23 ms·

Why Microsoft Word must die

413 points by r721 13y ago

dkuebric 13y ago
Monopoly or not, it's the only wsywyg text editor I've ever found truly usable. I now prefer Google docs for convenience but it's not quite there yet for composition/edit experience. Hoping for more good alternatives, if anyone has suggestions.
- Ecio78 13y ago
  I'm not sure it is still a problem nowadays but until some months ago if you used the zoom function of the browser Google docs had very bad problems rendering and managing your input.
- ghaff 13y ago
  It depends on what you need. I just use a text editor for a lot of purposes. For writing a long complex document, I really like Scrivener on the Mac--but that's mostly for creating content prior to entering into a formatting/publishing phase. For creating a typical 1-10 page formatted document, Word is fine. But show is Libre Office for the most part.
- telephonetemp 13y ago
  LyX isn't WYSIWYG but rather WYSIWYM (the "M" stands for "mean"), but I found it the most usable visual editor for word processing. Edit: Why the downvote?
  - emiliobumachar 13y ago
    The concept of WYSIWYM, which you casually tossed around, is really hard to grasp at a glance, which is mildly frustrating. (I did not downvote nor think there's reason enough for it. Just speculating) I took a look at the LyX web page, and it really didn't shed much light on the issue. "writing based on the structure of your document" added zero information to me. The screenshots look like a weird middle ground between WYSIWYG and TeX.
  - alok-g 13y ago
    My key issue with Lyx has been that the document interface is not in fully human format. References and tags show up as fields visible to the user. To create a cross-reference, user must insert tags at the target location first (Microsoft Word keeps track of headings, captions, etc. by itself for cross-referencing). Also, hyperlinks are not clickable (the last time I checked). Edit: I did not downvote, and cannot explain why you got them.
- e12e 13y ago
  Have you tried abiword (recently)?
nonchalance 13y ago
The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
  - comicjk 13y ago
    $100K is one developer-year... I would expect it to cost at least a hundred times that.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      In the US. You can find developers, good developers, for cheaper than that outside of major metro areas in the US, Europe, etc.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        Little factors of 2-3x are not the issue here. It's the ten years with a thousand developers that really drive the cost.
  - nonchalance 13y ago
    LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market. And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword): MS-XLS, MS-CFB, MS-ODRAW, MS-ODRAWXML, MS-OGRAPH, MS-OFFCRYPTO, MS-RMPR, MS-OVBA, MS-OSHARED, MS-CTXLS, ECMA-376, MS-OLEDS, MS-OLEPS, MS-DTYP, MS-XLSB, MS-OFORMS, MS-VBAL, MS-OAUT, MS-DCOM, MS-XLSX But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list): https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx (go, xlsx read) https://poi.apache.org/ https://poi.apache.org/ (java) https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx (javascript, xlsx read) https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls (javascript, xls read) https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ (php) http://www.python-excel.org/ http://www.python-excel.org/ (python, based on openoffice ) https://github.com/randym/axlsx https://github.com/randym/axlsx (ruby, xlsx write) https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table (ruby, xls/xlsx read)
zerovox 13y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy, happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication. I do feel that this is one of those cases where you should be able to write in the way you feel best for you, and if the publisher insist on having the final document in a word format, it should be straightforward to convert your chosen representation to theirs. It's hard to say without knowing precisely how the publisher expects the file to be formatted, but if it's fairly straightforward, there are libraries that will write to doc files for you, or there are open formats that MS Word already knows how to convert into .doc files that you could target instead.
- objclxt 13y ago
  Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc without any problems. It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
  - cstross 13y ago
    Publisher's workflow now insists on copy editors using Word with change tracking to mark up submitted manuscripts. The author then gets a copy of the marked-up MS to check. Which means having to use at least a tool compatible with MS change tracking on .doc files. So I'm blissfully Word-free until I hit "compile" in Scrivener ... but after the output file (RTF) goes to the publisher it comes back to me as a Word document with tracked changes and I have to dive into the turbid depths once more.
    - ghaff 13y ago
      And, honestly, for my last book I did pretty much the same thing even though I wasn't using an actual publisher. I did however have to send my ms to a copy editor and I also--at some point--had to get into some semblance of layout (for which I used Pages; my needs were pretty simple).
SusanLTomlin 13y ago
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telephonetemp 13y ago
Government forms served as Word documents with complex table-based formatting and "fields" made out of underscores are truly the worst. They are sadly ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe, much like mathematics typeset using Word and MathType.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  They seem like a step up from paper to me. You can still convert them to paper, do not need to drive to the DMV to get them, and have the option of filling them in with the keyboard if your handwriting is terrible (like me). Are they a dream borne from an angel? No. Are they better? I think so.
- unsignedint 13y ago
  I can't go into so much detail about it, but some companies I had to deal with had a form that was MS Word. ("More than 50 pages of check list" which used one of those fields, in which I had to check mark each one of them.) They had MS Word and PDF version of it, which PDF version wasn't even fillable form. Somehow those forms are a real pain to work with. One time, I just printed out the entire thing out of the PDF and just hand-checked them, and another time, I've used Preview app on Mac to check those by annotation. Either way, they were very annoying...
- scholia 13y ago
  Which is the fault of the users, not the applications. Microsoft Office offers much better ways to do that sort of thing.
anderslindgaard 13y ago
try libreoffice.
oinksoft 13y ago
Right now the word processor choices are Word or open-source Word clone, so I don't see the point for the end user. I use Libre/NeoOffice, but it's no easier to use than Word. I'd like to see a word processor more like old ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.
- claudius 13y ago
  Or you could just use LaTeX with the text editor of your choice. Yes, you can write letters in LaTeX, yes, that is easy and yes, it takes me roughly one minute to get a perfectly-formatted simple letter, which is roughly equivalent to the time it took Word to start the last time I tried it (~2008?)
  - pseingatl 13y ago
    If you're going to work in LaTex you might want to use Lyx. Otherwise, working in a LaTex compiler is full of problems. Texshop is forgiving, but where is the Zoom view feature? Other compilers simply halt without letting you know why. As a word processor, Lyx is not bad at all. Exporting from Word to LaTex is not easy.
    - claudius 13y ago
      If you’re new to LaTeX, I presume that Lyx might be a good start, but personally I prefer AUCTex with standard Emacs – the zoom feature being in my PDF viewer (evince-gtk for simplicity).
- pseingatl 13y ago
  Wordperfect? Depends on what you're trying to do. Writeroom/Darkroom and clones. Pages. Scrivener. Final Draft. Celtx. Write (myownapp) etc. (no affiliation with any of these)
tuananh 13y ago
I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document format.
- tonyedgecombe 13y ago
  .docx is an open format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
  - cstross 13y ago
    It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - serge2k 13y ago
      Can you implement it freely? Will microsoft sue you into oblivion if you attempt to use it? "It's hard" doesn't mean it isn't open. It may well mean that it is a crappy format.
      - rbanffy 13y ago
        Parts of it say "do as Word 6 does".
    - triton 13y ago
      That's actually a load or horse shit (excuse my French). I've worked with both ODF and OOXML extensively as we write document templating software and I'll pick OOXML over ODF any say. It's less quirky, there are decent COTS tools to handle it and the output rendering is consistent regardless of which tool you pick to do the rendering. It's also better documented and way more intuitive. I really don't know where you are getting these facts from other than the usual spiel that Microsoft does only evil. The standards are open, published and free to implement (look for Microsoft open specifications). The documentation is way better than anything else out there. So LibreOffice obviously reimplemented lotus 123, wordperfect and wordstar did they as well?
willvarfar 13y ago
