9 ms·
Death to MS Word
- tptacek 15y agoWord "Track Changes" is still the industry standard for legal documents.
- homosaur 15y agoSo there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's advanced functionality? Not being facetious, let's name em.
- mdda 15y agoLibreOffice track changes seems to work perfectly adequately, IMHO.
- tptacek 15y agoIf it doesn't interoperate perfectly with Word's Track Changes, that doesn't matter: your counterparty in any legal negotiation is sure to be using Word.
- forkandwait 15y agoIn some cases (like the state office I work at), Libre Office track changes would be fine. We aren't all doing legal negotiating with counterparties (MS Office power users! I am super impressed!)
- gruseom 15y agoI wonder how hard it is to interoperate perfectly with Word's Track Changes, or, let's say, with a minimal set of critical Word features. Could a small smart team pull that off? That's how I'd try to do it if I were trying to kill Word. Or is Word so complicated that it would just be hopeless?
- Duff 15y agoTrack changes isn't part of any standard, so it's harder to duplicate. Technical superiority won't defeat Word. Office is on every business desktop because of the licensing regime that Microsoft has been very successful at implementing.
- mdda 15y agoFrankly, it's better to own the drafting process yourself : We're happy to show all the black-lined versions, but (due to 'technical difficulties') get our counterparties to send over manual changes which we implement...
- mdda 15y agoFrankly, it's better to own the drafting process yourself : We're happy to show all the black-lined versions, but (due to 'technical difficulties') get our counterparties to send over manual changes which we implement...
- kooshball 15y ago> So there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's advanced functionality? Why do you need any more? Legal itself is a huge field and a lot of the work produced are obviously documents. Even if it's just the legal field that use Track Changes, it seems like it would be a huge win. It's not like Tracking is forced upon anyone. It's an extra feature that stays out of the way unless you want it there. I dont understand why this is even an issue.
- homosaur 15y agoIt's not about disliking Word's advanced features, it's about disliking Word and that most industries have no particular need for most of Word's unique features. So far we have legal, so every other industry can stop using Word tomorrow without a problem? That's quite exciting to me but I doubt it's true.
- mbreese 15y agoLet's not forget that this is the industry that at least until recently was exclusively using WordPerfect...
- elithrar 15y ago> So there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's advanced functionality? Not being facetious, let's name em. In the Engineering/Consulting industry we use it often to collaborate on proposals, reports and other documents. Key clients - many of them utilities or energy companies - also prefer Word documents and use Track Changes. It's very hard to move away from that momentum, partly because you can't use another tool and just export to .doc/.docx due to the format being so arcane. For what it's worth though, Track Changes is what Word does pretty well. I rarely use it outside of work though, preferring something like Byword on my Mac or just TextEdit.
- wvenable 15y agohttp://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html "A lot of software developers are seduced by the old '80/20' rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. "Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release 'lite' word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC."
- dagw 15y agoMy girlfriend is an academic and uses the track changes feature all the time when writing or editing papers and articles. When you add Endnote integration and the fact that most journals outside of the hard math heavy sciences want Word documents, Word is clearly the best choice. Does she NEED Word? Technically not I suppose, but Word is the tool that makes her job the easiest. That being said she still curses Word and Endnote all the time, so there is no doubt room for improvement.
- singingfish 15y agoI am so hanging out to ditch word for academic writing.
- tincholio 15y agoI work on European research projects, often with over 20 partners. When writing deliverables and integrating input from so many people, the track changes feature is an FSM-send. I say this as an otherwise hardcore Emacs and LaTeX guy.
- pnathan 15y agoWhat's wrong with hg + Latex?
- mmc 15y agoNothing - if everyone knows how to use it. Version control is not as commonly used in research & business writing as you might hope.
- disgruntledphd2 15y agoI also work on some European projects and love LaTeX and git, so I'll chime in. LaTeX is much better if everyone uses them. However, most people use Word, and at that point, you may as well too. Anything I write I write in LaTeX and convert to odf, then save as doc, but most people only know word and will not be able to work with anything else. For instance, I once sent my supervisor a beautifully formatted latex paper. She replied and said that she couldn't give any feedback without a word copy of the document. Sigh.
