5 ms·

> When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is be

> When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It's a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6/Word97). The Office won out purely on the sheer marketing muscle of Microsoft and their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems. Without that I doubt they'd be where they are now in terms of market penetration.

int_19h 5y ago
The native Word file format is so complicated because it was basically a filesystem in a file, designed for extensibility scenarios such as embedding documents into other documents via OLE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  The structured storage part isn’t the problem, because Word doesn’t actually use it much except when you use OLE (the seemingly builtin things that use OLE are images, the abominable Equation, and maybe WordArt). IIRC the Word 97 format is essentially the previous Word format (whatever it was called) changed to use UCS-2 throughout, packed into a single stream in OLE storage, plus a bit of frills such as \005SummaryInformation. (This is to be compared with e.g. OOXML spreadsheets, which go as far as to store the sheets of cells and the strings inside those cells in two completely different entries of the ZIP container.) Everything that a Word document is maps 1:1 to a relatively straightforward string-of-bytes RTF. (With, again, the exception of OLE, which is why WordPad can write stuff that it assigns a .DOC suffix but is in fact an RTF stuffed into structured storage.) In fact, there was a piece of Microsoft software called the WinWord Converter SDK (Q111716) that used RTF as an intermediate format and had a bunch of DLLs that could read and write other formats; a compatible set of DLLs shipped with Windows and supported WordPad, and a larger one shipped with Word proper and contained all of its foreign format support. However, if you look at that perfectly innocent, easily parseable RTF, you’ll find that it is still a nightmare. Not only because Word generated horrible unoptimized RTFs and only used Unicode text if it couldn’t avoid it, but also exactly because it can represent everything that a Word document is, and that is an unfathomable amount of stuff to be able to represent, even for Word 97. (None of which the alleged RTF spec tells you how to render or lay out.) My personal answer to the question “why can’t one replace Word?”, or rather “why are all replacements for Word either failures or not particularly better?” is that Word can do (and thus supporting its format requires you to implement) so much that being compatible with Word is effectively equivalent to just being Word. To be fair, OpenOffice Writer is a pretty decent Word and I do use it when I need one, but it’s very uninteresting as a contribution to the field of handling formatted text on computers.
  - perlancar3 5y ago
    OpenOffice Writer and LibreOffice Writer have their proper bugs of their own, to the point that it's very frustrating to work with a non-trivial document. Many of these include some aspects of formatting not being saved to file and not restored when re-loading the file. And this is saving to .odt and not .doc or .docx. The Calcs have many bugs too. I have reported some but have since given up. For serious work I return to Word. The other alternatives are not better. A couple of weeks ago I needed to create a catalog of products that is just a few pages long. Calligra couldn't even show the image I added; there was bounding box which could be moved around but no images were shown. Abiword got glacially slow when adding a ~4MB image.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Once upon a time I worked for a company that did document viewer software (in the year and a half I was there it went through three names none of which I can remember). One of my first tasks was—no, seriously—debugging an issue where an animated gif in an Excel spreadsheet embedded in a Word document wasn't being animated.
Someone1234 5y ago
I agree with you, playing devil's advocate though I would argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual usages even if it meant hurting professional ones. Then give it away to schools for $0 (in the 1990s) so they'd get a mass of beginner/casual users that brought it with them into professional settings. Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really easy to use casually for making resumes/letters/etc. Excel is excellent for making lists of things and basic accounting/graphing. Aside; the original Microsoft Office formats (e.g. doc) were formulated in C header files (i.e. a serialized array of C data types). They were garbage. Current Microsoft Office formats (ending in "x" e.g. docx) are night-and-day better (they're standard zip files with boring XML files within). People should go unzip a docx file and check it out, very not-intiminating.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  "(they're standard zip files with boring XML files within)" that's the container format. But the actual document data is still a big mess. Although that's probably unavoidable if you keep a file format for a long time. PDF and Photoshop files are also a mess.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  Targeting casual use was the key. Even in the "professional" world almost nobody uses the Office applications to their full extent. The people who can are using more appropriate software. Accountants have Intuit and Peachtree, Anyone working in graphics, design or typesetting will use the appropriate Adobe app or competitor. Power Point is probably the only member of the suite that doesn't have a more "professional" equivalent. But there are definitely people who are more adept with it in the business world. Office was probably feature complete in its second or third iteration. The only substantive changes 99% of users notice are in interface overhauls.
  - baud147258 5y ago
    > Targeting casual use was the key. I feel like that's what Google does with chromebooks and their editor suite
- 5y ago
phaedrus 5y ago
I was explaining to one of my coworkers how back in the day with WordPerfect you could click "Show Codes" (or whatever the menu option was called) and view all the embedded formatting tags as text rather than WYSIWYG. This made it incredibly easy to fix formatting issues and see what was wrong with an unintended interaction of styles. As people who had only ever used (read: fought with) Microsoft Word, they were mind-blown that such a thing once existed. We maintain technical documentation and have to manually track page changes, which ultimately results in physical pages being printed and replaced in physical binders in many facilities. Use of Microsoft Word for this purpose is sketchy as f--- because when Word decides to "go nuts" and slightly reformat the next 100 pages (or worse, even previous pages) because of a minor edit, it turns a single page change into a hundreds-of-pages change apocalypse. Of course we don't really let that outcome stand; what actually happens is an engineer (with occasional consultation of a documentation specialist) spends half a day tentatively prodding and undoing changes in an increasingly broken document trying to find a way through the maze that doesn't trigger either a formatting booby trap or Word's over-helpful malevolent AI. The key point here is without the ability to "show codes" and edit the real underlying structure of the document not the WYSIWYG view, the entropy just increases over time. We all agree that Word is not the appropriate software for what we're doing. Unfortunately the people with the power to fix this situation are the furthest removed from understanding our pain, and we have decades' worth of Word docs. And since Microsoft Office is the default, even when Word breaks compatibility we don't take advantage of that opportunity to move to a real document management system, they just keep buying the next version of Office.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  You can show codes in Word. They've just buried it about 12 layers deep.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Really? Where?
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
GekkePrutser 5y ago
> You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6/Word97). Yeah I really miss the source screen of WordPerfect. That was an amazing feature and if they added that to Word it would actually be worth it to upgrade for once.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago
  WordPerfect (12 or 14 I believe) still runs on Windows 10. May have to run in compatibility mode. We have an employee that uses it today because of Show Codes.
wombatpm 5y ago
People don’t know how or why to use styles. I actually read the entire word manual that came with version 5 for the Mac. Best thing I ever did in grad school

