Pages does all I need these days.
If you like outlines/thumbnails etc. on the left and you're doing (interactive) books, try iBooks Author, just be prepared for a messy experience if you need to insert any WORD chapters.
I wouldn't call my latex experience efficient by default, instead I call the result pretty and this is all that count's. Also it gives your resume a certain well recognized format, at least by the people in the same club. Why would you deal with Winword noobs.
Je me souviens.
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
So is their any decent alternatives? I personally do not really like MS:O nor OO all that much.
I have pretty much completely given up on all of them and just use unstyled text editors now.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"The last line of a right hand page should not end with a hyphen. This
has been a style rule for many years, yet it is amazing that most word
processors do not do this! I just smile when I pick up a book produced
with something like Frame and you immediately find these errors.
Needless to say, troff does this correctly, and has for 20+ years. A
friend commented to me that normal evolution would have gone Word to
Frame to troff, but instead, the computer industry has gone the other
way!"
-W. Richard Stevens, author of 7 popular technical books. [R.I.P.]
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.
'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer --'
.. was the first WYSIWYG .. word processor
Ami
What exactly makes Word so bad? It seems functional enough, and I fully admit that maybe I'm just not understanding the finer points of some programming strategies, so what's the deal? He obviously hates Microsoft for things like buying up all these focused program adons like spell checkers from other companies, and wrapping them into Word, yet seems to think we'd be better off with somehow managing dozens of such apps if they were still separate companies and programs. He then goes on to act talk about how he hates being forced to use Word when he does just fine with other options... like Vim, of all things.
He mentions things like control codes and hierarchical style sheets being "fundamentally incompatible" yet the way he describes them they are basically the same thing. He very well may have a point, technically speaking, but he sure does a crappy job of getting it across.
End the end, the article kind of reminds me of some guy who's bitching about how the automotive industry should have gone with diesel instead of fuel 70 years ago.
After years of riding the feature wagon I am finally detoxing and going with the 'less is more' idiom. For me, a programmer and rare blogger, 98% of everything I ever need to write can be handled with either H1-H6 or markdown. I write my notes is Notepad++ using Markdown now, and paste them into my Wiki for storage and later retrieval. Blogs are knocked out with the most basic of HTML features.
I haven't had MS Turd installed for over a decade now and don't think I'm likely to ever need it again. The only outlying case for me is my CV, and I keep that in Open Office and export it to PDF for distribution.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.
How is this broken by design? The author seems to think that a hierarchical format that uses a small set of inline codes for paragraph structure and formatting hints is inferior to Wordperfect's completely unstructured stream. With Word's hierarchy you can safely move blocks of data around without the risk of accidentally leaving control codes in the wrong place. Somehow that is supposed to be a bad thing?
Most of his rant centers about retelling history and griping about the file format incompatibilities between different versions and the challenge of creating an independent reader for the binary format. He gives the impression that the world would be a better place if we were all stuck on using Wordstar for sharing documents and Microsoft should never have had the ambition to add features to Word. Yes. Binary Word documents are baroque nightmare to decode. That's what happens when you carry a design forward for 20+ years that wasn't architected for clean forward compatibility. Considering the early versions of Word were implemented in assembly and run on machines with tiny scraps of memory, the design "flaws" were necessities of the day. Yes. DOCX has a lot of undocumented cruft to support translation from the old binary format. Word 2007+ avoids using those dark corners for documents that were not imported from an earlier version. You don't have to use that cruft at all when building XML documents from an external tool which is far better than the old hack of generating RTF to interoperate with Word.
Word has its issues and has to be coddled to avoid breakage in long-standing problems like numbering but at least I don't have to pull my hair out trying to do basic table formatting as happens in Open/LibreOffice. I'll switch when the open source rivals can match the capability and usability of Word 2003.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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
troff + tbl + eqn
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
But it doesn't know what a line is.
Yes, you *can* do anything. But it can take a long time to do it. (Actually, I *think* it's a LaTex problem, it could be a Tex problem. I tried to get to like it for a few weeks, because it would handle some things that my other tools wouldn't handle. But it was really lousy at some things I do all the time. I had to dick around with cascading changes every time I edited a line.