- tincholio 15y agoYou wouldn't believe the amount of technical people who cannot do LaTeX... nevermind DCVS. Also, tracking changes in a text document, with comments and such by the side, _is_ easier than looking at diffs and so on.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- chollida1 15y agoEngineering uses the auto table of contents and appendix generation features pretty heavily.
- tylerritchie 15y agoLooking at several of the other responses to this I found that most of the other individuals named fields that use either track changes or TOC generation. Those don't need Word. The inter-operation with other human beings who know and want to use Word, needs Word. In biology (in government and industry) we use both. And we tend to use Word because that's what everyone else is using. But WordPerfect and LibreOffice generate TOC and figure lists, and track changes just fine. LaTeX and git also accomplish those goals. But the problem is working with other people in different groups, companies, levels of expertise, preference, etc. When track changes is breaking between LibreOffice and Word you just revert to using word to find the changes, and then incorporate them by hand into your LibreOffice document. Or, since you're using Word anyway and it does accomplish your goals, you just switch to Word. Working in any setting aside from a self-contained research unit or the academic world, you just learn Word. In my case I learned Word and I use all of the various variable-esque and markup I can to make generating TOC, figure/table lists and references and adjusting values easier when working with people who just use Word because that's what you write reports in. Even in an academic setting, if your advisers use Word (and prefer Word over dead trees) you're going to be creating Word documents for your thesis and academic papers (the journals mostly don't care because they re-typeset everything anyway) because you need their expertise to make your work awesome. So, what about LaTeX? I like the idea more than the practice. Making basic changes (or what would be basic with CSS, Word, InDesign) to templates is mindbogglingly complicated to beginners. I'm not sure it's even particularly easy to create custom templates and formatting for experienced LaTeX users. However, once you have the Ecology, Washington Department of Fish And Wildlife, USDA, etc. LaTeX template all future publications for those is much faster. If you want to know the actual one true solution to kill Word for academic, industry and government publishing it's this: Modify Lyx (or make something like it using Markdown or reST) that uses sane defaults (I think WYSIWYM with a live preview is probably okay for everyone except the "lost dog" folks), some auto-correction, spelling and grammar checking tools and has the ability to easily and correctly make headings, adjust page headers and footers, footnotes, endnotes, and insert and edit figures, tables (the table formatting tools should be very powerful, ideally also the ability to include data from Excel and also tie into R, SAS and SPSS), images and variables (for things like n, p-value, species names) and integrate it with Evernote, Endnote, Papers, Mendeley and BibTeX (though, supporting BibTeX gets you pretty far). Now, make an extensive repository of formats for publications (like PyPI, rubygems, etc. but for templates from academic journals etc.) Ideally the templating should be powerful enough for experts to create anything they can imagine and simple enough that the Masters student studying the behavior of Little Auks can get her short fact sheet to look how she wants it to for her presentation to the Reykjavik Ornithological Society (using system fonts should not be difficult or require any amount of documentation reading). Now you need to add collaboration tools. Track changes, highlighting, and commenting gets you to 90% of use cases for Word. Add in version control that is easy and makes sense, the ability for multiple people to live edit the same document and good merging tools (for multiple offline changes to the same document by different people) and suddenly your software is more useful than Word. Oh, and it needs to be open-source, because us science-ey folks are increasingly grumpy about closed-source things, and we already have to buy the Microsoft Office suite to deal with documents and data from multiple different sources. It also can't be multiple gigabytes to download because I need to be able to tell my colleagues, "Hey, you should use this, it's easier to make pretty things, and the collaboration tools are more useful than Word's." But even that only gets you the people who are writing for (essentially) print. If you have output formats that create sane, semantically correct and useful HTML (for people writing for online magazines, blogs and static pages) and HTML/CSS for people who want to use it as web publishing system you've got a tool that could slowly start gaining a foothold.
- Alex3917 15y agoAnd for good reason. Trying to edit anything without 'track changes' would be a nightmare. This guy's argument that you can just view the version history with Google Docs is ridiculous, that doesn't even come close to being a feasible replacement.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- guard-of-terra 15y agoA legal document is essentially a program; but: - They don't use variables where they should. - They don't factor out common code in libraries. - They don't use any reasonable kind of diff and patch. All this means they are doing extra work with bad tools not made for their needs. They might not see it, but that's lame.
