When I arrived in London I sent my CV as a PDf to a number of recruiters. Each one requested that I send a word copy, something that was difficult as I had written it in Latex.
I found out later that they want it in word so they can edit it, incorporate the cover letter, their own notes etc. Not a system that instilled me with confidence.
A fair number of recruiters have, or had, resume uptake systems that are/were based on VBA macros and required Word docs. I'm not sure if some remnant of these systems remain, but essentially, yes, they want an editable version of your resume.
Hrm. I may need to knock the "Word" format output option off my resume generator.
mk4ht is your friend here. Its part of tex live, and can handle most formatting. mk4ht oolatex yourcv.tex is really useful. Its not perfect, but its better than writing in word or open/libre office
That's okay as long as your skills are in demand and you have luxury to pick what you like. Will one refuse to demonstrate her website to an important person if by accident he only has some old version of the browser?
There are plenty of people who would submit in whatever format is required to land the job/contract/anything they desparately need and that positive quality is called 'perseverance' :)
It's because most recruiters want to be able to easily copy and paste data from your resume into reports for their clients and that doesn't work well from PDFs.
However, I don't want to work for a company that uses external recruiters that put stupid, restrictive requirements on applications either because they are too lazy to do their job well for the $10k+ commission they get for new placements.
The problem is even companies that may be ok still can have dinosaur recruiters, once a company is of a certain size is inevitable that not everyone they employ will be technical and for companies that are smaller they probably aren't able or interested in devoting technical resources to streamline the recruiting process
"Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files."
Wait, what?
In any event, he's clearly not the right customer for the product. Neither am I; my pathological hatred of Word has dimmed over the years and settled into a mild perpetual annoyance. An itch, if you will, that you dare not scratch too long or it will likely draw blood. And I got to that point even before I got hired at Microsoft four years ago.
But I've also seen times when some of Word's abilities (like the "Track Changes" feature being dissed in the article) are not only useful but essential. Example: a language spec being worked on by several people and actively reviewed by several dozen more.
Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-large business who's using it to churn out various types of paperwork -- not for the person who's just trying to write some text.
Also, no thread about Word would be complete without that mix of grimace and dismissive smirk we reserve for people who paste screen shots into a Word document, then attach it onto an email in order to send them to us.
We should also include Microsoft's obnoxious tendancy to release read-only documentation as mutable docx files instead of portable PDFs or even in its own not-invented-here PDF format, XPS.
> "Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-large business"
I've heard it said that Microsoft's "right" customer is themselves. They're a gigantic company that builds gigantic documents. Many of the esoteric features of Word were developed because somebody in Microsoft wanted to use them.
> "[MS Word] has become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work. Part of this is Microsoft's more-is-more approach to adding capabilities, and leaving all of them in the "on" position."
> "Publishing a two-word sentence as a Web Page, then pasting the source code back into MS Word yields an eight-page document. Egads!"
> "Track Changes ... makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor."
> "A tool that's lost its purpose makes a great toy."
The problem with trying to make an 'open document standard' is that everyone thinks they have an 'open document standard', so you end up with 30 'open document standards' that confuse the less technically inclined users and infuriate the more inclined.
Personally, until a better (read: equally universal) format comes out, I've got my document library saved as both .txt (unformatted + UTF-8 encoded) and .doc (formatted). Everyone uses both, at least.
I would agree with this article especially after it used the word "till". Till isn't the word you want to be using moron. Till is what a farm uses. Til, as in the shortening of 'until', is what you want to use. How the fuck does shit get published where 'til' is the accepted shortcut for a word that doesn't have an extra til.
Till exists in such popularity simply because spellcheckers won't correct it. Til brings up the red underline thingy, and people want to assume it knows what it means. Sadly, most people listen to it.
Till isn't what you mean. Til is. Fuck spellcheck, if that thing actually was smart you wouldn't have any headaches.
That's the sad thing about technological achievement. Most of the time it occurs because enough people start following the default behavior.
Don't get me start on how 'referer' became the default spelling for the HTTP referrer.