(Actually, that doesn't make much sense to me, as I would expect the problem to be that it didn't know what a paragraph was, but I remember it as it didn't know what a line was. And couldn't decently word-wrap.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Word may have flaws, like every other piece of software ever written. But it does the job. Millions of not-so-computer-savvy people are able to created good-looking documents using it.
WordPerfect relied on the embedded codes model, but they never did get it completely right. For anything non-trivial, you pretty much had to go down to the code level, hand-placing the codes to make the text render properly. Copy-and-paste across formats was often disastrous.
Word's model might be conflicted, but it works. There are very few situations where the wysiwyg editor can't get the text to look like what you want.
If I'm creating a document, I don't really care whether the encoding is HTML or RTF or docx or whatever, I just want it to look right, and Word does that.
Funny how he claims its broken by design.
I use it very frequently, and while it is crap, it does actually work.
If you have used a rock to pound nails all your life, how can you understand the advantages of a hammer?
People misuse MS-Word to create monstrosities of crap that cannot be edited.Companies use its bizaro features to make unalterable files and forms that defy logic.However, it can also be used to create actual documents using styles and formatting that lets people get work done. Google Docs is a poor substitute (I have a Chromebook and tried). None of the office tools I've seen are perfect and none ever will be.
I' like to see tools that use descriptive formatting as SGML intended, but every application of SGML since its introduction has been made by document professionals that are worse than Word. XML sucks.
"the file format didn't change"
"new features that were added in later versions"
If the file format didn't change, then there would not be a later version.
The sad thing is that one of the victims of Word was Ami Pro, the first WYSIWYG text editor for Windows. And it used styles (templates) they way it should. Still feel sorry for those guys. I can't even remember how many messed-up documents I took from desperate people, stripped them to bare ascii, set up the styles the way they wanted and started applying. Should have seen their eyes when the document came out of the printer.
We used it at one workplace. I am glad it is dead. You had to use to with the motif window manager, otherwise it would just not start. All the control symbols were in French, so you had to guess at their meaning. It wasn't good.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This is not rocket science if you want Word to die write something better and cheaper the market is willing to accept over word.
I hear a lot of talk, fancy words but no hint of what would replace it or what could be done to even start to remedy the situation other than clicking your heels and wishing the evil Redmond monster go away. Talk is cheap, real monsters don't go away because you ask them nicely.
First of all, if you're trying to make a statement of how a product must "die" due to transgressions from the 1980s, that's plain ridiculous. Someone who committed a drugs offence during the Reagan administration shouldn't be denied a job opportunity in the fall of 2013. Right? Let's pass judgments in the current state of things, not what we had to deal with 20 years ago.
Second -- the whole technical argument being made seems to revolve around the idea that mixing "control code" and "style sheets" in a single format is bad. I've got quite a bit of past experience in writing software that builds doc files (the binary ones) and I can state with great certainty that this is NOT how Word works. Everything is a style, whether explicitly or implicitly by combining styles with direct formatting, and every style is able to be (and usually is) inherited from a parent style. You don't have to explicitly define the combined styles, and in more recent versions of Word they've made it much clearer that that's what is happening. (IMO Word 2007 is the first version where they actually got the UI right)
A lot of people are confused by all this because older versions of Word favoured UI simplicity over structurally beautiful documents. A lot of that has to do with trying to convince WordPerfect users to come over to Word..... anyone remember the complaints that everyone had in the 1990s about how Word didn't have a "Reveal Codes" function like WordPerfect? Yeah, that's because THERE ARE NO CODES like the author of TFA claims.
Third -- the Word style system is remarkably similar to HTML + CSS. It's hierarchical layout with the ability to override anything at any time. Presentation and content are "ideally" totally separate, and you can certainly work this way in Word if you are disciplined, but nothing at all stops you from saying "yeah I -know- this block of text is 14pt but I want this one word to be 12pt."
The author also drills pretty hard on the point that the format of Word documents has changed from one version to the next. Well, yeah....they added features like Table Styles and List Styles in Word 2002. Surely nobody is expecting documents that utilize this really helpful feature to older versions of Word..... right? This is no great conspiracy.....it's just a case of adding new features. Switching to the XML-based document format and standardizing the format with Ecma and ISO has definitely helped settle the format down, but if a word processor doesn't support a feature in a newer version of the document format, well.....tough shit. I don't hear anybody bitching about how Firefox 3.6 doesn't fully implement CSS3, accordingly people shouldn't bitch about how Word 2000 doesn't implement features new to Word 2010!