My experience with libreoffice scripting was painful: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/making-the-history-of-worlds-religions-map http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...
- icu 13y ago
  I agree that trying to force open source alternatives on your workflow after using Microsoft Office for a long time can be difficult. I tried to switch from Microsoft Office to the other open source alternatives and while I did like Open Office, I found I couldn't use it beyond 'average' tasks. As soon as I needed advanced analysis I had to go back to Excel. I find that switching between R and Excel 2013 works well for me. Also I feel that Microsoft has done a good job with Office 2013 and I like what they've done with PowerPoint animations on the ribbon. Frankly though Office is expensive so if you need the features not available in open source alternatives you've just got to pay.
michaelpinto 13y ago
I didn't really appreciated MS Word until I started using Apple Pages: Pages has no draft mode! Suddenly clunky Word seemed to have a better interface. The problem is that over the years Word has become a poster child for feature creep, but that said for each feature that you detest there is someone else who is fan.
riffraff 13y ago
> But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. Is this actually true? I accidentally checked just a few days ago, and amazon's self publishing platform allows using a simple html file. Also I clearly remember that D. Hofstadter's books were typeset with latex, and at least in my country they are published by one of the biggest publishing companies. So, maybe the stranglehold isn't so tight?
- makomk 13y ago
  I think at least some non-fiction authors have to supply a "camera-ready" manuscript, which is basically typeset and laid out by them and not the publishing house and so doesn't have to go through the Word-based workflow fiction publishers like Stross' use.
rtfeldman 13y ago
I came to similar conclusions but didn't like Scrivener, so I scratched my own itch instead. The result is http://dreamwriterapp.com http://dreamwriterapp.com - it only works in Chrome, but it can handle 100,000+ word novels without performance tanking like it does in Google Docs.
- alextingle 13y ago
  I get nothing but a spinning icon.
  - macmac 13y ago
    Same here.
mikro2nd 13y ago
Long have I said, " Word processors are to words as food processors are to food," The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else. That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that refuses to swear!
- teleclimber 13y ago
  > The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. I completely agree. Software developers and even physical product developers have (or attempt to have) development workflows that separate the content creation from the style. There is a good reason for that: it is far easier to focus on these things separately than all at once. You would think Word and other tools for writers would adopt the same ideas in an effort to make their users more productive.
primelens 13y ago
LibreOffice is fighting the good fight and for most things it's a great substitute for word. But I've always wondered what would happen if something like Latex were to become truly user friendly - I mean pre-compiled distributions that are easy to download and work without tweaking, relatively good wysiwyg viewers and a less obtuse maze of packages.
- clarry 13y ago
  I don't think the fight here is Word vs LibreOffice vs Latex vs whatever, it's that it sucks when a very specific format (and workflow or tools, when the format is too complex to be universal like plaintext) is imposed on you even though the task at hand could be easily completed with dozens of different tools. I hate when msword .docs are imposed on me, and I'd hate it just as much if latex or libreoffice was imposed on me the same way.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  You mean like PageMaker and FrameMaker?
6cxs2hd6 13y ago
> Arguments raged internally: 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 and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there. Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming? Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.
raverbashing 13y ago
(about stylesheets and codes) "Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there." No. That's the "developers" point of view (and a false dichotomy) Word is focused on the user. If the user wants to italicise one letter, it's OK to let him do it. Sometimes it's a requirement Of course, the problem with Word is that you can't debug the mess it creates when it doesn't work the way you wanted.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  You can italicize one letter with styles. It's not a requirement to have two completely different methods of doing so.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    Imagine looking for a style every time you needed to italicize a letter. Body text, italicized. Header, italicized. Subtitle, italicized. Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing style. You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 + Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized. Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting you do gets turned into an anonymous style.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      Sounds like a UI problem then, rather than a core logic problem.
vzhang 13y ago
“The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable.” I don't know what he would think about air with this hipster mentality.
- clarry 13y ago
  If air was a big, expensive, complex, hard-to-use, proprietary product that we could perfectly well kill off and do without, I'd loathe it.
  - nkhodyunya 13y ago
    The author's argument that Microsoft Word in unavoidable because doc format is de facto standard in his problem domain seems bullshit to me. You can't substitute a document editor with document format like that. I mean, you can totally avoid using Microsoft Word for creating doc files by switching to latex/markdown/org/... with [pandoc][1] converter, for example, or use any kind of MSWord-like word processors, e.g. OpenOffice Writer(if this somehow change something). The author didn't mention any other problem with Word, except it's local ubiquity, which i don't find a problem at all. So, why hate so much? [1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
    - scholia 13y ago
      You're right, it's bullshit. Apart from anything else, Word saves in a ton of formats. I use Word all the time but I very rarely use doc/docx. I use rtf instead.
anuraj 13y ago
Word is an end user product - not open source - not developer friendly - want a developer friendly format - work with ODF or similar entities pushing open standards. Word does its job fairly well.
- gggmaster 13y ago
  There are many better open source alternatives for end users. Being locked into one product is not a good thing.
joosters 13y ago
Word is IMO just fine for most uses. It has lots of features and lots of ways of writing and designing documents because users wanted them. You can't blame a product on its users. And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.
- thuuuomas 13y ago
  > The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices. Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.
  - joosters 13y ago
    Just read the rest of the comments, there are plenty of alternatives. The author isn't complaining about a lack of choices, either. Instead, he is moaning that other people have made a different choice from him.
    - pseut 13y ago
      No. Look, I'll read the last paragraph for you: "The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer's integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But 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. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon." --TFA So, you can disagree, but the "why" of your first comment is pretty directly addressed by the author.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
MS Word still can't kern very well, and can't really hyphenate for double-column justified papers. LaTeX is still my tool of choice.
gingerlime 13y ago
I can understand the frustration with publishers who choose to use .doc as their standard. This is not as bad as the government adopting it. In Israel, so many online documents provided by government and public funded organizations are .doc/.docx format. (disclaimer: I moved out of Israel in 2002, so things might have changed and I do so some shift to pdf, but I believe a lot is still .doc based)
kijin 13y ago
> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place. Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory. Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big Business. > I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.
- GuiA 13y ago
  > Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress. Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")
bambax 13y ago
I agree with the article in general, but this isn't true: "Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program." The first part of the sentence is true, and the second part, "which could not be parsed" is also technically true, but false in practice, since Microsoft releases free tools to convert new formats into old formats. I use Word 2000 on Win XP to exchange documents with my clients and it's fine, really; they can read what I send them, they send me back .docx files and I edit them without a problem. (Not to say that MS Word is not horrible; it is, but the particular problem of file formats isn't real).