I think this is the year that LibreOffice actually takes off as a widespread replacement. No offense to any devs that might be reading, but the last few times I used it (or Open Office), it was awful in a vague, this is just sucky, slow, ugly way. 3.4.6, however, is great; I know my office could move over with barely a hiccup (we are technical bureaucrats -- lots of SAS and Excel and GIS).
I think it is only if you have some complex workflow dependent on VBA and links and all that crap that you would have a problem, and I think most people tried that garbage in the late nineties and never did it again. Mail merge is the only stupid automated thing that sort of works, and Libre has that.
I'm not sure how a clone that is nearly as complex (minus VBA) will take off as a "widespread replacement".
The clutter in Word permeates many Windows apps (not just those from MSFT -- take a look at WinZip, for example). Most everyday windows users have become used to this and are unlikely to change. This doesn't even count businesses that base their enterprise around MSFT products...
With Microsoft's push towards Windows 8, maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite. Until then, people will continue to use what they know.
"maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite"
Laws never disappear from the books, swords are never beaten into plowshares, and Word never, ever loses a feature, although some of them do get hidden.
Ok, maybe I am dreaming...but...if and when Office shows up for tablets (iOS/etc), maybe that will transition over to Win8/Metro. It is a dream, maybe an impossible dream.
I remember Excel 5 being fast and not sucking. Word 2.x wasn't bad either. However, you have a point, Word has been additive over the years.
I was about to retweet this news while honestly adding, "Who still uses Word?" ... then I remembered that less than one year ago, while still working at Xerox Research, Word was the standard and I was the only weirdo forwarding documents in PDF (because I had not authored them in Word).
... so, besides being aware that your microcosm is not representative ... I don't see how can word die (as it should). There are too many people that cannot drop it due to all the required learning to move away (e.g., most people do not even know there are alternatives to Word).
If it doesn't interoperate perfectly with Word's Track Changes, that doesn't matter: your counterparty in any legal negotiation is sure to be using Word.
In some cases (like the state office I work at), Libre Office track changes would be fine. We aren't all doing legal negotiating with counterparties (MS Office power users! I am super impressed!)
I wonder how hard it is to interoperate perfectly with Word's Track Changes, or, let's say, with a minimal set of critical Word features. Could a small smart team pull that off? That's how I'd try to do it if I were trying to kill Word. Or is Word so complicated that it would just be hopeless?
Track changes isn't part of any standard, so it's harder to duplicate.
Technical superiority won't defeat Word. Office is on every business desktop because of the licensing regime that Microsoft has been very successful at implementing.
Frankly, it's better to own the drafting process yourself : We're happy to show all the black-lined versions, but (due to 'technical difficulties') get our counterparties to send over manual changes which we implement...
Frankly, it's better to own the drafting process yourself : We're happy to show all the black-lined versions, but (due to 'technical difficulties') get our counterparties to send over manual changes which we implement...
> So there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's advanced functionality?
Why do you need any more? Legal itself is a huge field and a lot of the work produced are obviously documents. Even if it's just the legal field that use Track Changes, it seems like it would be a huge win.
It's not like Tracking is forced upon anyone. It's an extra feature that stays out of the way unless you want it there. I dont understand why this is even an issue.
It's not about disliking Word's advanced features, it's about disliking Word and that most industries have no particular need for most of Word's unique features. So far we have legal, so every other industry can stop using Word tomorrow without a problem? That's quite exciting to me but I doubt it's true.
> So there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's advanced functionality?
Not being facetious, let's name em.
In the Engineering/Consulting industry we use it often to collaborate on proposals, reports and other documents. Key clients - many of them utilities or energy companies - also prefer Word documents and use Track Changes.
It's very hard to move away from that momentum, partly because you can't use another tool and just export to .doc/.docx due to the format being so arcane.
For what it's worth though, Track Changes is what Word does pretty well. I rarely use it outside of work though, preferring something like Byword on my Mac or just TextEdit.
"A lot of software developers are seduced by the old '80/20' rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
"Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release 'lite' word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC."
My girlfriend is an academic and uses the track changes feature all the time when writing or editing papers and articles. When you add Endnote integration and the fact that most journals outside of the hard math heavy sciences want Word documents, Word is clearly the best choice.