One last thing: I'm posting this to debunk some mythology and refute the author's claims, but I'm not defending the old-school Office document format....yeah, it was driven by a very 1990s need to be fast on old 286s etc. (same reason Windows 3.0 APIs lacked a lot of bounds checking, BTW) and the format is a proprietary file system unto itself (doc files always come in sizes of multiples of 8192 bytes because that was the size of a block of data regardless of its content). But those times are long gone now. We should have a great appreciation for the people who worked really hard on decoding all this ten years ago and published some good Perl modules on CPAN.... I've read all that source code and it is insane. And we should have an appreciation for those who pushed Microsoft to go "open" with their Office formats. Openness was pushed into Office without users even realizing it, which is good for everyone.
Actually not.
The format was designed from the beginning to allow for new features to be added. The format is a binary record format. Each record begins with a record length and a record type indicator. New versions of Word added new record types, but they did not change the underlying structure of the document format. If your reader (Word 97) didn't know a record type (from Word 2003) it can safely skip over it and keep going.
This is very similar to HTML. An older browser might not know about the <video> tag, because that is an HTML 5 feature the older browser doesn't handle. But all of the older tags will work just fine, whether your browser is new or old. The addition of the <video> tag doesn't change the underlying HTML format, it just adds new capabilities, while still following the same rules the older browsers knew.
It's a featureful app, but I hate having to dig through the UI to accomplish the most basic tasks.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Yes you can, it hasn't changed much and a lot of people are still using MS Word 2007 anyway.
Do you really believe Word has advanced and improved since 2006?
There is a recurring problem with software development in recent years, where one player has become dominant, the barriers to competition are so high that it has no real challenger for a long time, and the result is stagnation. There are numerous examples: Microsoft Office for business documents and spreadsheets, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics, Autodesk applications in the 3D modelling space, IE6 as the classic beloved of web developers everywhere, and as an odd one out just to make the point, Linux if you want an OSS operating system.
There are a few ways out of the trap, but the big problem is that the people making purchasing decisions often aren't interested in assessing the quality or productivity benefits of alternative software, or even able to make informed judgements about those things if they wanted to. No-one ever got fired for buying the market leader, so while they know that the new subscription pricing model will give vendors even less incentive to actually improve anything or the support contracts are probably far more expensive than they're actually worth or the TCO will be horrendous because of usability problems, they'll carry on using these leading products anyway so their careers aren't at risk.
That creates a vicious circle where no-one is willing to invest the staggering amounts of time and money required to build a heavyweight competitor that can effectively challenge an incumbent. Instead, we get open source clones or cheap-and-simple web/mobile apps, which do a good enough job to save some users paying for the heavyweight commercial software, but in most cases offer little real innovation and almost invariably lack the quality and feature set of the established big names. That's why the professionals spending serious money keep buying those big names, and so the cycle continues, with little incentive for software giants like Microsoft to improve their cash cows or innovate with entirely new products.
I think the most likely way out of this in the long term is for a new product to arrive that changes the rules and moves the market. 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. Probably every programmer reading this routinely uses far more powerful editing, review and collaboration capabilities in their everyday tools. I don't just want Word 2014 any more. I want something that helps me collect, organise and share information in ways that match how we'll be living and working in 2014. And a tool that does that might have a small chance of breaking the Word stranglehold.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I thought latex was for not having children.
but if a word processor doesn't support a feature in a newer version of the document format, well.....tough shit. I don't hear anybody bitching about how Firefox 3.6 doesn't fully implement CSS3, accordingly people shouldn't bitch about how Word 2000 doesn't implement features new to Word 2010!
There's a difference between complaining about old Firefox and complaining about old Word. Upgrades from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox current release aren't paywalled. With Word, on the other hand, if someone sends you a document that uses a new feature, but you haven't yet budgeted an upgrade to a version of your word processor that can handle the new feature, then as you said, tough shit.
The format is a binary record format. Each record begins with a record length and a record type indicator.