int_19h 5y ago

The native Word file format is so complicated because it was basically a filesystem in a file, designed for extensibility scenarios such as embedding documents into other documents via OLE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage

mananaysiempre 5y ago
The structured storage part isn’t the problem, because Word doesn’t actually use it much except when you use OLE (the seemingly builtin things that use OLE are images, the abominable Equation, and maybe WordArt). IIRC the Word 97 format is essentially the previous Word format (whatever it was called) changed to use UCS-2 throughout, packed into a single stream in OLE storage, plus a bit of frills such as \005SummaryInformation. (This is to be compared with e.g. OOXML spreadsheets, which go as far as to store the sheets of cells and the strings inside those cells in two completely different entries of the ZIP container.) Everything that a Word document is maps 1:1 to a relatively straightforward string-of-bytes RTF. (With, again, the exception of OLE, which is why WordPad can write stuff that it assigns a .DOC suffix but is in fact an RTF stuffed into structured storage.) In fact, there was a piece of Microsoft software called the WinWord Converter SDK (Q111716) that used RTF as an intermediate format and had a bunch of DLLs that could read and write other formats; a compatible set of DLLs shipped with Windows and supported WordPad, and a larger one shipped with Word proper and contained all of its foreign format support. However, if you look at that perfectly innocent, easily parseable RTF, you’ll find that it is still a nightmare. Not only because Word generated horrible unoptimized RTFs and only used Unicode text if it couldn’t avoid it, but also exactly because it can represent everything that a Word document is, and that is an unfathomable amount of stuff to be able to represent, even for Word 97. (None of which the alleged RTF spec tells you how to render or lay out.) My personal answer to the question “why can’t one replace Word?”, or rather “why are all replacements for Word either failures or not particularly better?” is that Word can do (and thus supporting its format requires you to implement) so much that being compatible with Word is effectively equivalent to just being Word. To be fair, OpenOffice Writer is a pretty decent Word and I do use it when I need one, but it’s very uninteresting as a contribution to the field of handling formatted text on computers.
- perlancar3 5y ago
  OpenOffice Writer and LibreOffice Writer have their proper bugs of their own, to the point that it's very frustrating to work with a non-trivial document. Many of these include some aspects of formatting not being saved to file and not restored when re-loading the file. And this is saving to .odt and not .doc or .docx. The Calcs have many bugs too. I have reported some but have since given up. For serious work I return to Word. The other alternatives are not better. A couple of weeks ago I needed to create a catalog of products that is just a few pages long. Calligra couldn't even show the image I added; there was bounding box which could be moved around but no images were shown. Abiword got glacially slow when adding a ~4MB image.
dhosek 5y ago
Once upon a time I worked for a company that did document viewer software (in the year and a half I was there it went through three names none of which I can remember). One of my first tasks was—no, seriously—debugging an issue where an animated gif in an Excel spreadsheet embedded in a Word document wasn't being animated.