- mjwalshe 15y agoerm no its a very speclised form of document - I wish programmers who have no experience of how laws are made and parliamentary procedure would stop making broad assumptions like this. Any thing using a parliamentry system to draft laws has a lot of fuzy areas and some non obvious gotchas. I while back i had a whole day being briefed on the new employment laws one of my collegues asked well why did they not draft the wording so its clear exactly when you are allowed to discriminate on age grounds. The General Counsel who was leading the course gave a wry grin and said well there are lots of lawyers in the House of commons so maybe they wanted to create loads of work for there lawyer friends
- icebraining 15y agoI don't know why have you brought up draft laws. Parents said "legal documents," of which only a minuscule number are laws. Most are contracts, licenses, agreements, deeds, etc.
- mjwalshe 15y agoWhich have a law that underpins them - I was talking about the more general case/
- guard-of-terra 15y agoI failed to parse your response, but it doesn't seem to address the points I made. Any program text itself is a "very specialised form of document".
- 15y ago
- mutagen 15y agoTrack Changes is version control and diff rolled into one rotten interface for the rest of the world.
- pagekalisedown 15y agoI would miss a world without Word. Word is how I know whether to apply for a job or not. If you only accept resumes in Word format, you're not the dinosaur I want to work for.
- hub_ 15y ago"Sorry I can't read PDF, do you have MS-Word" True story. Today I sent a link to my CV online, in HTML.
- rrreese 15y agoWhen I arrived in London I sent my CV as a PDf to a number of recruiters. Each one requested that I send a word copy, something that was difficult as I had written it in Latex. I found out later that they want it in word so they can edit it, incorporate the cover letter, their own notes etc. Not a system that instilled me with confidence.
- dredmorbius 15y agoA fair number of recruiters have, or had, resume uptake systems that are/were based on VBA macros and required Word docs. I'm not sure if some remnant of these systems remain, but essentially, yes, they want an editable version of your resume. Hrm. I may need to knock the "Word" format output option off my resume generator.
- disgruntledphd2 15y agomk4ht is your friend here. Its part of tex live, and can handle most formatting. mk4ht oolatex yourcv.tex is really useful. Its not perfect, but its better than writing in word or open/libre office
- democracy 15y agoThat's okay as long as your skills are in demand and you have luxury to pick what you like. Will one refuse to demonstrate her website to an important person if by accident he only has some old version of the browser? There are plenty of people who would submit in whatever format is required to land the job/contract/anything they desparately need and that positive quality is called 'perseverance' :)
- andrewfelix 15y agoCan someone explain to me how this works? http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/hometech/death-to-microsoft-word-20120412-1wta8.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/hometech/death-to-microso... It's the same article. So are both SMH and Slate syndicating from the same source or is Tom Socca employed by both?
- jacques_chester 15y agoThe SMH syndicated from Slate. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and you'll see the attribution.
- andrewfelix 15y agoHa! Pretty easy to miss that one word attribution. Cheers.
- CurtHagenlocher 15y ago"Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files." Wait, what? In any event, he's clearly not the right customer for the product. Neither am I; my pathological hatred of Word has dimmed over the years and settled into a mild perpetual annoyance. An itch, if you will, that you dare not scratch too long or it will likely draw blood. And I got to that point even before I got hired at Microsoft four years ago. But I've also seen times when some of Word's abilities (like the "Track Changes" feature being dissed in the article) are not only useful but essential. Example: a language spec being worked on by several people and actively reviewed by several dozen more. Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-large business who's using it to churn out various types of paperwork -- not for the person who's just trying to write some text.
- CurtHagenlocher 15y agoAlso, no thread about Word would be complete without that mix of grimace and dismissive smirk we reserve for people who paste screen shots into a Word document, then attach it onto an email in order to send them to us.
- politician 15y agoWe should also include Microsoft's obnoxious tendancy to release read-only documentation as mutable docx files instead of portable PDFs or even in its own not-invented-here PDF format, XPS.
- codeka 15y agoScreenshots pasted into Word documents are awesome. Even better is when they're pasted into an Excel spreadsheet!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- lotharbot 15y ago> "Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-large business" I've heard it said that Microsoft's "right" customer is themselves. They're a gigantic company that builds gigantic documents. Many of the esoteric features of Word were developed because somebody in Microsoft wanted to use them.
