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Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"
somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job.
So his publisher is forcing him to use Word. I would be annoyed as well. I know at least some publishers accept PDF (and some even LaTeX). So maybe he should just choose a different publisher.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, let's enumerate all the structural untidinesses of Word. Let's blame that application -- which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp) but because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do -- for the inelegance of its data model. Let's compare it to SGML, which is so much nicer and easier and so much more elegant if you're a programmer and can appreciate that sort of elegance, and if you're not a programmer, well then for god's sake why are you touching a computer?
If you want SGML, you know where to download it.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
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
You know the alternatives are really crappy when the better one is an Adobe product.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
My number one wish for any word processor, but especially Word, is a switch that says:
I'm writing a document that will be printed out on paper with black toner.
At a minimum, I don't want e-mail addresses or URLs changed to blue, or underlined, or hyperlinked.
My number two wish is a switch that says:
Anything pasted into this document will adopt the formatting of the line into which it is being pasted.
I cannot think of a single instance, ever, when I wanted the formatting from some web page to be carried over into my document. My final wish is to find a word processor that assumes, or at least makes really easy to specify, that the Page One Header will not be used on subsequent pages. I don't recall how Word does that these days, but in LibreOffice it involves creating a style just for the first page. Assuming that you've managed to Google the specific forum post that tells you that.
Three Squirrels
Gee, I can't imagine why people would use Word over this.
Christ. This article, like so many here at Slashdot, summarizes to: Usability matters. Usability matters A LOT. Open source developers still don't fucking get it.
Here's a thought: if you want people to stop using Word, why not make something better than Word? Shocking.
Comment of the year
Of course, there's the TeX engine and the default macro packages which are different things.
Actually, I was talking specifically about the generic TeX engine properties that make it virtually impossible to use it for incremental redisplay and similar purposes, so you have to go WYSIWYM instead, but then TeX isn't the foundation for the document platform itself but just the output module, which is what I was pointing out. It also doesn't work well for compound documents, not just simple hand-edited text ones ("simple" as in "not compound", but not excluding structured and large ones, of course), but that's sort of outside of TeX's scope (if you ignore Web2C's [\immediate]\write18, or yet another converter to "lower" the document data (for example, data linked to a live online resource) into something "set in stone" that TeX can actually typeset), so perhaps that would be an unreasonable request anyway.
You are not bound to plain TeX or LaTeX or a few others, write your own.
That doesn't solve the problem I was referring to. One potential solution that occurred to me the other day was that since TeX's state tends to be small, and the processing is "paged" in the last stages of TeX's internals, one possible option would be memoizing the internal state of the processor and resuming the execution only from the nearest place preceding your edit point in the input stream where the last state snapshot took place and going on from there. But that still requires a modified TeX implementation, and it doesn't work for multi-pass processing that, i.e., collects page number references to scatter them throughout your document in a later pass (a single inserted character could change the page number on a page reference on the very page you're editing right now, and there's no way to know without running all the full document passes again, and there goes your real-time redisplay), and that tends to be quite common, so tough luck.
Apparently you need to be reminded. TeX is a system for "automating stuff", not a system for interactively enabling tweaks by hand.
Apparently, I failed to get my point across. Of course TeX can do that, but the document application with TeX export has to export the document structure into the TeX file properly, and I have yet to see a complex application doing it in a user-friendly way. Nowhere am I suggesting that *TeX* is the right place for the necessary user interaction. If you're accusing me of a desire to do stupid things, you had better point out which ones, since I fail to see which part of my requirements is unreasonable.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
Will you hate me if I tell you that you could have created that book in less than half the time with Framemaker, the best publishing application of it's time, damn you Adobe for abandoning it! One major problem with most Microsoft supporters is that they live with such blinders on. "Word is great" is synonymous with "I've only ever worked with Word and now know so many work arounds for all its deficiencies that I'll never change." Word and Excel have so much legacy cruft that I find them mostly unusable. In the words of Larry Wall, simple things should be simple, and hard things should be possible. I can't think of a single Microsoft application that follows that mantra.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
you are supposed to write things. Then you twiddle how it looks a bit at the end.
That's hardly how any business document in existence is written. Layout is considered at the same time as the content. Presentation is often more than 50% of the value of the document. It is essential to be able to make edits right in the final output. Nobody is willing to print the DVI, then mark it up with a red pen, and then to find corresponding code that programs that piece of the document, and then to change it ... and once you change something on page 1, things cascade down to page 100 - pictures and tables jump onto different pages, blank areas show up where none were before... this means you need to redo the DVI and review after every change. To compare, a WYSIWYG wordprocessor gives you exactly what you are going to print for given page settings. You just go from the first page down and make your changes. That's why MS Office (and WordPerfect before that) rule the office space, not TeX. Those wordprocessors do a pretty good job on having things done your way, with background pagination and other niceties.
The primary argument used to dismiss Libre Office as a viable alternative to MS Office is that it "can't do anything more complex than basic document editing".
And yet here we are, explaining why MS Office is the popular choice because it only does the most basic stuff that 9-to-5 clerical workers need.