jwr 13y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents. I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features. And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  FrameMaker and PageMaker?
  - cormullion 13y ago
    Ah, FrameMaker was the proverbial dog's bollocks. Unfortunately Adobe bought it.
- ancarda 13y ago
  +1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside. Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
It should. Word's roots reach back to an era when the primary way to share documents was by printing them out. And that heritage is deeply ingrained in so much of it. But that's not the way documents are shared today. I'd be surprised if even 1% of all documents created in Word in 2013 are printed out, yet all of those optimizations and compromises are still there. Unfortunately, not many people have come up with unambiguously superior replacements, yet, so Word continues to hold on to its position of dominance.
- hydralist 13y ago
  kids printing school papers has to make that number > 1
  - MarcScott 13y ago
    My students _never_ print school papers. Submissions are all by email or the learning platform.
lispm 13y ago
My problem with Microsoft Word is, that its core task, formatting text documents, is completely buggy. Instead to get the core engine right, Microsoft added tons of less important features. It's really hard to write a half-complex document of, say, 40 pages and not to run into a multitude of editing, display and formatting problems.
AndrewDucker 13y ago
I've yet to encounter a better method of tracking changes than the one Word uses. Makes it trivially easy for me to take a document, make a bunch of changes, and then have the originator see exactly what I've done to it.
- EliRivers 13y ago
  I've found a better method to be creating documents in plain text with some suitable formatting markup, and then apply a diff tool such as meld to see changes made. The way word does it, if I recall, involves sort of mashing the two versions together (or rather, having the change data saved with the document), with red font and strikethrough and so forth used to indicate changes, which is far harder to follow than what meld presents (the two documents side-by-side with coloured sections indicates changes, additions and deletions, joined with little lines between the documents to show locations, and a sensible scrolling mechanism to keep them coordinated). I haven't used word for a few years, though, so if it's changed, disregard :)
  - cdcarter 13y ago
    Word can do a side-by-side diff. And really, a lot of business people are more comfortable with the mashed up version. We don't say we red-line a contract because Word presents it that way. Red-lining has worked that way for years prior.
VMG 13y ago
worse is better
keithpeter 13y ago
" Word is, I’m told, horrid, but it talks to publishers, which is really all I use it for." [1] It is the lock-in. We can use our preferred tools (vim/LaTeX or Gedit/markdown) but collaboration requires capitulation. I can get away with PDFs a lot as I work as a teacher and my work is consumed on paper in very small editions. [1] http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/ http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/
triton 13y ago
Everything there could be applied to pianos but you don't see people lining up to rant about them on blogs. Word is "good enough" which is more than both the macro-driven systems (i.e. LaTeX, troff) have mustered and the opposite end of the spectrum with the layout based tools. To be honest, every time I use Word, I'm relieved it's not HTML.
unsignedint 13y ago
Being locked into some vendor is one thing, but I find worse is people insisting to send something in .doc (or other rich text format) while plain text or texts in the body of E-mail would just suffice.
- shadowOfShadow 13y ago
  try .docx since it's an open format. It's interesting to see OP and you both talk about .doc. It shows your familiarity with the details of the topic.
  - unsignedint 13y ago
    Oh I meant to be more of general statement... I'd be as frustrated if it was odt if use case wouldn't warrant it. Though docx has its own problem -- a lot of free implementations do not handle it correctly and MS implementation of OpenDocument is largely incomplete (as far as I know from 2007's implementation...) Honestly, using LibreOffice day to day with other users being MS Office users, ironically doc seems to be most complete interchangeable format with these users. I think some of those come from ambiguity of spec so I guess there are mulple parties to be blamed.
camus 13y ago
The problem is not the software,it is the proprietary format,just like PDF or PSD. These formats force industries to use specific softwares, were open formats would be plateform and software independent. That's the fight one needs to do, impose open and free file formats on the industry level. Microsoft like to break stuffs like it wanted to make his own version of XML, that's the true evil of Microsoft.
Knacktus 13y ago
Unfortunately the author clouds the facts and his mostly correct findings with his emotions. What could have been an interesting reading remains a rant.
psn 13y ago
"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident " They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  Indeed, disk transfer speed mattered a great deal in the early days. People used to save all their data to floppy disks, and use their hard disks only to load programs. Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data. The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document. Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.
jruthers 13y ago
FrameMaker - or a new, open source ground up rewrite of it - for the win!
_random_ 13y ago
The reality is that Word is really-really good. That's why it's a monopoly. Just like Apple products.
skue 13y ago
I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. Back in 1999 I authored a web programming book for O'Reilly. At the time, their technical folks would begrudgingly accept Word files, but they strongly preferred FrameMaker.[1] Some of that probably had to do with the propensity for large Word files to become corrupted, but it's also because FrameMaker helped authors generate documents with much cleaner styling than Word. It's a shame that Adobe let FrameMaker languish. FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. The difference is analogous to creating a web page and declaring styles inline (how most folks use Word) vs. using a stylesheet (how most folks used FrameMaker). It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought. Pages also has a style inspector, which is my favorite feature (despite the old-school NeXT-style drawer). For a reason that I can't easily articulate, using styles in Pages feels cleaner than Word and more like using FrameMaker. So if I have to create a large Word document I will typically do so in Pages, then export to Word. [1] I believe O'Reilly also accepted alternative open source formats such as DocBook and LaTeX. And though these might be great formats, I could never find an editor that I could stand using for more than a few minutes -- let alone the months needed to write a book.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. ... FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. ... It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought. How long has it been since you used Word? The styles are now right on the Home tab in the Ribbon. On my monitor, it takes up over half the width of the Ribbon. You don't have to "pop open" anything to use styles, but you do need to open the styles palette to define and change styles. A publisher could supply a Word template to its authors, and forbid the author to make any other formatting changes. They could also enforce this by opening the styles inspector and checking for any unauthorized formatting. An author could also apply a different stylesheet to reformat a text to match a different publisher's stylesheet. Word is a styles-based word processor, internally. If you boldface some text, Word will create a new anonymous style that's simply the existing style, plus boldface. You could even use the styles inspector to change all instances of that anonymous style back to the original style, or to turn it into a named style. You can use Word like Framemaker (sans frames) if you want. It's just that most people don't.
rypskar 13y ago
I will not at all say MS Word is perfect, but I still haven’t seen a program that works better for me. Spelling and grammar is not what I am best at, and English is not my first language so I take the help I can get. I have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice and am using Google Docs, but none of them comes close to Word in helping with my spelling and grammar. I did type this comment in Word to get rid of the most obvious errors, and I do even type my master thesis in Word and copy the text to my latex editor for formatting. For me it was worth it to pay for Office instead of using any of the free alternatives.
tszming 13y ago
I still have Word 2003 (and Excel 2003) installed on my PC, still very useful when I need it, and it is still my first choice when I need to prepare some serious documents, otherwise, I will use Google Docs. It is quite amazing as they are software written 10 years ago, providing all the features I need as of today. In general, for office suite, I still can't find any opensource alternatives that can compare with these 10 years old software. Yes, they are proprietary, they are not open, blah blah blah, but when you have used other latest alternatives like LibreOffice (Mac), they even can't make the basic Cmd+F search work as expected [1], can you tolerate? This is the question you need to ask. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853