- politician 15y agotldr-quotes-edition: > <img id="obligatory-clippy-joke" /> > "[MS Word] has become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work. Part of this is Microsoft's more-is-more approach to adding capabilities, and leaving all of them in the "on" position." > "Publishing a two-word sentence as a Web Page, then pasting the source code back into MS Word yields an eight-page document. Egads!" > "Track Changes ... makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor." > "A tool that's lost its purpose makes a great toy."
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- melling 15y agoI think Word is fine. However, we really need to get to that open document standard so you can use whatever app you happen to prefer.
- swashtm 15y agoThe problem with trying to make an 'open document standard' is that everyone thinks they have an 'open document standard', so you end up with 30 'open document standards' that confuse the less technically inclined users and infuriate the more inclined. Personally, until a better (read: equally universal) format comes out, I've got my document library saved as both .txt (unformatted + UTF-8 encoded) and .doc (formatted). Everyone uses both, at least.
- gringomorcego 15y agoI would agree with this article especially after it used the word "till". Till isn't the word you want to be using moron. Till is what a farm uses. Til, as in the shortening of 'until', is what you want to use. How the fuck does shit get published where 'til' is the accepted shortcut for a word that doesn't have an extra til. Till exists in such popularity simply because spellcheckers won't correct it. Til brings up the red underline thingy, and people want to assume it knows what it means. Sadly, most people listen to it. Till isn't what you mean. Til is. Fuck spellcheck, if that thing actually was smart you wouldn't have any headaches. That's the sad thing about technological achievement. Most of the time it occurs because enough people start following the default behavior. Don't get me start on how 'referer' became the default spelling for the HTTP referrer.
- forkandwait 15y agoI think this is the year that LibreOffice actually takes off as a widespread replacement. No offense to any devs that might be reading, but the last few times I used it (or Open Office), it was awful in a vague, this is just sucky, slow, ugly way. 3.4.6, however, is great; I know my office could move over with barely a hiccup (we are technical bureaucrats -- lots of SAS and Excel and GIS). I think it is only if you have some complex workflow dependent on VBA and links and all that crap that you would have a problem, and I think most people tried that garbage in the late nineties and never did it again. Mail merge is the only stupid automated thing that sort of works, and Libre has that.
- jmspring 15y agoI'm not sure how a clone that is nearly as complex (minus VBA) will take off as a "widespread replacement". The clutter in Word permeates many Windows apps (not just those from MSFT -- take a look at WinZip, for example). Most everyday windows users have become used to this and are unlikely to change. This doesn't even count businesses that base their enterprise around MSFT products... With Microsoft's push towards Windows 8, maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite. Until then, people will continue to use what they know.
- read_wharf 15y ago"maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite" Laws never disappear from the books, swords are never beaten into plowshares, and Word never, ever loses a feature, although some of them do get hidden.
- jmspring 15y agoOk, maybe I am dreaming...but...if and when Office shows up for tablets (iOS/etc), maybe that will transition over to Win8/Metro. It is a dream, maybe an impossible dream. I remember Excel 5 being fast and not sucking. Word 2.x wasn't bad either. However, you have a point, Word has been additive over the years.
- forkandwait 15y ago
- ramses 15y agoI was about to retweet this news while honestly adding, "Who still uses Word?" ... then I remembered that less than one year ago, while still working at Xerox Research, Word was the standard and I was the only weirdo forwarding documents in PDF (because I had not authored them in Word). ... so, besides being aware that your microcosm is not representative ... I don't see how can word die (as it should). There are too many people that cannot drop it due to all the required learning to move away (e.g., most people do not even know there are alternatives to Word).
- read_wharf 15y agoI've never worked anywhere that they didn't use Word. I've never worked anywhere that they didn't despise Word. Why won't it die? Why? Why?
- forrestthewoods 15y agoBecause it's vastly better than the alternatives.