In other words, not unlike PNG's chunked format. But why weren't this binary record format and the meaning of each record type documented publicly earlier?
Someone who users MS Word more than anyone reading this site has spotted some problems and you are bitching that he is "non-technical"? I suppose if he used the program less and did some technical stuff instead you would dismiss him as not using the program enough to comment on it?
We shouldn't blame the users for usability problems. That's where we have to lift our game instead of throwing insults back.
From a pragmatic developer's POV I'd say the invisible hand is still stroking Microsoft's cock because "the market" says MS Office is as "good as it gets" for now. For better or worse, by hook or by crook, Office is embedded in the corporate environment. Today, you still need Office to communicate with corporate customers who don't give a flying fuck what else you do, they just want you to read the word document and fill out the excel spread sheet they sent you.
So while I don't like the way MS gained their monopoly, they were held to account long ago through the courts. From a pragmatic business POV, I have to agree with today's CIO's, given the environment they would have to be insane to stop buying Office licenses. That sort of bravery is best left to governments who have a big influence on electronic document formats because for many corporations the government is also their biggest customer. Which leads me to believe that eventually governments will define standard document formats with the same rigour they define standard weights and measures. Personally I think we are not ready for that yet since significant improvements are still occurring at a rapid pace.
The market is still working out these sort of issues and slowly defining what "electronic document" means, the government has an important role to play in ensuring the result is something that "raises all boats". Governments were early adopters of electronic communications, their choices propelled the Office and Adobe boats into orbit. In many ways both products deserved their reward. But soon they will have to step down from the podium in much the same way the railroad barons did.
What we have gained from the evolution of electronic documents since the WordStar generation has concentrated wealth into new hands but at the same time it has brought about a genuine technological revolution in human communications which is just as significant as the invention of the printing press and may eventually be seen as up there with the invention of writing itself. For a simple example, when I was a kid the Jetsons was a big hit, but adults also speculated that one day robots would build things and serve us, nobody really suspected they would replace the vast majority of (say) bank tellers within their own life time.
Theoretically this is supposed to give us more leisure time but in practice it just raises our standard of living by allowing us to do more with the same amount of time. (assuming you're lucky enough to live somewhere with humane labour laws).
Humans still communicate emotions with screams, hoots, moans and laughter like other great apes do, sometime in the last 100Kyrs we started talking and our obscure species suddenly (geologically speaking) shot to the top of the food chain. The change in the geological record is as dramatic as the Cambrian explosion - only in reverse. Most of those changes have been concentrated into the last 500yrs or so, on face value the geological record of the advent of humans looks like an asteroid strike, the only lasting thing that gives it away as human activity is the fact that asteroids with high levels of plutonium and plastic are exceedingly rare.
Language gave us the ability to organise, plan and share experiences at the tribal level, writing notched it up to the civilization level, printing made two way communication available to millions of citizens and educated foreigners', each of these events lead to significant changes in the way humans organise their societies (most notably the size and complexity of tasks that could be undertaken by significantly larger groups of people). The internet will, or already has, reached N-to-N communication at the species level. I believe it will rapidly overtake and outperform religion in it's role of unifying people's across political/cultural borders.
I'm in my 50's, I think the next century will see a spectacular jump in human capabilities and it will be as a direct result of the internet's potential for new
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The reason some recruiters want that is so they can edit your resume which IMHO they should never do unless you give your permission.
People, if you make it as far as an interview be sure to have enough paper copies of your real resume to hand around in case you've been screwed over by the recruiters. In one case with me they cut out five years of relevant employment because they wanted to put forward one star canditate and two duds. My current employer short circuited the process by interviewing all three and no longer users that unethical recruitment agency.
If you want some facts about MS Word 97 here's one that still pisses me off even now. Some versions of MS Word 97 could not open files written in other versions of MS Word 97 - and the different versions came in identical boxes with identical labels on the CDROM. The answer was to reinstall every single copy of MS Word 97 in and office from the same CDROM. In my case it was a university engineering department and a few postgrads like myself doing it day and night in shifts over a week until it was all done.
As for the other incompatibilities, they were real too so please do not mistake your inexperience for reality.
Latex makes beautiful documents and is unparalleled for mathematics, but it is beyond the pale for most mortals....