kabdib 13y ago
Since I left MS a year ago, to join a small games company, I've used Microsoft Word only twice; both times, to make signs like DANGER: ZERO GRAVITY AREA for the doors of one of the server rooms here. In other words, we don't use Word. We use Outlook a lot; I can't imagine not using it (there is quite a bit of email traffic, and Outlook is pretty good at scaling). I've also used Excel a fair amount to do analysis and "little database" work. But Word, PowerPoint, Visio: Nada.
n0on3 13y ago
Nice piece; unfortunately it's not just about MS Word. It's pretty common for inferior/hurtful-in-the-long-term products to get leading positions in the market and become "unavoidable". The first easy guess is that marketing people are doing a great job for these products; the second one would be that the majority of us are too stupid/busy/unwilling-to-consider-long-term-consequences to spot their game and go for smarter choices. TL;DR: Please run humanity.upgrade(), we would think about their word processors l8r (:
skue 13y ago
This is an interesting article and has generated some good discussion, but blaming Word for mixing style sheets and control codes seems off to me. > Arguments raged internally: 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 and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there. Back in the 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the market leader - not MS Word. And WordPerfect 5.0 supported style sheets when it was released in the 80s, alongside the existing control codes that were already a core feature of WP.[1] Even after it supported WYSIWYG editing, WP still enabled users to Reveal Codes - essentially toggling from WYSIWYG to the underlying markup. I'm not defending MS Word as a program - I hate it too. I wish WordPerfect or something better had won. But I don't see how Microsoft alone can be blamed for deciding to support both control codes and style sheets. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_libraries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_li...
wissler 13y ago
It's part of the current human condition, where people want instant gratification and don't want to take the time to figure out or learn a properly designed editor.
Ethan_Mick 13y ago
My personal annoyance with Word is how terrible it works on a Mac. There are simply things I expect any text box to do (including this one that I am typing in to post this). Things like: 1: If I highlight text with my cursor and mouse, and I scroll using my trackpad (MacBook Air), I expect the text to be highlighted with the scrolling. Word fails at this. 2: I expect different my basic OS X commands to work, ctrl+e, go to end of line, ctrl+a, front of line, etc. These don't work in Word. 3: Scrolling is not smooth, typing is not smooth, and many other small annoyances. I understand that OS X isn't nearly as big as Windows for a market, but I would love it if the software crafted for it wasn't so bad.
MarcScott 13y ago
In my school I'm trying my best to push students away from using Word. If they're making quick notes, I ask them to do it in a text editor. If they're presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown. This is only for my CompSci classes, but it's a start. My next mission is to break the stranglehold that PowerPoint has on my students.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  "If they're presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown." Perhaps a git repository to track feedback and changes? Do they need to use diagrams or images at all?
  - MarcScott 13y ago
    git is something I'm working towards. Ideally I'd like github to be our learning platform.
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      I thought that might be the direction that you were moving in, and I think that is a really good idea for your particular students to get used to a source code repository and version control quickly. One thing I have not looked at yet but may do in the future is git-annex [1] and the associated GUI [2]. I'm hoping I can use git-annex to sync folders between laptops just using an external drive. [1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/ [2] http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/ That will allow music/video/images to be synced as well as text.
wildster 13y ago
Why has google docs stopped being developed?
NN88 13y ago
so what should I use?
markjbrown 13y ago
This is a pathetic rant. I'm surprised it got as many comments as it did. Oh wait, this is hacker news. No, I'm not surprised then.
blahbl4hblah 13y ago
Comparing word to Winston Smith in 1984 proves that you aren't a food writer no matter what you use. Tripe
dmourati 13y ago
Why stop at Word?
4dl0v3-p34c3 13y ago
We kinda had this talk, but it proved useless, since most users hardly change habits (the real reason to µ$ Word stagnation): http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1mt8a5/nearly_everyone_who_is_new_to_emacs_hates_it/ http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1mt8a5/nearly_everyon... Even IE6.
rob05c 13y ago
> a programmer's text editor (such as ed YES. Clearly the capricious abregation of Ed was where we went wrong. Let the faithful return! http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt
tnkd 13y ago
Without putting too much thought into the subject, the state of Office in the enterprise upsets me. Over the last six years I've gradually rolled away from Outlook and Word in favour of Google Apps / Drive. True, it's not perfect, but for the 'lay user' (students per se?) it is sufficient and the barrier to entry is low. My real concern with Office comes from what if in the future I'm not in a position where the company I work for is still tied to the Office Suite of products. Productivity wise, switching back to Office (even Office365) is a real killer for someone that is proceeding efficient at the former.
chalst 13y ago
The reason many publishers prefer MS Word is that it is the best choice at the editing stage. It is much easier to find copy-editors who will be able work efficiently with Word than any other system, with Adobe Indesign/Incopy being a distant second. It would be possible to grow a tool infrastructure around Latex (and/or Context) to eliminate the practical problems working with that system, but at present it does not exist. Word's support for change tracking is very good. Change-tracking is a very different thing to version control: version control is about storing and reconciling difference versions of a file, while change tracking is about communicating the changes made for the other person to check. If I edit your text, I can switch change tracking on and off, so that the relevant changes I have made to your writing are visible for you to step through one-by-one, while the changes my macros made to make font choices consistent are untracked, so will not waste your time when you review the text. If version control and change tracking overlap somewhat in functionality, they have different uses and fundamentally different semantics.
dbot 13y ago
I'm a litigator who continues to be amazed by the page formatting requirements in courts around the country. Especially at the appellate level, it can take hours to find and then implement all of the requirements. Worse, all documents are then converted to PDF, making them even less useful. What's crazy is that most briefs are actually just a series of links: cite to Case A, B; cite to document C; cite to statute C...Sometimes attorneys will make "e-briefs" to actually link PDFs, but those usually cost thousands of dollars to manually generate. I'm working on an open-source court filing project that would let attorneys and the court write and post everything in an electronic format for easy linking and search. Think of it as a free, universal ECF/PACER for state courts. If anyone is interested in helping, feel free to drop me a line.
ajmarsh 13y ago
For me its MS Word's "outline mode" I'm not sure I could write a document longer than a few paragraphs without it.
triplesec 13y ago
There is until now no mention whatsoever in this thread of Openoffice, and I'm baffled as to why not. Sadly, they use the MX paradigm rather than improve the UXperience greatly, but, well, it's a start.
nicarus1984 13y ago
"It's a poor workman who blames his tools." You may not like Word, but I find it helpful for certain tasks. You want it to die? A bit dramatic and non-constructive. Basically, "I don't like it, so no one should use it."
sbussard 13y ago
I bet you could raise money to buy word.ms domain and point it to this post :p
mncolinlee 13y ago
Oddly enough, when I was a corporate intern technical writer, everything was being done there in DocBook XML. We were using PTC Arbortext products which were very expensive per seat. It's inevitable that the publishing industry will dump Word, but I don't think it's realistic to expect it all at once. First, they have to offer the ability to use other formats and they may require that the industry adopts a standard software package and document flow that does exactly what it needs. This sounds like an awesome open source project for someone who knows that industry's exact needs.