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- dredmorbius 15y agoNo. Because no one single alternative is vastly superior to it. Microsoft won the Office wars in the mid 1990s by bundling all the major applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, later Outlook and possibly Visio, I don't recall) in a single package that cost less than buying the alternatives (WordPerfect, AmiWord, Lotus123, Quattro, etc.) individually. WordPerfect (the most popular word processing program at the time) got caught flat-footed with the shift from DOS to Windows 3.1, in part due to illegal monopoly actions as alleged in a still ongoing suit by Novell (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell-microsoft-wordperfect-trial.html.csp http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell-micros...). Effectively, Microsoft poisoned the well: individual competitors couldn't outflank it, were starved for cash, and couldn't collaborate on a single alternative. Sucks to play in a proprietary world when the racetrack owner's got a horse in the race. My own history: I'd previously used a few word processing / text editing tools, including MacWrite, WordPerfect, WordStar, vi, DOS EDIT, EDT, EVE, and AmiPro. I always found Word to be fussy, and during this period started using Linux. I recognized the value in learning a single tool that couldn't be crushed by competition or abandoned by a single vendor, and so returned to vi (as vim) for virtually all my editing, with some fill-ins from Emacs, Lyx, and the odd usage of Abiword (quick letters for postal mail) or OpenOffice/LibreOffice (if I actually have to deal with Microsoft formats). Occasionally Google Docs. And a lot of web forms (most of which go to a spawned vi editor via Vimperator, such as this one). Office97 was the first and last time I really used Microsoft's suite (though I've certainly been exposed to it since), and the less I have to be exposed to it, the better. What I've mostly found is that text editing suits my needs far better than word processing / DTP. And there are very few compatibility issues.
- jmpeax 15y agoI've been happily doing my postgrad in compsci, using the excellent LaTeX for all my papers and thesis. I got a job in medical research... holy shit... all the publishers require Word documents. Moving from LaTeX to Word is like moving from Python to Fortran on punch cards.
- kooshball 15y agoI agree with you, LaTeX is awesome for what it is commonly used for. No question there. However the learning curve is much higher than that of Word. So I think complexity and readability wise to an average worker, LaTeX to Word is more like Fortran to English.
- dredmorbius 15y agolatex2rtf FTW. It's not word, but it may be acceptably close.
- chimeracoder 15y agoHonestly, I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about Word as a program. I just wish .odf would replace the open-in-name-only .docx/.xlsx/etc formats in public use. If that were the case, then what do I care if people are using a different program to open them?
- kooshball 15y agoThis whole article is basically about using the wrong tool for the job which the author mentions directly: > Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Well yea. I dont think anyone will argue with that. > Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my document was carrying. Here's a snippet: The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted? >Word's idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor. First of all, this is incorrect. In the latest version of Word, if you have files stored at a shared location you can collaborate by both editing the file directly like in Google Docs. Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome. It does exactly what it's meant to do. Any changes you make while tracking is the displayed. I dont understand what "world most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor" has anything to do with the tool, rather than the editor himself. > When I was writing a book, which required lots of alone time with a giant file—and lots of word-counting, which Microsoft is good at—I stuck with Word. Good for you.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago"Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?" No, but it's a huge surprise to users that copying and pasting from Word into a completely different program (say, a rich text editor in a web browser) brings all that crap along. Unless it's pasting into another Word window, it should paste the plain text. There is absolutely no situation where pasting Word's pseudo-HTML into a non-Microsoft program is the right thing to do. As you mention, Word's formatting is hideously complex, so why even bother? It isn't going to work. Just paste the text.
- kooshball 15y agoFrom what I understand, the copy command will put some content into clipboard, then the paste command can be programmed to read that content and print or convert it accordingly. For example, if I copy some content with formatting from Word and paste it into Google Docs it will try to preserve the format. Is that expected behavior? I dont know, but that's how it's designed and I think that makes a lot of sense. If I have a table in Word why shouldn't I be able to copy that to Google Docs? I dont know enough about the clipboard programming to know if the program that calls copy can determine what comes out based on the paste program. Also, I think the garbage formatting lines in that article will never be shown to the user. That will only be shown if you try to look at the formatting directly or if you're reading the HTML.
- rmason 15y agoAm I the only one who finds it ironic that Bill Gates funded Slate and now it comes back to bite him? Sure it's all true what he says about Word, but the delicious irony is that his very own creation is slinging the arrows.
- Shank 15y agoBill Gates left Microsoft prior to move on to bigger and better things. If it was his influence that created the design that everyone despised in 2007, which I'll argue that it wasn't, they'd have changed by now. Slate would be an example of something that Bill Gates helped create because of the value it'd bring to the world - not because of anything from an economic standpoint.