That's why the GP suggested LyX, rather than LaTeX. Duh.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you're wanting to simply edit text there are plenty of simple text editors out there that are more than up to the task and less crash prone than word.
If you want it to look good or are archving and indexing large numbers of documents then you need a DTP or document markup system: eg. Interleaf, latex (steep learning curve and other issues aside), proprietary solutions from companies such as Canon.
It's not until you have to assemble a set of conference papers for example when you see word and latex documents side-by-side do you realise how truly horrible word's output looks.
In spite of the fact that the end result tends to look better both markup and document databases emphasise document structure and content vs the look.
So in short; if it's short or ephemeral use a text editor, if it's long or has to be kept for a long time use something designed for the task, not word.
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
Anyone needing to produce good-looking print-form documents from content that "lives" on the web should check out http://www.princexml.com/.
Prince supports most CSS3 and has a number of CSS extensions that help you control formatting. So getting well-formed and styled HTML to print beautifully is a relatively painless step forward.
I have crappy memory. I'm not one to remember arcane macros or shortcuts. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V is as far as I go.
Never fear - nested menus always helped me find things.
Now with the Ribbon in Office, first I have to search each of 5 or 6 ribbon views. They aren't grouped very meaningfully so it's basically a linear search. Then if I don't find what I am looking for I am basically stuck, since I can't remember how to find items that aren't on the ribbon, and I can't really search on them, because I am not exactly sure what they are called. So I end up using Word like a glorified notepad.
The design team that killed the menus on Word (and those kids who are doing the same on browsers) don't realize the damage they are causing end users.
But I use PageMaker...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
*clippy pops up*
It looks like you're trying to kill me. YOU MUST DIE!
Ridiculous complaint. The ribbon IS a hierarchical menu system just like the old one, still has on-screen-highlighted keyboard shortcuts just like the old one.
Your complaint boils down to "I learnt where things were arranged in the old hierarchy and so they should never ever change."
Nope. Go to little drop down list at the very top and choose "More commands". Then in the dropdown for "Choose commands from" select "commands not in ribbon".
And there you have it, and alphabetized single list of several HUNDRED commands that don't show up ANYWHERE in the ribbon...NOT organized by function so that you can find them even if you unsure what exactly you are looking for.
The whole point of nested menus is it helps you explore to even know what you are looking for.
Now get me my menus back in Chrome and I will consider using that too,
The pre-ribbon Word also had hundreds of commands that weren't put on menus.
Are you saying that you believe the ribbon is harder to explore than menus? (I can maybe see that if you don't want to hover over items to read the tooltip and instead want the text of the option visible straight away).
Or are you saying that you believe that less functionality is effectively discoverable now via the ribbon than used to be through menus? (I find that doubtful, given how telemetry-guided the team was this time).
Or are you saying that you just disagree with what functionality they chose to expose to explorers now vs before? (again, given all the telemetry-guidance, I find this hard to believe).
The behavior of Word including styles and formatting seems to be the invention from hell - some style templates seems to be as contagious as viruses and you can't ever get anything right as you want it. The number of times I have had to settle for "Good enough" are numerous and can't be counted.
At least with HTML I can get some control over things, but the downside there is that it costs a lot of time to produce a user-friendly document instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Like when I delete an extra space and it changes my font?
Why does the author keep trashing the term "baroque"? Find a better word. How about "archaic"; you won't offend the Archaicians.
Table-ized A.I.
Microsoft used secret APIs to give its programs an advantage over competitors. That had a big effect in the 1990's. It is apparently still going on in some things but we'll have to wait, as usual, a long time before it turns up in court records. And like before, the damage will have been done. The only way to stop it is to stop using M$ products.
You can find more like that if you wade through the material of the Comes V Microsoft case at the now archived Groklaw site. Basically anything bad that has been said about M$ and the people that work there is true.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
MS Word took off when they started bundling it. For most people it was simple math: Either buy MS Word + MS Excel for the same price as WordPerfect or Quattro alone, or double up the money and pay for WordPerfect and Quattro. d
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Much as I disapprove of Word and it's complicated underlayer of kluge programs, the problem for open source software is how to coordinate and document multiple word processing sub-systems to put together a clean, balanced, and powerful word processing performance suite.