413 points by r721 13y ago

Monopoly or not, it's the only wsywyg text editor I've ever found truly usable. I now prefer Google docs for convenience but it's not quite there yet for composition/edit experience. Hoping for more good alternatives, if anyone has suggestions.

Ecio78 13y ago
I'm not sure it is still a problem nowadays but until some months ago if you used the zoom function of the browser Google docs had very bad problems rendering and managing your input.
ghaff 13y ago
It depends on what you need. I just use a text editor for a lot of purposes. For writing a long complex document, I really like Scrivener on the Mac--but that's mostly for creating content prior to entering into a formatting/publishing phase. For creating a typical 1-10 page formatted document, Word is fine. But show is Libre Office for the most part.
telephonetemp 13y ago
LyX isn't WYSIWYG but rather WYSIWYM (the "M" stands for "mean"), but I found it the most usable visual editor for word processing. Edit: Why the downvote?
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  The concept of WYSIWYM, which you casually tossed around, is really hard to grasp at a glance, which is mildly frustrating. (I did not downvote nor think there's reason enough for it. Just speculating) I took a look at the LyX web page, and it really didn't shed much light on the issue. "writing based on the structure of your document" added zero information to me. The screenshots look like a weird middle ground between WYSIWYG and TeX.
- alok-g 13y ago
  My key issue with Lyx has been that the document interface is not in fully human format. References and tags show up as fields visible to the user. To create a cross-reference, user must insert tags at the target location first (Microsoft Word keeps track of headings, captions, etc. by itself for cross-referencing). Also, hyperlinks are not clickable (the last time I checked). Edit: I did not downvote, and cannot explain why you got them.
e12e 13y ago
Have you tried abiword (recently)?

nonchalance 13y ago

The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite

toomuchtodo 13y ago
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
- comicjk 13y ago
  $100K is one developer-year... I would expect it to cost at least a hundred times that.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    In the US. You can find developers, good developers, for cheaper than that outside of major metro areas in the US, Europe, etc.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Little factors of 2-3x are not the issue here. It's the ten years with a thousand developers that really drive the cost.
- nonchalance 13y ago
  LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market. And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword): MS-XLS, MS-CFB, MS-ODRAW, MS-ODRAWXML, MS-OGRAPH, MS-OFFCRYPTO, MS-RMPR, MS-OVBA, MS-OSHARED, MS-CTXLS, ECMA-376, MS-OLEDS, MS-OLEPS, MS-DTYP, MS-XLSB, MS-OFORMS, MS-VBAL, MS-OAUT, MS-DCOM, MS-XLSX But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list): https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx (go, xlsx read) https://poi.apache.org/ https://poi.apache.org/ (java) https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx (javascript, xlsx read) https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls (javascript, xls read) https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ (php) http://www.python-excel.org/ http://www.python-excel.org/ (python, based on openoffice ) https://github.com/randym/axlsx https://github.com/randym/axlsx (ruby, xlsx write) https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table (ruby, xls/xlsx read)

zerovox 13y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy, happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication. I do feel that this is one of those cases where you should be able to write in the way you feel best for you, and if the publisher insist on having the final document in a word format, it should be straightforward to convert your chosen representation to theirs. It's hard to say without knowing precisely how the publisher expects the file to be formatted, but if it's fairly straightforward, there are libraries that will write to doc files for you, or there are open formats that MS Word already knows how to convert into .doc files that you could target instead.

objclxt 13y ago
Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc without any problems. It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
- cstross 13y ago
  Publisher's workflow now insists on copy editors using Word with change tracking to mark up submitted manuscripts. The author then gets a copy of the marked-up MS to check. Which means having to use at least a tool compatible with MS change tracking on .doc files. So I'm blissfully Word-free until I hit "compile" in Scrivener ... but after the output file (RTF) goes to the publisher it comes back to me as a Word document with tracked changes and I have to dive into the turbid depths once more.
  - ghaff 13y ago
    And, honestly, for my last book I did pretty much the same thing even though I wasn't using an actual publisher. I did however have to send my ms to a copy editor and I also--at some point--had to get into some semblance of layout (for which I used Pages; my needs were pretty simple).

SusanLTomlin 13y ago

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telephonetemp 13y ago

Government forms served as Word documents with complex table-based formatting and "fields" made out of underscores are truly the worst. They are sadly ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe, much like mathematics typeset using Word and MathType.

sliverstorm 13y ago
They seem like a step up from paper to me. You can still convert them to paper, do not need to drive to the DMV to get them, and have the option of filling them in with the keyboard if your handwriting is terrible (like me). Are they a dream borne from an angel? No. Are they better? I think so.
unsignedint 13y ago
I can't go into so much detail about it, but some companies I had to deal with had a form that was MS Word. ("More than 50 pages of check list" which used one of those fields, in which I had to check mark each one of them.) They had MS Word and PDF version of it, which PDF version wasn't even fillable form. Somehow those forms are a real pain to work with. One time, I just printed out the entire thing out of the PDF and just hand-checked them, and another time, I've used Preview app on Mac to check those by annotation. Either way, they were very annoying...
scholia 13y ago
Which is the fault of the users, not the applications. Microsoft Office offers much better ways to do that sort of thing.

anderslindgaard 13y ago

try libreoffice.

oinksoft 13y ago

Right now the word processor choices are Word or open-source Word clone, so I don't see the point for the end user. I use Libre/NeoOffice, but it's no easier to use than Word. I'd like to see a word processor more like old ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.

claudius 13y ago
Or you could just use LaTeX with the text editor of your choice. Yes, you can write letters in LaTeX, yes, that is easy and yes, it takes me roughly one minute to get a perfectly-formatted simple letter, which is roughly equivalent to the time it took Word to start the last time I tried it (~2008?)
- pseingatl 13y ago
  If you're going to work in LaTex you might want to use Lyx. Otherwise, working in a LaTex compiler is full of problems. Texshop is forgiving, but where is the Zoom view feature? Other compilers simply halt without letting you know why. As a word processor, Lyx is not bad at all. Exporting from Word to LaTex is not easy.
  - claudius 13y ago
    If you’re new to LaTeX, I presume that Lyx might be a good start, but personally I prefer AUCTex with standard Emacs – the zoom feature being in my PDF viewer (evince-gtk for simplicity).
pseingatl 13y ago
Wordperfect? Depends on what you're trying to do. Writeroom/Darkroom and clones. Pages. Scrivener. Final Draft. Celtx. Write (myownapp) etc. (no affiliation with any of these)

tuananh 13y ago

I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document format.

tonyedgecombe 13y ago
.docx is an open format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
- cstross 13y ago
  It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - serge2k 13y ago
    Can you implement it freely? Will microsoft sue you into oblivion if you attempt to use it? "It's hard" doesn't mean it isn't open. It may well mean that it is a crappy format.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      Parts of it say "do as Word 6 does".
  - triton 13y ago
    That's actually a load or horse shit (excuse my French). I've worked with both ODF and OOXML extensively as we write document templating software and I'll pick OOXML over ODF any say. It's less quirky, there are decent COTS tools to handle it and the output rendering is consistent regardless of which tool you pick to do the rendering. It's also better documented and way more intuitive. I really don't know where you are getting these facts from other than the usual spiel that Microsoft does only evil. The standards are open, published and free to implement (look for Microsoft open specifications). The documentation is way better than anything else out there. So LibreOffice obviously reimplemented lotus 123, wordperfect and wordstar did they as well?

