6 ms·

The 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 o

The 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 14y ago
The 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.
- dylan62 14y ago
  > Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another > application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - tjoff 14y ago
    Just as much a feature. Right click ->paste-as-plain-text is available in chrome, notepad++, Word (don't know if it is available during a right click though) and many many others.
    - baq 14y ago
      word 2010 (actually, all of office 2010) is better than right-click: you paste normally, tap ctrl and then t.
- ma2rten 14y ago
  Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. I always past and then again copy text into the address bar of my browser or notepad for longer text. Not ideal, but it works.
  - maguay 14y ago
    I hit CMD+space, CMD+V, CMD+A, then CMD+X all the time to use OS X' Spotlight text field to stip formatting from text I've copied from the web and other applications. It's far from an elegant solution, but it does work!
    - npongratz 14y ago
      For OS X, you might also consider Shift+Option+CMD+V, which pastes using the formatting of the target document. I have found this does not work for all target applications, however. (PowerPoint is one. Lame.) If you find you always desire to paste without formatting, you can remap CMD+V in OS X: * Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts * Click the + under the right-hand list to add a shortcut * Application: All; Menu Title: Paste and Match Style; Keyboard Shortcut: type CMD+V Ask MetaFilter's discussion of above: http://ask.metafilter.com/187733/OSX-How-to-copy-plaintext-always-everywhere-without-exception http://ask.metafilter.com/187733/OSX-How-to-copy-plaintext-a...
kzrdude 14y ago
> "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format uh that's the worst precedent for an "open" file format to ever be published as a standard, and this has been disseminated lots of times already. OOXML is a sham standard.
- dspillett 14y ago
  Not only that, but last I heard MS Office does not currently implement the standard entirely correctly...
- sp332 14y ago
  I know there are problems with it, but at least OOo and Google Docs etc. can usually interpret my documents OK. That's not exactly a glowing review but it's enough for me and most people to get work done.
  - streptomycin 14y ago
    They can interpret the old .doc ones too, often better.
    - Splines 14y ago
      I wish - I've had attachments that I've tried to open in Google Docs that appear mangled on my iPhone (which is not fun when you don't have a PC anywhere nearby). It's unfortunate that the case where you wouldn't really need to attach a Word document and should just paste in the contents into email (just some plain text) is the case where Google Docs works just fine, and the case where you really need a Word document (complex table layout & floating pictures) is the case where Google Docs just doesn't work that well.
      - streptomycin 14y ago
        I didn't say it's perfect. Neither .doc or .docx are read perfectly by any software, Word included.
awakeasleep 14y ago
I understand what you're saying and in some ways your right, but after spending a year supporting a 250 person editorial department in a web company that publishes a lot of copy, the author is "more right" Word, with all it's features, benefits, and menus does not cater to the world of digital text swapping and collaboration. Compared to a plain text editor, the print document focus in Word means that users need to make several annoying modifications to every document they work with, and if you're publishing stuff online you'll work with many documents. And to top it all, a Microsoft Office application will be by far the slowest app on an Apple computer, regardless of the specs of the machine. (it'll start faster than photoshop, but slower in terms of responsiveness.) To understand this perspective, you have to understand the program the author compares Word to, TextEdit, is the notepad.exe of the Apple world.
- fluidcruft 14y ago
  Word defaults to a print document focus, but it also has others and they are easy to switch between. There are five prominent views: "Print Layout", "Full Screen Reading", "Web Layout", "Outline" and "Draft". It sounds like you want the "Web Layout" (or possibly "Draft" view).
  - zaphar 14y ago
    Keep in mind that the author is also talking as a consumer of word documents that someone else wrote. I would wager that he knows about these various options but that doesn't mean that the people whose documents he is consuming know about them. His rant is partly centered around the fact that word's default settings are poorly chosen for someone in the digital publishing world.
toyg 14y ago
I agree with the Clippy thing, but... I do believe that, whenever somebody responds to software criticism with "he's doing it wrong!", it means the software failed to interface with its human masters in a good way. I thought this was the main lesson "Saint Steve" taught us: the software should be designed to minimize the incidence of "user wrongness", while still allowing for high productivity. Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s! Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.
- barkingllama 14y ago
  "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!" Have you used Office 2010? There are multiple options to pasting: Keep source formatting, merge formatting, and keep text only. The options in Excel are even greater.
  - crazygringo 14y ago
    The issue isn't pasting into Word, it's copying from Word. And web browsers, for example, don't generally have a "Paste as Plain Text" option inside of text fields.
  - toyg 14y ago
    As crazygringo said, the problem is copying from Office into textboxes. Any developer who's ever worked on a web-based CMS will tell you how painful it is to have to deal with people pasting walls of text from Word. (And btw, I do use Office 2010 every day of my cursed life...)
crazygringo 14y ago
> He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple releases. Clippy is still very symbolic of Microsoft's overall UI approach, "helping you help yourself", and very appropriate here, since it continues to pervade the new ribbon, wizards, etc. > 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? He's not talking about saving, he's talking about copy-paste. This has been a huge headache for me as well when dealing with web-based CMS's -- 90% of our editors' bugs came from pasting simple text into our CMS. No matter how much we taught them to paste into Notepad first, then re-copy and re-paste into the CMS, they never always remembered. I HATE Word for this. > The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack... That's the whole point. It's kind of a huge pain for users to keep track of compatibility packs and whatnot. It's as annoying as it would be if there were multiple PDF formats.
jamieb 14y ago
On the other hand, here's an article [1] I wrote today, about MS Word 2010. I managed to send out some resumes that look fine, but break when printed. It's no longer a WYSIWYG editor apparently. I suppose its a testament to the faith I had in Word that I didn't try printing it before I sent it out to employers. Others may view it as a lack of testing on my part, which is somewhat embarrassing for a programmer. [1] http://jamiebriant.tumblr.com/post/20967362687/1-what-ms-word-2010-displays-when-editing-my http://jamiebriant.tumblr.com/post/20967362687/1-what-ms-wor...
- toyg 14y ago
  It's a testament to your faith that you didn't send out the resume in PDF. You don't know which fonts they have, which default template or crazy macro they have, or any of the other umpteen ways Word can break your carefully-crafted layout when opening the file on a different pc...
  - jamieb 14y ago
    Its all Arial for that very reason. And I thought PDFs would work. When I first started this process I'd send a link to linkedin but got push-back. So then I tried PDF. Push-back on that too. "Have you got it in Word?"

