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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.
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."
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.
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
... 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!
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
"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.
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.
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. "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not bitching, just stating the obvious. He's trying to argue that MS Word sucks on technical merits, but doesn't seem to have a good grasp of those technical details. Did you bother to read his article? The bulk of the article was a history lesson of MS Word file format changes. The wikipedia articles he seems to be paraphrasing are mostly correct about how Word used to store the files, but not real accurate for the current format. He only spends a single paragraph to state the features he doesn't like in very general terms, and then says MS Word must die because he can't avoid using it.
The sensationalistic title of "Why Microsoft Word must Die" is a bit over the top, and smacks of a cheap tabloid rag. Not something worthy of someone with a few Hugos for novels.
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.
*clippy pops up*
It looks like you're trying to kill me. YOU MUST DIE!
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 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.
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.
Richard M. Stallman already said similar things in his
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
2002 article.
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
[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.