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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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.