willvarfar 13y ago

My experience with libreoffice scripting was painful: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/making-the-history-of-worlds-religions-map http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...

icu 13y ago
I agree that trying to force open source alternatives on your workflow after using Microsoft Office for a long time can be difficult. I tried to switch from Microsoft Office to the other open source alternatives and while I did like Open Office, I found I couldn't use it beyond 'average' tasks. As soon as I needed advanced analysis I had to go back to Excel. I find that switching between R and Excel 2013 works well for me. Also I feel that Microsoft has done a good job with Office 2013 and I like what they've done with PowerPoint animations on the ribbon. Frankly though Office is expensive so if you need the features not available in open source alternatives you've just got to pay.

michaelpinto 13y ago

I didn't really appreciated MS Word until I started using Apple Pages: Pages has no draft mode! Suddenly clunky Word seemed to have a better interface. The problem is that over the years Word has become a poster child for feature creep, but that said for each feature that you detest there is someone else who is fan.

riffraff 13y ago

> But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. Is this actually true? I accidentally checked just a few days ago, and amazon's self publishing platform allows using a simple html file. Also I clearly remember that D. Hofstadter's books were typeset with latex, and at least in my country they are published by one of the biggest publishing companies. So, maybe the stranglehold isn't so tight?

makomk 13y ago
I think at least some non-fiction authors have to supply a "camera-ready" manuscript, which is basically typeset and laid out by them and not the publishing house and so doesn't have to go through the Word-based workflow fiction publishers like Stross' use.

rtfeldman 13y ago

I came to similar conclusions but didn't like Scrivener, so I scratched my own itch instead. The result is http://dreamwriterapp.com http://dreamwriterapp.com - it only works in Chrome, but it can handle 100,000+ word novels without performance tanking like it does in Google Docs.

alextingle 13y ago
I get nothing but a spinning icon.
- macmac 13y ago
  Same here.

mikro2nd 13y ago

Long have I said, " Word processors are to words as food processors are to food," The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else. That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that refuses to swear!

teleclimber 13y ago
> The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. I completely agree. Software developers and even physical product developers have (or attempt to have) development workflows that separate the content creation from the style. There is a good reason for that: it is far easier to focus on these things separately than all at once. You would think Word and other tools for writers would adopt the same ideas in an effort to make their users more productive.

primelens 13y ago

LibreOffice is fighting the good fight and for most things it's a great substitute for word. But I've always wondered what would happen if something like Latex were to become truly user friendly - I mean pre-compiled distributions that are easy to download and work without tweaking, relatively good wysiwyg viewers and a less obtuse maze of packages.

clarry 13y ago
I don't think the fight here is Word vs LibreOffice vs Latex vs whatever, it's that it sucks when a very specific format (and workflow or tools, when the format is too complex to be universal like plaintext) is imposed on you even though the task at hand could be easily completed with dozens of different tools. I hate when msword .docs are imposed on me, and I'd hate it just as much if latex or libreoffice was imposed on me the same way.
pjmlp 13y ago
You mean like PageMaker and FrameMaker?

6cxs2hd6 13y ago

> Arguments raged internally: 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 and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there. Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming? Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.

raverbashing 13y ago

(about stylesheets and codes) "Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there." No. That's the "developers" point of view (and a false dichotomy) Word is focused on the user. If the user wants to italicise one letter, it's OK to let him do it. Sometimes it's a requirement Of course, the problem with Word is that you can't debug the mess it creates when it doesn't work the way you wanted.

Dylan16807 13y ago
You can italicize one letter with styles. It's not a requirement to have two completely different methods of doing so.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  Imagine looking for a style every time you needed to italicize a letter. Body text, italicized. Header, italicized. Subtitle, italicized. Why not let the user italicize, and then let Word itself find the style? Because that's what happens behind the scenes. If you italicize some Header 2 text, Word will create a new style "Header 2 + Italics." If you italicize some more Header 2 text, Word will reuse the existing style. You can actually open the styles palette and decide to change all "Header 2 + Italics" to be boldface instead of italicized. Word is a styles-based word processor internally. All the ad-hoc formatting you do gets turned into an anonymous style.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    Sounds like a UI problem then, rather than a core logic problem.

vzhang 13y ago

“The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable.” I don't know what he would think about air with this hipster mentality.

clarry 13y ago
If air was a big, expensive, complex, hard-to-use, proprietary product that we could perfectly well kill off and do without, I'd loathe it.
- nkhodyunya 13y ago
  The author's argument that Microsoft Word in unavoidable because doc format is de facto standard in his problem domain seems bullshit to me. You can't substitute a document editor with document format like that. I mean, you can totally avoid using Microsoft Word for creating doc files by switching to latex/markdown/org/... with [pandoc][1] converter, for example, or use any kind of MSWord-like word processors, e.g. OpenOffice Writer(if this somehow change something). The author didn't mention any other problem with Word, except it's local ubiquity, which i don't find a problem at all. So, why hate so much? [1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
  - scholia 13y ago
    You're right, it's bullshit. Apart from anything else, Word saves in a ton of formats. I use Word all the time but I very rarely use doc/docx. I use rtf instead.

anuraj 13y ago

Word is an end user product - not open source - not developer friendly - want a developer friendly format - work with ODF or similar entities pushing open standards. Word does its job fairly well.

gggmaster 13y ago
There are many better open source alternatives for end users. Being locked into one product is not a good thing.

joosters 13y ago

Word is IMO just fine for most uses. It has lots of features and lots of ways of writing and designing documents because users wanted them. You can't blame a product on its users. And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.

thuuuomas 13y ago
> The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices. Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.
- joosters 13y ago
  Just read the rest of the comments, there are plenty of alternatives. The author isn't complaining about a lack of choices, either. Instead, he is moaning that other people have made a different choice from him.
  - pseut 13y ago
    No. Look, I'll read the last paragraph for you: "The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer's integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But 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. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon." --TFA So, you can disagree, but the "why" of your first comment is pretty directly addressed by the author.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

MS Word still can't kern very well, and can't really hyphenate for double-column justified papers. LaTeX is still my tool of choice.

gingerlime 13y ago

I can understand the frustration with publishers who choose to use .doc as their standard. This is not as bad as the government adopting it. In Israel, so many online documents provided by government and public funded organizations are .doc/.docx format. (disclaimer: I moved out of Israel in 2002, so things might have changed and I do so some shift to pdf, but I believe a lot is still .doc based)

kijin 13y ago

> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place. Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory. Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big Business. > I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.