Does she NEED Word? Technically not I suppose, but Word is the tool that makes her job the easiest. That being said she still curses Word and Endnote all the time, so there is no doubt room for improvement.
I work on European research projects, often with over 20 partners. When writing deliverables and integrating input from so many people, the track changes feature is an FSM-send. I say this as an otherwise hardcore Emacs and LaTeX guy.
I also work on some European projects and love LaTeX and git, so I'll chime in.
LaTeX is much better if everyone uses them. However, most people use Word, and at that point, you may as well too. Anything I write I write in LaTeX and convert to odf, then save as doc, but most people only know word and will not be able to work with anything else. For instance, I once sent my supervisor a beautifully formatted latex paper. She replied and said that she couldn't give any feedback without a word copy of the document. Sigh.
You wouldn't believe the amount of technical people who cannot do LaTeX... nevermind DCVS.
Also, tracking changes in a text document, with comments and such by the side, _is_ easier than looking at diffs and so on.
Looking at several of the other responses to this I found that most of the other individuals named fields that use either track changes or TOC generation. Those don't need Word. The inter-operation with other human beings who know and want to use Word, needs Word.
In biology (in government and industry) we use both. And we tend to use Word because that's what everyone else is using. But WordPerfect and LibreOffice generate TOC and figure lists, and track changes just fine. LaTeX and git also accomplish those goals. But the problem is working with other people in different groups, companies, levels of expertise, preference, etc. When track changes is breaking between LibreOffice and Word you just revert to using word to find the changes, and then incorporate them by hand into your LibreOffice document. Or, since you're using Word anyway and it does accomplish your goals, you just switch to Word.
Working in any setting aside from a self-contained research unit or the academic world, you just learn Word. In my case I learned Word and I use all of the various variable-esque and markup I can to make generating TOC, figure/table lists and references and adjusting values easier when working with people who just use Word because that's what you write reports in.
Even in an academic setting, if your advisers use Word (and prefer Word over dead trees) you're going to be creating Word documents for your thesis and academic papers (the journals mostly don't care because they re-typeset everything anyway) because you need their expertise to make your work awesome.
So, what about LaTeX? I like the idea more than the practice. Making basic changes (or what would be basic with CSS, Word, InDesign) to templates is mindbogglingly complicated to beginners. I'm not sure it's even particularly easy to create custom templates and formatting for experienced LaTeX users. However, once you have the Ecology, Washington Department of Fish And Wildlife, USDA, etc. LaTeX template all future publications for those is much faster.
If you want to know the actual one true solution to kill Word for academic, industry and government publishing it's this:
Modify Lyx (or make something like it using Markdown or reST) that uses sane defaults (I think WYSIWYM with a live preview is probably okay for everyone except the "lost dog" folks), some auto-correction, spelling and grammar checking tools and has the ability to easily and correctly make headings, adjust page headers and footers, footnotes, endnotes, and insert and edit figures, tables (the table formatting tools should be very powerful, ideally also the ability to include data from Excel and also tie into R, SAS and SPSS), images and variables (for things like n, p-value, species names) and integrate it with Evernote, Endnote, Papers, Mendeley and BibTeX (though, supporting BibTeX gets you pretty far). Now, make an extensive repository of formats for publications (like PyPI, rubygems, etc. but for templates from academic journals etc.) Ideally the templating should be powerful enough for experts to create anything they can imagine and simple enough that the Masters student studying the behavior of Little Auks can get her short fact sheet to look how she wants it to for her presentation to the Reykjavik Ornithological Society (using system fonts should not be difficult or require any amount of documentation reading).
Now you need to add collaboration tools. Track changes, highlighting, and commenting gets you to 90% of use cases for Word. Add in version control that is easy and makes sense, the ability for multiple people to live edit the same document and good merging tools (for multiple offline changes to the same document by different people) and suddenly your software is more useful than Word.
Oh, and it needs to be open-source, because us science-ey folks are increasingly grumpy about closed-source things, and we already have to buy the Microsoft Office suite to deal with documents and data from multiple different sources. It also can't be multiple gigabytes to download bec...
And for good reason. Trying to edit anything without 'track changes' would be a nightmare. This guy's argument that you can just view the version history with Google Docs is ridiculous, that doesn't even come close to being a feasible replacement.