RandallBrown 14y ago

The 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.

dylan62 14y ago
> Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another > application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tjoff 14y ago
  Just as much a feature. Right click ->paste-as-plain-text is available in chrome, notepad++, Word (don't know if it is available during a right click though) and many many others.
  - baq 14y ago
    word 2010 (actually, all of office 2010) is better than right-click: you paste normally, tap ctrl and then t.
ma2rten 14y ago
Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. I always past and then again copy text into the address bar of my browser or notepad for longer text. Not ideal, but it works.
- maguay 14y ago
  I hit CMD+space, CMD+V, CMD+A, then CMD+X all the time to use OS X' Spotlight text field to stip formatting from text I've copied from the web and other applications. It's far from an elegant solution, but it does work!
  - npongratz 14y ago
    For OS X, you might also consider Shift+Option+CMD+V, which pastes using the formatting of the target document. I have found this does not work for all target applications, however. (PowerPoint is one. Lame.) If you find you always desire to paste without formatting, you can remap CMD+V in OS X: * Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts * Click the + under the right-hand list to add a shortcut * Application: All; Menu Title: Paste and Match Style; Keyboard Shortcut: type CMD+V Ask MetaFilter's discussion of above: http://ask.metafilter.com/187733/OSX-How-to-copy-plaintext-always-everywhere-without-exception http://ask.metafilter.com/187733/OSX-How-to-copy-plaintext-a...

kzrdude 14y ago

> "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format uh that's the worst precedent for an "open" file format to ever be published as a standard, and this has been disseminated lots of times already. OOXML is a sham standard.

dspillett 14y ago
Not only that, but last I heard MS Office does not currently implement the standard entirely correctly...
sp332 14y ago
I know there are problems with it, but at least OOo and Google Docs etc. can usually interpret my documents OK. That's not exactly a glowing review but it's enough for me and most people to get work done.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  They can interpret the old .doc ones too, often better.
  - Splines 14y ago
    I wish - I've had attachments that I've tried to open in Google Docs that appear mangled on my iPhone (which is not fun when you don't have a PC anywhere nearby). It's unfortunate that the case where you wouldn't really need to attach a Word document and should just paste in the contents into email (just some plain text) is the case where Google Docs works just fine, and the case where you really need a Word document (complex table layout & floating pictures) is the case where Google Docs just doesn't work that well.
    - streptomycin 14y ago
      I didn't say it's perfect. Neither .doc or .docx are read perfectly by any software, Word included.