Like Eric Raymond's model of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the problem for open source software is to pull together small parts of a superior system from many independent authors and coordinate the accomplishments into districts and describe what each module does in a way that makes sense to the wide variety of visitors.
For my wife, a very busy fast working touch typist, there needs to be a pushbutton "Word mode" to make the word processor behave keystroke by keystroke just like Word of the Office XP vintage. With her, she always is facing deadlines, writing furiously and always exchanging .doc files.
For me, the problem with Libre Office is I am stuck with a version I downloaded outside of the Ubuntu Debian package system. I have lost track of the re-union of Open Office and Libre Office. Big embarassment for me, I don't have time to straighten it out.
So how can open source free software move away from Word and become the clarity, quality and power leader?
I really like the observation earlier that the office suites need specific development by area experts.
The user documentation for add-in modules needs to be very good. That means OO or LO need a documentation system that can pick up new chapters and new cross references when a additional package is added to the word procesing suite.
I would like a 8-up card module, a mailing list module, a bulk email response tracking module, a wall-poster module, a fill in a scanned blank form module, a Google Docs module, a google blogger editor, a music quoting module, a classical greek quoting module, a school-teacher-class-student-parent database module, an rsync remote mirror and a paragraph checksum integrity module.
Another half of the battle is the suites need good example files. How about identical example files in American English, Dutch, German, French and classical Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi. These language files would model how to set up OO in each of the languages. I would like to see example files of a short book, a term paper, tables, photos, movies, mathematical formulae and music notation with linked audio.
Finally, another area where open source software is lacking is in the conversion from screen image to printed on paper image. There is a point where the WP program dumps data into the printer driver and control and knowledge about sheet size, ink and pixel size is embedded in some unknown place.
Richard M. Stallman already said similar things in his
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
2002 article.
His criticisms of Microsoft's deliberate lack of interoperability, ever-changing file-format, and attempts to establish market dominance by force aren't new, but of course it's always good to hear them publicized and repeated. About ten years ago I wrote a similar article, Please Don't Send Me Microsoft Word Documents, which includes links to even earlier essays by others.
You mean, like HTML?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Each turn of the crank of Word is a new and different product. The migration from Word 2003 to 2007 to 2010 and beyond is as steep as moving from Word to OpenOffice. It's boringly predictable that when discussing the manipulation of a document over the phone where each person has a slightly different version of Word (that is, no on screen document sharing) it's pointless because so many of the controls and how those controls operate are different. But hey at least it's not Excel which is even worse.
This article is not worth reading. Someone who doesn't use MS Word is whining about everyone standardizing on .DOC files.
His history is totally wrong - claiming Word came from work with Apple/Jobs/Macintosh, but it was actually on Xenix (called MultiTool, IIRC), then DOS before the Mac shipped. It was written by Charles Simonyi, who developed the first GUI word processor at Xerox PARC. So the development order was PARC, Xenix, DOS, then the Mac. Word 2.0 for DOS was an amazing tool, and I dumped Word Perfect for it.
He makes so many claims that are just flat-out wrong that I felt compelled to save others from this time sink.
Place nail here >+
Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model?
Yes, it could. Unfortunately, it doesn't because some morons have decided that copying is more important than inventing.
There are a couple of really good and different tools, like LyX. But honestly, the problem with productivity tools like these is that they aren't cool and sexy, so it needs momentum to carry the developers, because the coolness alone doesn't do it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do.
No. No he does not.
Well, I wrote a 100-page book in Word, and it was such an awful experience that I learned LaTeX and wrote a 2000 page book in it. Word breaks down very, very quickly when the page count hits three digits. Word is not designed for books! It's designed for one-page letters and envelopes.
LaTeX is an abominable, hair-pulling, uber-frustrating, insane mess sometimes, but it's one that gets the job done! Once you learn a few quirks, it generate beautiful PDFs.
The one big drawback to LaTeX is inline images. They're insanely quirky and almost impossible to flow properly.
WriteNow 4.0....It hasn't gotten better since then, and for most wordsmiths who don't work in a corporate environ, it has only gotten worse.
In 2002 I switched over to LaTeX and took an oath never to create another Word document as long as I lived. So far, so good!