A legal document is essentially a program; but:
- They don't use variables where they should.
- They don't factor out common code in libraries.
- They don't use any reasonable kind of diff and patch.
All this means they are doing extra work with bad tools not made for their needs. They might not see it, but that's lame.
erm no its a very speclised form of document - I wish programmers who have no experience of how laws are made and parliamentary procedure would stop making broad assumptions like this.
Any thing using a parliamentry system to draft laws has a lot of fuzy areas and some non obvious gotchas.
I while back i had a whole day being briefed on the new employment laws one of my collegues asked well why did they not draft the wording so its clear exactly when you are allowed to discriminate on age grounds.
The General Counsel who was leading the course gave a wry grin and said well there are lots of lawyers in the House of commons so maybe they wanted to create loads of work for there lawyer friends
I don't know why have you brought up draft laws. Parents said "legal documents," of which only a minuscule number are laws. Most are contracts, licenses, agreements, deeds, etc.
no that's just the high level representation of the program I was commenting the tendency of non political tecies (who are not wonks) to make a very superficial link between using a SCS to commit code and how government and in how particular laws are made.
* who has actually developed software for drafting and reviewing legal documents within parliamentary procedure
I can tell you that all the above is entirely true.
In any case, the vast majority of legal documents in everyday use aren't developed in a parliamentary system, they're developed within the framework of contract law, where sensible refactoring and variable naming would go a very long way if lawyers had the tooling and training to make use of them.
No it's not; a program defines computations from certain inputs to outputs. A legal document, on the other hand, is a deontologigal set of rules saying you must X and cannot Y etc. While introducing variables and libraries could make documents shorter, they wouldn't be easier to read or write, because a single change could have massive effects in other places, which you wouldn't notice at first because there's no computer to test the "code" on. In the end legal text is just natural language, and it needs to be interpreted as such. And this is for the better, I for one wouldn't want a judge to just apply some formal procedure to decide guilt.
I believe it's not computation because the inputs are not well-defined, and the result depends on contexts which aren't well-defined either.
What kind of definition of "look like" are you working with? I see words that are in the dictionary, plus I can parse them into meaningful sentences. I have no idea how "text" is supposed to behave anyway... It's about what humans do with it, and that happens to be the same as with other texts: humans read it and do stuff based on that. Sure there are differences, just as a letter of recommendation differs from a novel, but if you are claiming it's a different "language" you'll have to back that up.
Well, programs sometimes have to handle such problems too.
You can always find keywords and function names from a program source in a dictionary, but it doesn't make program source a normal text. The main difference is that a legal document can be evaluated and it transforms input to output; novel doesn't.
Because no one single alternative is vastly superior to it.
Microsoft won the Office wars in the mid 1990s by bundling all the major applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, later Outlook and possibly Visio, I don't recall) in a single package that cost less than buying the alternatives (WordPerfect, AmiWord, Lotus123, Quattro, etc.) individually. WordPerfect (the most popular word processing program at the time) got caught flat-footed with the shift from DOS to Windows 3.1, in part due to illegal monopoly actions as alleged in a still ongoing suit by Novell (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell-micros...).
Effectively, Microsoft poisoned the well: individual competitors couldn't outflank it, were starved for cash, and couldn't collaborate on a single alternative. Sucks to play in a proprietary world when the racetrack owner's got a horse in the race.
My own history: I'd previously used a few word processing / text editing tools, including MacWrite, WordPerfect, WordStar, vi, DOS EDIT, EDT, EVE, and AmiPro. I always found Word to be fussy, and during this period started using Linux. I recognized the value in learning a single tool that couldn't be crushed by competition or abandoned by a single vendor, and so returned to vi (as vim) for virtually all my editing, with some fill-ins from Emacs, Lyx, and the odd usage of Abiword (quick letters for postal mail) or OpenOffice/LibreOffice (if I actually have to deal with Microsoft formats). Occasionally Google Docs. And a lot of web forms (most of which go to a spawned vi editor via Vimperator, such as this one). Office97 was the first and last time I really used Microsoft's suite (though I've certainly been exposed to it since), and the less I have to be exposed to it, the better.