GuiA 13y ago
> Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress. Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")

bambax 13y ago

I agree with the article in general, but this isn't true: "Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program." The first part of the sentence is true, and the second part, "which could not be parsed" is also technically true, but false in practice, since Microsoft releases free tools to convert new formats into old formats. I use Word 2000 on Win XP to exchange documents with my clients and it's fine, really; they can read what I send them, they send me back .docx files and I edit them without a problem. (Not to say that MS Word is not horrible; it is, but the particular problem of file formats isn't real).

jwr 13y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents. I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features. And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.

pjmlp 13y ago
FrameMaker and PageMaker?
- cormullion 13y ago
  Ah, FrameMaker was the proverbial dog's bollocks. Unfortunately Adobe bought it.
ancarda 13y ago
+1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside. Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

It should. Word's roots reach back to an era when the primary way to share documents was by printing them out. And that heritage is deeply ingrained in so much of it. But that's not the way documents are shared today. I'd be surprised if even 1% of all documents created in Word in 2013 are printed out, yet all of those optimizations and compromises are still there. Unfortunately, not many people have come up with unambiguously superior replacements, yet, so Word continues to hold on to its position of dominance.

hydralist 13y ago
kids printing school papers has to make that number > 1
- MarcScott 13y ago
  My students _never_ print school papers. Submissions are all by email or the learning platform.

lispm 13y ago

My problem with Microsoft Word is, that its core task, formatting text documents, is completely buggy. Instead to get the core engine right, Microsoft added tons of less important features. It's really hard to write a half-complex document of, say, 40 pages and not to run into a multitude of editing, display and formatting problems.

AndrewDucker 13y ago

I've yet to encounter a better method of tracking changes than the one Word uses. Makes it trivially easy for me to take a document, make a bunch of changes, and then have the originator see exactly what I've done to it.

EliRivers 13y ago
I've found a better method to be creating documents in plain text with some suitable formatting markup, and then apply a diff tool such as meld to see changes made. The way word does it, if I recall, involves sort of mashing the two versions together (or rather, having the change data saved with the document), with red font and strikethrough and so forth used to indicate changes, which is far harder to follow than what meld presents (the two documents side-by-side with coloured sections indicates changes, additions and deletions, joined with little lines between the documents to show locations, and a sensible scrolling mechanism to keep them coordinated). I haven't used word for a few years, though, so if it's changed, disregard :)
- cdcarter 13y ago
  Word can do a side-by-side diff. And really, a lot of business people are more comfortable with the mashed up version. We don't say we red-line a contract because Word presents it that way. Red-lining has worked that way for years prior.

VMG 13y ago

worse is better

keithpeter 13y ago

" Word is, I’m told, horrid, but it talks to publishers, which is really all I use it for." [1] It is the lock-in. We can use our preferred tools (vim/LaTeX or Gedit/markdown) but collaboration requires capitulation. I can get away with PDFs a lot as I work as a teacher and my work is consumed on paper in very small editions. [1] http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/ http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/

triton 13y ago

Everything there could be applied to pianos but you don't see people lining up to rant about them on blogs. Word is "good enough" which is more than both the macro-driven systems (i.e. LaTeX, troff) have mustered and the opposite end of the spectrum with the layout based tools. To be honest, every time I use Word, I'm relieved it's not HTML.

unsignedint 13y ago

Being locked into some vendor is one thing, but I find worse is people insisting to send something in .doc (or other rich text format) while plain text or texts in the body of E-mail would just suffice.

shadowOfShadow 13y ago
try .docx since it's an open format. It's interesting to see OP and you both talk about .doc. It shows your familiarity with the details of the topic.
- unsignedint 13y ago
  Oh I meant to be more of general statement... I'd be as frustrated if it was odt if use case wouldn't warrant it. Though docx has its own problem -- a lot of free implementations do not handle it correctly and MS implementation of OpenDocument is largely incomplete (as far as I know from 2007's implementation...) Honestly, using LibreOffice day to day with other users being MS Office users, ironically doc seems to be most complete interchangeable format with these users. I think some of those come from ambiguity of spec so I guess there are mulple parties to be blamed.

camus 13y ago

The problem is not the software,it is the proprietary format,just like PDF or PSD. These formats force industries to use specific softwares, were open formats would be plateform and software independent. That's the fight one needs to do, impose open and free file formats on the industry level. Microsoft like to break stuffs like it wanted to make his own version of XML, that's the true evil of Microsoft.

Knacktus 13y ago

Unfortunately the author clouds the facts and his mostly correct findings with his emotions. What could have been an interesting reading remains a rant.

psn 13y ago

"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident " They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.

tanzam75 13y ago
Indeed, disk transfer speed mattered a great deal in the early days. People used to save all their data to floppy disks, and use their hard disks only to load programs. Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data. The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document. Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.

jruthers 13y ago

FrameMaker - or a new, open source ground up rewrite of it - for the win!

_random_ 13y ago

The reality is that Word is really-really good. That's why it's a monopoly. Just like Apple products.

skue 13y ago

I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. Back in 1999 I authored a web programming book for O'Reilly. At the time, their technical folks would begrudgingly accept Word files, but they strongly preferred FrameMaker.[1] Some of that probably had to do with the propensity for large Word files to become corrupted, but it's also because FrameMaker helped authors generate documents with much cleaner styling than Word. It's a shame that Adobe let FrameMaker languish. FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. The difference is analogous to creating a web page and declaring styles inline (how most folks use Word) vs. using a stylesheet (how most folks used FrameMaker). It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought. Pages also has a style inspector, which is my favorite feature (despite the old-school NeXT-style drawer). For a reason that I can't easily articulate, using styles in Pages feels cleaner than Word and more like using FrameMaker. So if I have to create a large Word document I will typically do so in Pages, then export to Word. [1] I believe O'Reilly also accepted alternative open source formats such as DocBook and LaTeX. And though these might be great formats, I could never find an editor that I could stand using for more than a few minutes -- let alone the months needed to write a book.

tanzam75 13y ago
> I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. ... FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. ... It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought. How long has it been since you used Word? The styles are now right on the Home tab in the Ribbon. On my monitor, it takes up over half the width of the Ribbon. You don't have to "pop open" anything to use styles, but you do need to open the styles palette to define and change styles. A publisher could supply a Word template to its authors, and forbid the author to make any other formatting changes. They could also enforce this by opening the styles inspector and checking for any unauthorized formatting. An author could also apply a different stylesheet to reformat a text to match a different publisher's stylesheet. Word is a styles-based word processor, internally. If you boldface some text, Word will create a new anonymous style that's simply the existing style, plus boldface. You could even use the styles inspector to change all instances of that anonymous style back to the original style, or to turn it into a named style. You can use Word like Framemaker (sans frames) if you want. It's just that most people don't.

rypskar 13y ago

I will not at all say MS Word is perfect, but I still haven’t seen a program that works better for me. Spelling and grammar is not what I am best at, and English is not my first language so I take the help I can get. I have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice and am using Google Docs, but none of them comes close to Word in helping with my spelling and grammar. I did type this comment in Word to get rid of the most obvious errors, and I do even type my master thesis in Word and copy the text to my latex editor for formatting. For me it was worth it to pay for Office instead of using any of the free alternatives.

tszming 13y ago

I still have Word 2003 (and Excel 2003) installed on my PC, still very useful when I need it, and it is still my first choice when I need to prepare some serious documents, otherwise, I will use Google Docs. It is quite amazing as they are software written 10 years ago, providing all the features I need as of today. In general, for office suite, I still can't find any opensource alternatives that can compare with these 10 years old software. Yes, they are proprietary, they are not open, blah blah blah, but when you have used other latest alternatives like LibreOffice (Mac), they even can't make the basic Cmd+F search work as expected [1], can you tolerate? This is the question you need to ask. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853

kabdib 13y ago

Since I left MS a year ago, to join a small games company, I've used Microsoft Word only twice; both times, to make signs like DANGER: ZERO GRAVITY AREA for the doors of one of the server rooms here. In other words, we don't use Word. We use Outlook a lot; I can't imagine not using it (there is quite a bit of email traffic, and Outlook is pretty good at scaling). I've also used Excel a fair amount to do analysis and "little database" work. But Word, PowerPoint, Visio: Nada.