Someone1234 5y ago

I agree with you, playing devil's advocate though I would argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual usages even if it meant hurting professional ones. Then give it away to schools for $0 (in the 1990s) so they'd get a mass of beginner/casual users that brought it with them into professional settings. Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really easy to use casually for making resumes/letters/etc. Excel is excellent for making lists of things and basic accounting/graphing. Aside; the original Microsoft Office formats (e.g. doc) were formulated in C header files (i.e. a serialized array of C data types). They were garbage. Current Microsoft Office formats (ending in "x" e.g. docx) are night-and-day better (they're standard zip files with boring XML files within). People should go unzip a docx file and check it out, very not-intiminating.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
"(they're standard zip files with boring XML files within)" that's the container format. But the actual document data is still a big mess. Although that's probably unavoidable if you keep a file format for a long time. PDF and Photoshop files are also a mess.
thereddaikon 5y ago
Targeting casual use was the key. Even in the "professional" world almost nobody uses the Office applications to their full extent. The people who can are using more appropriate software. Accountants have Intuit and Peachtree, Anyone working in graphics, design or typesetting will use the appropriate Adobe app or competitor. Power Point is probably the only member of the suite that doesn't have a more "professional" equivalent. But there are definitely people who are more adept with it in the business world. Office was probably feature complete in its second or third iteration. The only substantive changes 99% of users notice are in interface overhauls.
- baud147258 5y ago
  > Targeting casual use was the key. I feel like that's what Google does with chromebooks and their editor suite
5y ago

phaedrus 5y ago

I was explaining to one of my coworkers how back in the day with WordPerfect you could click "Show Codes" (or whatever the menu option was called) and view all the embedded formatting tags as text rather than WYSIWYG. This made it incredibly easy to fix formatting issues and see what was wrong with an unintended interaction of styles. As people who had only ever used (read: fought with) Microsoft Word, they were mind-blown that such a thing once existed. We maintain technical documentation and have to manually track page changes, which ultimately results in physical pages being printed and replaced in physical binders in many facilities. Use of Microsoft Word for this purpose is sketchy as f--- because when Word decides to "go nuts" and slightly reformat the next 100 pages (or worse, even previous pages) because of a minor edit, it turns a single page change into a hundreds-of-pages change apocalypse. Of course we don't really let that outcome stand; what actually happens is an engineer (with occasional consultation of a documentation specialist) spends half a day tentatively prodding and undoing changes in an increasingly broken document trying to find a way through the maze that doesn't trigger either a formatting booby trap or Word's over-helpful malevolent AI. The key point here is without the ability to "show codes" and edit the real underlying structure of the document not the WYSIWYG view, the entropy just increases over time. We all agree that Word is not the appropriate software for what we're doing. Unfortunately the people with the power to fix this situation are the furthest removed from understanding our pain, and we have decades' worth of Word docs. And since Microsoft Office is the default, even when Word breaks compatibility we don't take advantage of that opportunity to move to a real document management system, they just keep buying the next version of Office.

CamperBob2 5y ago
You can show codes in Word. They've just buried it about 12 layers deep.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Really? Where?
  - CamperBob2 5y ago

GekkePrutser 5y ago

> You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6/Word97). Yeah I really miss the source screen of WordPerfect. That was an amazing feature and if they added that to Word it would actually be worth it to upgrade for once.

artificialLimbs 5y ago
WordPerfect (12 or 14 I believe) still runs on Windows 10. May have to run in compatibility mode. We have an employee that uses it today because of Show Codes.

wombatpm 5y ago

People don’t know how or why to use styles. I actually read the entire word manual that came with version 5 for the Mac. Best thing I ever did in grad school