What I've mostly found is that text editing suits my needs far better than word processing / DTP. And there are very few compatibility issues.
And I've found that text mostly meets my needs too. But that's partly because I'm technical and willing/able to deal with formatting codes for things that should be rendered as more than text: html, restructured text, markdown, etc. In a sense it's a step backwards to WordPerfect and their split screen.
There's a lot to be said for wysiwyg. Most people are unwilling or unable to learn or use formatting code in plain text and no immediate rendering of the result.
But fundamentally there's no reason why anyone should have to deal with plain text source that produces nicely rendered output (unless we want to). Computers are really, really good at displaying things nicely, and hiding details.
The problem is that Word (and the creeping Sharepoint ecosystem) are much too powerful for almost everyone's needs. My work is typical: all our documents are a single font, and they have tables. The docs are kept in Sharepoint, and we do nothing with Sharepoint but keep documents.
That over-engineered solution would be better replaced with a very simple word processor like WordPad or some similar rtf tool, and the file system.
I don't need to use the truck that takes space shuttles from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad just to get to work.
The key problem with WYSIWYG is that it doesn't exist any more. The key point as I read of the original article was that Word is a WYSIWYG tool aimed at print.
The Slate article could have been a lot better if the author noted the distinction between WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM. Followed immediately by the standard observation that WYSIWYM is a tougher nut. Most of the solutions I'm familiar with rely on either markup (HTML, LaTeX, Wiki parkup, markdown, etc.) or structural conventions (my text docs strongly resemble 1970s typewritten documents in line-length, paragraph style, etc. formats).
The great thing about LaTeX is that your document is entirely semantic, and the style is applied by the stylesheet. With tools such as Lyx, this is reasonably intuitive, though stylesheet production itself is a nontrivial task. Similar concepts exist for Web, obviously, with HTML and CSS.
The problem is that for the typical user, print remains a simple conceptual model to understand, regardless of how brittle it is in a world with mulitple output formats. There's been a lot of thought put into this area over decades, and for a good tool to emerge and become prominant is yet another tough nut.
I agree (from a limited and somewhat old exposure) with your assessment of Sharepoint. I've mostly seen it used as "Christmas Tree" in which individual document blobs (or other objects) are hung, rather than a Wiki in which documents are interlinked, readily refactorable, and dynamic.
I've been happily doing my postgrad in compsci, using the excellent LaTeX for all my papers and thesis. I got a job in medical research... holy shit... all the publishers require Word documents. Moving from LaTeX to Word is like moving from Python to Fortran on punch cards.
I agree with you, LaTeX is awesome for what it is commonly used for. No question there. However the learning curve is much higher than that of Word. So I think complexity and readability wise to an average worker, LaTeX to Word is more like Fortran to English.
Honestly, I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about Word as a program. I just wish .odf would replace the open-in-name-only .docx/.xlsx/etc formats in public use.
If that were the case, then what do I care if people are using a different program to open them?
This whole article is basically about using the wrong tool for the job which the author mentions directly:
> Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing.
Well yea. I dont think anyone will argue with that.
> Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my document was carrying. Here's a snippet:
The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?
>Word's idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor.
First of all, this is incorrect. In the latest version of Word, if you have files stored at a shared location you can collaborate by both editing the file directly like in Google Docs. Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome. It does exactly what it's meant to do. Any changes you make while tracking is the displayed. I dont understand what "world most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor" has anything to do with the tool, rather than the editor himself.
> When I was writing a book, which required lots of alone time with a giant file—and lots of word-counting, which Microsoft is good at—I stuck with Word.
"Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?"
No, but it's a huge surprise to users that copying and pasting from Word into a completely different program (say, a rich text editor in a web browser) brings all that crap along. Unless it's pasting into another Word window, it should paste the plain text. There is absolutely no situation where pasting Word's pseudo-HTML into a non-Microsoft program is the right thing to do. As you mention, Word's formatting is hideously complex, so why even bother? It isn't going to work. Just paste the text.
From what I understand, the copy command will put some content into clipboard, then the paste command can be programmed to read that content and print or convert it accordingly.