n0on3 13y ago

Nice piece; unfortunately it's not just about MS Word. It's pretty common for inferior/hurtful-in-the-long-term products to get leading positions in the market and become "unavoidable". The first easy guess is that marketing people are doing a great job for these products; the second one would be that the majority of us are too stupid/busy/unwilling-to-consider-long-term-consequences to spot their game and go for smarter choices. TL;DR: Please run humanity.upgrade(), we would think about their word processors l8r (:

skue 13y ago

This is an interesting article and has generated some good discussion, but blaming Word for mixing style sheets and control codes seems off to me. > Arguments raged internally: 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 and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there. Back in the 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the market leader - not MS Word. And WordPerfect 5.0 supported style sheets when it was released in the 80s, alongside the existing control codes that were already a core feature of WP.[1] Even after it supported WYSIWYG editing, WP still enabled users to Reveal Codes - essentially toggling from WYSIWYG to the underlying markup. I'm not defending MS Word as a program - I hate it too. I wish WordPerfect or something better had won. But I don't see how Microsoft alone can be blamed for deciding to support both control codes and style sheets. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_libraries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_li...

wissler 13y ago

It's part of the current human condition, where people want instant gratification and don't want to take the time to figure out or learn a properly designed editor.

Ethan_Mick 13y ago

My personal annoyance with Word is how terrible it works on a Mac. There are simply things I expect any text box to do (including this one that I am typing in to post this). Things like: 1: If I highlight text with my cursor and mouse, and I scroll using my trackpad (MacBook Air), I expect the text to be highlighted with the scrolling. Word fails at this. 2: I expect different my basic OS X commands to work, ctrl+e, go to end of line, ctrl+a, front of line, etc. These don't work in Word. 3: Scrolling is not smooth, typing is not smooth, and many other small annoyances. I understand that OS X isn't nearly as big as Windows for a market, but I would love it if the software crafted for it wasn't so bad.

MarcScott 13y ago

In my school I'm trying my best to push students away from using Word. If they're making quick notes, I ask them to do it in a text editor. If they're presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown. This is only for my CompSci classes, but it's a start. My next mission is to break the stranglehold that PowerPoint has on my students.

keithpeter 13y ago
"If they're presenting work for review I ask them to write it in markdown." Perhaps a git repository to track feedback and changes? Do they need to use diagrams or images at all?
- MarcScott 13y ago
  git is something I'm working towards. Ideally I'd like github to be our learning platform.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    I thought that might be the direction that you were moving in, and I think that is a really good idea for your particular students to get used to a source code repository and version control quickly. One thing I have not looked at yet but may do in the future is git-annex [1] and the associated GUI [2]. I'm hoping I can use git-annex to sync folders between laptops just using an external drive. [1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/ [2] http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/ That will allow music/video/images to be synced as well as text.

wildster 13y ago

Why has google docs stopped being developed?

NN88 13y ago

so what should I use?

markjbrown 13y ago

This is a pathetic rant. I'm surprised it got as many comments as it did. Oh wait, this is hacker news. No, I'm not surprised then.

blahbl4hblah 13y ago

Comparing word to Winston Smith in 1984 proves that you aren't a food writer no matter what you use. Tripe

dmourati 13y ago

Why stop at Word?

4dl0v3-p34c3 13y ago

We kinda had this talk, but it proved useless, since most users hardly change habits (the real reason to µ$ Word stagnation): http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1mt8a5/nearly_everyone_who_is_new_to_emacs_hates_it/ http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1mt8a5/nearly_everyon... Even IE6.

rob05c 13y ago

> a programmer's text editor (such as ed YES. Clearly the capricious abregation of Ed was where we went wrong. Let the faithful return! http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

tnkd 13y ago

Without putting too much thought into the subject, the state of Office in the enterprise upsets me. Over the last six years I've gradually rolled away from Outlook and Word in favour of Google Apps / Drive. True, it's not perfect, but for the 'lay user' (students per se?) it is sufficient and the barrier to entry is low. My real concern with Office comes from what if in the future I'm not in a position where the company I work for is still tied to the Office Suite of products. Productivity wise, switching back to Office (even Office365) is a real killer for someone that is proceeding efficient at the former.

chalst 13y ago

The reason many publishers prefer MS Word is that it is the best choice at the editing stage. It is much easier to find copy-editors who will be able work efficiently with Word than any other system, with Adobe Indesign/Incopy being a distant second. It would be possible to grow a tool infrastructure around Latex (and/or Context) to eliminate the practical problems working with that system, but at present it does not exist. Word's support for change tracking is very good. Change-tracking is a very different thing to version control: version control is about storing and reconciling difference versions of a file, while change tracking is about communicating the changes made for the other person to check. If I edit your text, I can switch change tracking on and off, so that the relevant changes I have made to your writing are visible for you to step through one-by-one, while the changes my macros made to make font choices consistent are untracked, so will not waste your time when you review the text. If version control and change tracking overlap somewhat in functionality, they have different uses and fundamentally different semantics.

dbot 13y ago

I'm a litigator who continues to be amazed by the page formatting requirements in courts around the country. Especially at the appellate level, it can take hours to find and then implement all of the requirements. Worse, all documents are then converted to PDF, making them even less useful. What's crazy is that most briefs are actually just a series of links: cite to Case A, B; cite to document C; cite to statute C...Sometimes attorneys will make "e-briefs" to actually link PDFs, but those usually cost thousands of dollars to manually generate. I'm working on an open-source court filing project that would let attorneys and the court write and post everything in an electronic format for easy linking and search. Think of it as a free, universal ECF/PACER for state courts. If anyone is interested in helping, feel free to drop me a line.

ajmarsh 13y ago

For me its MS Word's "outline mode" I'm not sure I could write a document longer than a few paragraphs without it.

triplesec 13y ago

There is until now no mention whatsoever in this thread of Openoffice, and I'm baffled as to why not. Sadly, they use the MX paradigm rather than improve the UXperience greatly, but, well, it's a start.

nicarus1984 13y ago

"It's a poor workman who blames his tools." You may not like Word, but I find it helpful for certain tasks. You want it to die? A bit dramatic and non-constructive. Basically, "I don't like it, so no one should use it."

sbussard 13y ago

I bet you could raise money to buy word.ms domain and point it to this post :p

mncolinlee 13y ago

Oddly enough, when I was a corporate intern technical writer, everything was being done there in DocBook XML. We were using PTC Arbortext products which were very expensive per seat. It's inevitable that the publishing industry will dump Word, but I don't think it's realistic to expect it all at once. First, they have to offer the ability to use other formats and they may require that the industry adopts a standard software package and document flow that does exactly what it needs. This sounds like an awesome open source project for someone who knows that industry's exact needs.