- kijin 15y agoWord is not a program for editing text. If you want to edit text and only text, there are a hundred different tools that allow you to do that much more efficiently. Then you have Markdown et al. for formatting your text. What word actually is, for most people who don't need its advanced features, is an amateur desktop publishing tool. Word is for making fliers that you stick to the light pole. Word is for printing out notices that you stick to the coffee maker. Word is for writing pretty invitations for your 7 year old's birthday party. The same is true of virtually every "word processor" out there, including LibreOffice Writer. The switch from text editor to desktop publishing tool took place right around the time they started displaying page outlines in wonderful WYSIWYG. You don't need WYSIWYG if all you care about is the content, right? But everyone has an inner artist, even though only a few are actually any good. It's amazing how much people (including myself) care about how their text appears on a piece of paper or a WYSIWYG editor. Sometimes, this distracts from the content. But as long as the content isn't being completely neglected, I think we should forgive people for wanting to control the font in which their writings appear, or for wanting their quotes to look "smart", or for spending 20 minutes tweaking the line spacing of their resume. It's human nature to mix a sense of aesthetics with everything. Word caters to that desire. In this respect, a PDF file is only marginally better from the point of view of the unfortunate recipient, and sometimes even worse. So the problem isn't Word, it's people who abuse Word while performing tasks to which it is not best suited. For example, when you're sending a story to an editor, it's obvious that the editor only cares about the ASCII content and not your choice of fonts and margins.
- wvenable 15y agoTools like PageMaker, InDesign or MS Publisher are tools for fliers, notices, and invitations. Word is for documents. Essays, contracts, NDAs, memos. Documents with lots of text but still meant to be formatted for printing. I think the author's best point isn't so much that it's wrong tool for the job bur rather the job that Word is for is much less relevant now. Just like typewriters were obsolete when word processors arrived; word processors are themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't printed.
- kijin 15y ago
- DavidThi808 15y agoWord can write well to blogs (most of the time). But you need to create a new "blog" instead of a new "document." Word 2007 & 2010 both do this very well.
- jwallaceparker 15y agoThis article is silly. If you want to write only text, use a text editor. If you want a publishing tool, use Word or Pages or whatever.
- Turing_Machine 15y agoYou are confusing what users should do with what they actually do.
- ghshephard 15y agoI've been using MS word for at least 15 years - but 99% of the time when crafting documents, I do not use MS-Word. Much of the time I simply use my web browser (as I am now.) A lot of the time I use mail.app. For the 3-5 pages of notes, I switch to textedit - which I love, and is awesome but does have a bad habit of steadily increasing the number of open documents I have (Quitting doesn't close them - next time you restart they all come back - I understand why, but it doesn't change the fact that I have to, about once a week, manually do some garbage-collection to keep the number of open docs down to a reasonable number) But - when I'm putting together a 50-100 page technical specification, in which I'm embedding PDFs, figures, captions, cleaver headers/footers, carefully watermarked "DRAFT", Auto-updating table of contents, section breaks for multi-column sections, nicely crafted tables, and, most important of all for me - the ability to send this 75 page document to six reviewers, and get their comments nicely organized in electronic accept/reject mode - I am happy that MS Word is available during that 1% of my workflow. I agree with the author for the other 99% though. Text, or one of its markdown variants is a helluva lot more 2012 friendly.
- farnsworth 15y ago> next time you restart they all come back I assume you're talking about how Lion apps reopen the last open docs by default - you can disable this (for all OS X apps) in System Preferences > General > Restore windows when quitting/reopening apps
- frou_dh 15y agoSome apps annoyingly don't seem to respect that setting. For example TextEdit and Xcode.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- leeoniya 15y agoi'm switching as many clients as possible away from Word to google docs where it is possible and makes sense. just yesterday i had a client ask me for some software to write and submit docs on a Mac notebook for her online classes. it took 3 minutes to set her up with gmail and google docs and show her how to share. the interface is clean, no ribbon shit, nothing extra. it's cloud wordpad++. it's inherently cross-platform and free. there is a place for word, but that place is small in today's world, and even smaller for the asking price. the versioned editing is useful. but i'm fairly confident there is an automatically git-backed revision/collab cloud editor out there...the name escapes me.