For example, if I copy some content with formatting from Word and paste it into Google Docs it will try to preserve the format. Is that expected behavior? I dont know, but that's how it's designed and I think that makes a lot of sense. If I have a table in Word why shouldn't I be able to copy that to Google Docs?
I dont know enough about the clipboard programming to know if the program that calls copy can determine what comes out based on the paste program.
Also, I think the garbage formatting lines in that article will never be shown to the user. That will only be shown if you try to look at the formatting directly or if you're reading the HTML.
I don't know about Google docs per se, but most rich text editors produce horribly broken results when Word's "HTML" is pasted in. Many of them have add-ons or special procedures to attempt to clean up the mess, but it's an iffy proposition at best.
It's worth pointing out that for a _large_ number of users, the primary copy/paste flow from a Word document is into another Office application (quite often Outlook).
The end result is that you end up with two common flows:
* The program I'm pasting into is another Office app and supports (roughly) the same formatting, or
* The program I'm pasting into is a very rudimentary text-handling program and will just look for the plain-text version of whatever was copied.
Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley by trying and failing to parse Office's output, but I suspect for most people this is a huge red herring.
p.s. I'm a Microsoft employee, but I have nothing to do with how Office handles copy/paste. This is just my opinion.
"Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley"
"A number of apps" meaning "every textarea on the web with contenteditable set to true"?
And it isn't "trying and failing to parse Office's output" -- it's more like "taking Office's word for it that the garbage on the clipboard is actually HTML, when it isn't".
To both of your points, in the example from the article, the author is not describing how Word converts documents to HTML. He is describing the XML markup that the newer versions of Word use, and which can be carried along when you cut and paste text from Word.
When you copy some content from MS Word into the clipboard, it gets copied in a number of formats, including plain text. When you paste it to another application, it is for the application to choose which format to use from the clipboard. I think that the author tried to paste the content to GMail and GMail tried to preserve the original formatting and failed.
1) You have a contenteditable region (or a rich text editor that otherwise can handle HTML).
2) User copies something from Word. One of the choices on the clipboard claims to be HTML. It isn't. It's pure garbage, understandable only to other Microsoft products.
The rich text editor has two choices: disable pasting HTML altogether (even from within itself, or from another application that actually does put real HTML on the clipboard) or deal with the garbage that comes in from someone pasting from Word.
The fundamental problem here is that Word puts garbage on the clipboard and lies about it, claiming that it's HTML.
OLE, or whatever it's called these days, is magic - the other day, i set up a label printer and all the bundled programs it came with. I right-clicked to copy a jpeg in Chrome, hit paste in the label editor, without knowing if it would work - and it did. This is an image, going between a cross-platform Skia program and contracted fixed-function bundleware i'll never use twice, made by two completely different companies, and it... blew my mind a little. I have a resolved respect for the native platform capabilities. I mean, sure, it's just a tag in the clipboard code somewhere, but... fascinating.
Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)
It's pretty likely that your example case involved the two programs both using a standard clipboard format (a bitmap), not something more sophisticated.
I'd say that the track changes feature has a core of awesome that is made ugly by a really bad UX.
The worst case is making a bunch of fine-grained changes to a page -- say, a collaborator with poor grammar. Each change shows up with its own fat bubble explaining who made the change and when. You do, as claimed in TFA, end up looking like an anal-retentive a-hole (e.g., switching commas inside quotes 10 times per page results in 10 fat bubbles explaining each change). I simply don't do fine-grained edits with Track Changes on, because I can't bear to see order of 50 change bubbles per page.
Another problem with the track changes UX is iterated changes. You make a change, and then a change to that change (e.g., reword twice). Each one produces a bubble. Eventually you can't tell what the hell is going on. The owner of the document can choose to accept the changes piecemeal, which could result in chaos. You spend more effort trying to engineer a minimal set of changes than thinking about the content of the change.
> The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?
It absolutely is a huge surprise. Word presumably uses its own internal format for copy/pasting within Word, and for copy/pasting in HTML format, it should strip everything down to a few minimal tags like <b>, <i> and such. That would be the logical, obvious and useful solution.
Bill Gates left Microsoft prior to move on to bigger and better things. If it was his influence that created the design that everyone despised in 2007, which I'll argue that it wasn't, they'd have changed by now.