LaTeX has a big learning curve, but it creates beautiful documents and is math/science friendly.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Point...sometimes. When you are trying to display a box with wrapped text in it...
Perhaps LaTex has a decent way of doing this, but I never found it.
At the time I was trying to display params for functions in a class in a consistent and visually separated way. So I needed to wrap the text. And I couldn't get LaTex to wrap the text within the box without hand adjusting after every change. And these changes tended to cascade down the page(s) so after every change I had to check all text beneath it for alterations.
P.S.: I'm clearly not a Tex wizard, but that was too steep a learning curve for me. LibreOffice was much better. Yes, I'll grant that you can do ANY text formatting in Tex. I wouldn't be surprised if it were Turing complete. This doesn't make it a reasonable platform to use.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What I would like to see is an extension of the Excel tabs concept, but where any tab can be any kind of document. So, a single Office file can have a word processing document, a couple of spreadsheets, and a powerpoint slide, and any element of any tab can be referenced by any other tab so you can have a chunk of the spreadsheet tab dynamically embedded in the word tab.
Word is likewise at a point of being Mature, small improvements can be made but really unless somebody comes up with something drastically new there isn't much room to go.
This is a valid point, but I think you nailed it with your qualifier there: "unless somebody comes up with something drastically new". Plenty of related fields offer inspiration for how that drastically new alternative might work, but we're stuck in a rut and not bothering to look at them.
However, I don't think it's true that maturity is the explanation for most of the examples I gave before anyway. It's easy to suggest substantial improvements that could be made in almost every case, and the wish list sites and discussion forums for these software products are full of repeated feature or bug fix requests from people who actually use the software. But as long as those people keep on paying for what is already there, what is the incentive to improve it for them?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
[greybeard alert] The WYSIWYG interface of the IBM Selectric was ugly, corrections were messy and revisions were time and money lost. We were more careful programming when we got one turn around a day and used punch cards, similarly, we were careful and detail oriented when creating a document took a specialist (a "secretary") to create and change it. When the first Wang CPT-like systems entered the staff (USAF) we quickly noted that documents suddenly had to be perfect, corrections weren't allowed and the curmudgeons like to complain about the change in focus from content to format. The hapless staff officer would run around with the 8" floppy with the electronic version of the document, and every little nit picked resulted in a new printing, offices revisited, and signatures. TROFF and TeX both seemed to let you focus on content (again), but it seemed that people spent so much time tweaking the layout that that dream was lost. WYSIWYG was supposed to fix that, but the quality of the theses my students turned in did not reflect that dream so much as their desire to dazzle with really fancy font and alignment and equations that were typeset soooo prettily, surround by words that did not seem to matter so much. For a while I was a bit of an HTML 3.0 is all you really need Luddite, and highly structured CSS seems like a jump three steps back (JMP *-3) in complexity just to try to get back to where we were when all you could do was size, bold and italic (or is that em?). Sheese, I'm going back to hand-written. Maybe even carved in stone or clay.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Nissus Writer was a nice product, it was far more popular in Europe as it handled using a variety of languages within the same document extremely well, it also coped quite elegantly with specialty dictionaries such as medical and legal with no complaints.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Any type of hegemony will have awkward repercussions and collateral damage.
Casteism
Why does it always (not just default) assume that you are using "pages"? I would like to type a dozen chapters or so, each of around 20-30 kB of text. No pages. I don't want it to break my text.
Typesetting and page formatting is something I want to leave to the publishers. I don't want to write "documents" for either paper or web. I write novels, not pages.
Word used to have a mode for that, where it displayed things without most formatting.
I believe it was a successor of the times when machines weren't quite fast enough for real-time WYSIWYG, so you would only turn on WYSIWYG mode when you wanted to check the pages... but you could work without.
Sadly, they removed that mode several versions back.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
there are lots of freewares that are way better than MS word
Is supporting multiple conflicting paradigms really a bad thing ?
It reminds me of discussion about programming languages. For example, C++ supports both procedural and object-oriented programming and is often regarded as ugly but not as much as perl which supports even more conflicting paradigms. Yet both languages are very good at getting things done.
Yes, it's possible to do better. But inventing new models is not easy, and it's an uphill battle.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net