- mbylstra 15y agoeasy way to clean up word html (ckeditor) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831069 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831069
- Uchikoma 15y ago"Death to Allegra Geller!"
- jmodp 15y agoThe tools within Word that help with the task of document/story creation are underapreciated. Outline view, spell checking, comments, and synonym/dictionary are very useful for my kids and myself. Even the autocorrect feature that the author decries can be quite useful if you customize it. My special needs son uses a program with Word called WordQ. The combination of the features above plus WordQ have made an enormous difference in his abiity to express himself through writing. Sure, he won't be writing a Web site with Word but he is writing his own stories.
- zachrose 15y agoThe raw contents of an empty Microsoft Word document, pasted into an empty Microsoft word document. 63.6 KB / 124 pages http://document1.docx.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ http://document1.docx.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
- pastaking 15y agoI consider Word to be one of the greatest programs on Windows. It has always did well what it was meant to do - a noob friendly professional publishing tool. Heck, I use it on my Mac as well. A major flaw mentioned in this article (to edit web documents in word) is like editing vector graphics in Photoshop - it wasn't built for that.
- tylermenezes 15y agoWait, you mean your document layout program isn't good at generating web pages?! I don't understand how people can write articles like this. I remember reading something similar a few years back where someone criticized Wordpress because, "it is designed as a blogging platform from the ground up, it doesn’t lend itself to people who want to build a website without a blog." When I wrote an article on it at the time, I compared this line of thinking to "because this car was build to drive on the road, it doesn't lend itself well to serving as a boat". Yes, you could use a boat as a car, and yes there are better boats than a car, but that doesn't mean it's a valid point against cars.
- PakG1 15y agoThe thing is, for a lot of non-technical people, it IS easier, just because they know how to use it. My friend was asked to make a website with CMS capabilities for his church. They were putting up Drupal or Joomla or something like that, demoing all the features, saying "isn't this so cool and great?" The church committee stared at them blankly and asked, "Can we have something simple like write something up in MS Word?" Even with WYSIWYG features, they didn't get it at all, but they did get MS Word. My friend tried to protest saying, "But actually, you don't want MS Word. This is so much better for technical reasons, and you can format text exactly the same, blahblahblah." The fear that non-technical people have to try to use a brand new system they've never seen before is not something with which I'd ever be able to empathize. But I am able to sympathize, especially after the day I tried to teach my dad how to use gmail to attach photos (using gmail's drag and drop feature no less!). It was so frustrating to see he didn't get drag and drop, but he finally did manage to click some buttons, after a LOT of hesitation. Non-technical users don't care that Word adds on all that garbage. They don't even notice. They do care that their experience is that Word just works. And they're afraid of changing. I know that none of this really matters. More and more people seem to be getting more technically savvy every day. New technologies will leave old technologies behind, whether late adopters like it or not. Heck, even my dad can use gmail now. But part of me feels mean and guilty for making these non-technical people suffer through the transition. Not that I have any solution for that issue.
- 15y ago
- devs1010 15y agoI tried ditching word format for my resume briefly, however I immediately started receiving replies to please forward a word copy of my resume, so I gave up. I'm afraid non tech people (recruiters) are still living in the past
- dredmorbius 15y agoFrom resume Makefile: resume.doc : resume.html gnuhtml2latex -s resume.html > resume.tex latex2rtf resume.tex mv resume.rtf resume.doc Also, FWIW: resume.ps : resume.html resume.tidy html2ps -Tn resume.html > resume.ps.tmp mv resume.ps.tmp resume.ps resume.pdf : resume.ps ps2pdf resume.ps resume.pdf.tmp mv resume.pdf.tmp resume.pdf
- devs1010 15y agowhat it comes down to though is a lot won't accept anything but word, everyone seems to accept word format, so until people start refusing my resume in word format I don't see a reason to put any effort into a different format. Its probably just me being lazy though
- dredmorbius 15y agoWhat you may be missing here: I've got a build system for my resume. It outputs not only various formats (HTML, text, PDF, Word), but multiple versions (short abstract, stripped of detail and street address for Web, full-detailed general resume, specifically tailored for a given job prospect if I'm interested). Revision controlled. Automatically updated. Changes to global sections reflected in all versions and output formats.