awakeasleep 14y ago

I understand what you're saying and in some ways your right, but after spending a year supporting a 250 person editorial department in a web company that publishes a lot of copy, the author is "more right" Word, with all it's features, benefits, and menus does not cater to the world of digital text swapping and collaboration. Compared to a plain text editor, the print document focus in Word means that users need to make several annoying modifications to every document they work with, and if you're publishing stuff online you'll work with many documents. And to top it all, a Microsoft Office application will be by far the slowest app on an Apple computer, regardless of the specs of the machine. (it'll start faster than photoshop, but slower in terms of responsiveness.) To understand this perspective, you have to understand the program the author compares Word to, TextEdit, is the notepad.exe of the Apple world.

fluidcruft 14y ago
Word defaults to a print document focus, but it also has others and they are easy to switch between. There are five prominent views: "Print Layout", "Full Screen Reading", "Web Layout", "Outline" and "Draft". It sounds like you want the "Web Layout" (or possibly "Draft" view).
- zaphar 14y ago
  Keep in mind that the author is also talking as a consumer of word documents that someone else wrote. I would wager that he knows about these various options but that doesn't mean that the people whose documents he is consuming know about them. His rant is partly centered around the fact that word's default settings are poorly chosen for someone in the digital publishing world.

toyg 14y ago

I agree with the Clippy thing, but... I do believe that, whenever somebody responds to software criticism with "he's doing it wrong!", it means the software failed to interface with its human masters in a good way. I thought this was the main lesson "Saint Steve" taught us: the software should be designed to minimize the incidence of "user wrongness", while still allowing for high productivity. Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s! Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.

barkingllama 14y ago
"right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!" Have you used Office 2010? There are multiple options to pasting: Keep source formatting, merge formatting, and keep text only. The options in Excel are even greater.
- crazygringo 14y ago
  The issue isn't pasting into Word, it's copying from Word. And web browsers, for example, don't generally have a "Paste as Plain Text" option inside of text fields.
- toyg 14y ago
  As crazygringo said, the problem is copying from Office into textboxes. Any developer who's ever worked on a web-based CMS will tell you how painful it is to have to deal with people pasting walls of text from Word. (And btw, I do use Office 2010 every day of my cursed life...)

crazygringo 14y ago

> He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple releases. Clippy is still very symbolic of Microsoft's overall UI approach, "helping you help yourself", and very appropriate here, since it continues to pervade the new ribbon, wizards, etc. > 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? He's not talking about saving, he's talking about copy-paste. This has been a huge headache for me as well when dealing with web-based CMS's -- 90% of our editors' bugs came from pasting simple text into our CMS. No matter how much we taught them to paste into Notepad first, then re-copy and re-paste into the CMS, they never always remembered. I HATE Word for this. > The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack... That's the whole point. It's kind of a huge pain for users to keep track of compatibility packs and whatnot. It's as annoying as it would be if there were multiple PDF formats.

jamieb 14y ago

On the other hand, here's an article [1] I wrote today, about MS Word 2010. I managed to send out some resumes that look fine, but break when printed. It's no longer a WYSIWYG editor apparently. I suppose its a testament to the faith I had in Word that I didn't try printing it before I sent it out to employers. Others may view it as a lack of testing on my part, which is somewhat embarrassing for a programmer. [1] http://jamiebriant.tumblr.com/post/20967362687/1-what-ms-word-2010-displays-when-editing-my http://jamiebriant.tumblr.com/post/20967362687/1-what-ms-wor...

toyg 14y ago
It's a testament to your faith that you didn't send out the resume in PDF. You don't know which fonts they have, which default template or crazy macro they have, or any of the other umpteen ways Word can break your carefully-crafted layout when opening the file on a different pc...
- jamieb 14y ago
  Its all Arial for that very reason. And I thought PDFs would work. When I first started this process I'd send a link to linkedin but got push-back. So then I tried PDF. Push-back on that too. "Have you got it in Word?"