- devs1010 15y agoIts a cool concept, but do you actually send the resume in all these formats when you apply? I find that some of the non-tech people seem to get confused if you send them more than 1 format so I just keep it simple, I've also found they will but absolutely 0 effort into retrieving a resume, so even if I send them a url where I have it downloadable in a bunch of formats they won't go to the url and instead will just demand that I send it to them via email
- DaveMebs 15y agoThe author clearly has not spent much time using Word lately, and reading this I was constantly struck by the blatant inaccuracies throughout this piece. Some of his biggest complaints just don't align with modern versions of the software he is criticizing: 1) He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple releases. 2) He complains about the XML markup when you want to publish something to the Web through copy-paste. Has the author ever saved a Word document prior to publishing before? There are a variety of choices when saving a file, including the options to save as Plain Text (which removes all formatting), or even as a web page. No idea if the save as web page feature works well for complex documents, but to overlook this when complaining about publishing a Word doc as a web page demonstrates woeful ignorance of the product being criticized. This is especially ridiculous considering he highlights 3rd party programs that convert .docx into .txt. Why not mention that Word does this out of the box? 3) "The fundamental unit of Word is the single, proprietary file, anchored to one computer. Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files." As far as I can tell, the author pulled this one out of his ass. The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack released by MSFT allowing earlier versions of Word to open .docx files. The 3rd result is the Wikipedia page for "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format that all Office documents are saved in. (The 1st result is a free online 3rd party .docx to .doc conversion service.) And these were just the things that immediately jumped out at me.... There are plenty of valid criticisms of Word and ways in which the software can be improved (apparently feature discovery...), but by not understanding how to use even the most basic features such as "Save to Plain Text," I have difficulty putting much stock in this individuals personal gripes. (Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but not within the Office division. The above is my own personal opinion, etc., etc.)
- RandallBrown 15y agoThe one thing that he got completely right though, is that Word is for putting text to paper. Most people's writing never sees paper anymore, and I think that's why the tool isn't working for them. As far as saving to plain text and copying plain text, those are two different things. Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. I've never had that happen to me though, so maybe he's doing something wrong. I find Word very frustrating to use. I don't feel like I'm using it, I feel like I'm tricking it and at any moment my text will simply change fonts or tab depth or something weird.
- jstalin 15y agoCtl-A, Ctl-C, open notepad, Ctl-V, Ctl-A, Ctl-C How you have all your text sans any Word formatting. Horribly difficult, I know. This article's author is just annoyingly ignorant.
- cabirum 15y agoCtrl + Shift + C Paste as text (in chrome at least)
- bashzor 15y agoGreat to read how someone who needs Wordpad instead of Word (try it on Windows: open Start, type "write" without "", press enter) actually tries to bash Word on being too good. I agree that features might have an easier way to get turned off, but aside for that I think Word isn't that bad. He also complains about the file format. I agree as well that this could be done better, but they aren't doing a real bad job. In any case, _he_ certainly has no idea _why_ it's done the way it's done and is in no position to criticise it.
- ckpwong 15y agoIf you think the ungodly hidden XML embedded in text copied from Word is its most hideous crime, try working with living, breathing 500-page "documents" (specifications, test plans, policies, manuals, procedures, what-have-you) which are simultaneously edited by multiple people all the time. Oh, and the document needs to be conformed to some "company standard formatting" which are meant to look good on paper but nobody really prints the whole thing out in real life. THAT is probably a use case which happens more often in corporate America than the author's more specialized world of online publishing. I don't think Word is the ideal tool for this case neither (I hear cursing directed at Word all the time), but it is the de facto standard. As much as I want believe LaTeX is better suited for this task, nobody will use it. (Disclaimer: I last used LaTeX 12 years ago.)
- tyrmored 15y agoI don't hate Microsoft Word, but that's probably because I stopped thinking of it as an application for composing or editing text more than ten years ago. Instead I wrote in something like Notepad, and after having converted to the UNIX-like world, I now write pretty much everything in Vim. Word and its imitations, therefore, simply became a go-to typesetter and printer driver for simple tasks that didn't require LaTeX's precision, and a read-only viewer for documents people emailed to me.