Slate would be an example of something that Bill Gates helped create because of the value it'd bring to the world - not because of anything from an economic standpoint.
Word is not a program for editing text. If you want to edit text and only text, there are a hundred different tools that allow you to do that much more efficiently. Then you have Markdown et al. for formatting your text.
What word actually is, for most people who don't need its advanced features, is an amateur desktop publishing tool. Word is for making fliers that you stick to the light pole. Word is for printing out notices that you stick to the coffee maker. Word is for writing pretty invitations for your 7 year old's birthday party. The same is true of virtually every "word processor" out there, including LibreOffice Writer. The switch from text editor to desktop publishing tool took place right around the time they started displaying page outlines in wonderful WYSIWYG. You don't need WYSIWYG if all you care about is the content, right?
But everyone has an inner artist, even though only a few are actually any good. It's amazing how much people (including myself) care about how their text appears on a piece of paper or a WYSIWYG editor. Sometimes, this distracts from the content. But as long as the content isn't being completely neglected, I think we should forgive people for wanting to control the font in which their writings appear, or for wanting their quotes to look "smart", or for spending 20 minutes tweaking the line spacing of their resume. It's human nature to mix a sense of aesthetics with everything. Word caters to that desire. In this respect, a PDF file is only marginally better from the point of view of the unfortunate recipient, and sometimes even worse.
So the problem isn't Word, it's people who abuse Word while performing tasks to which it is not best suited. For example, when you're sending a story to an editor, it's obvious that the editor only cares about the ASCII content and not your choice of fonts and margins.
Tools like PageMaker, InDesign or MS Publisher are tools for fliers, notices, and invitations. Word is for documents. Essays, contracts, NDAs, memos. Documents with lots of text but still meant to be formatted for printing.
I think the author's best point isn't so much that it's wrong tool for the job bur rather the job that Word is for is much less relevant now. Just like typewriters were obsolete when word processors arrived; word processors are themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't printed.
True. But Word has a much larger installed base than any of the real desktop publishing tools you mentioned, or any proper web page editing tool. Every new PC nowadays includes Starter editions of Word and Excel. Word also happens to be capable of doing some of the things that these more specialized tools do, albeit rather badly. Meanwhile, people don't like to learn new tools. So it should come as no surprise that everyone just uses Word for everything. The result? Wrong tool for the job.
But I'm not sure if I agree with OP's idea that Word is becoming obsolete. Maybe it's not very useful for technically oriented people, but we still have a long way to go before printing becomes obsolete, if it ever does. Even Google Docs shows page outlines by default, as if the document were meant to be printed on Letter-sized paper. Which means the best that we can hope for, for the foreseeable future, is that people will use the right tool for the job. [edited]
word processors are themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't printed.
I don't see that.
When contracting I am always being sent Word docs for this and that. There's rarely a need for anyone to print them; the value seems to be in the ability to control layout and highlighting, embed nicely formatted tables, and include images or diagrams, all as viewed on a computer.
Even if we assumed no one was ever going to print these documents, only pass them around to a limited audience, what would be a better tool for the average person helping out on a project? If not Word then almost certainly something very much like it.
Google Docs I can see, though it's basically "Word, but in your browser." (Hence "If not Word then almost certainly something very much like it.")
I've had some mild push-back from a few people when trying to get them to switch from Word, but it has the upside of you always knowing what the current version is, a problem the Wordists I've dealt with run into often.
A wiki, though, is a lost cause for many. I do not want to be the one having to teach people how to correctly format tables or embed images with the correct size and captions.
"Why do I have to learn all this stuff when we already know how to use Word?" is a common lament.
> Tools like PageMaker, InDesign or MS Publisher are tools for fliers, notices, and invitations.
I have no experience with MS Publisher but the other two are certainly not. They are tools for professional typesetters, have a very steep learning curve and are priced accordingly. Using them to create Fliers, notices and invitations would be an overkill. In fact, now a days, they are an overkill even for a good number of books!
> But as long as the content isn't being completely neglected, I think we should forgive people for wanting to control the font in which their writings appear, or for wanting their quotes to look "smart", or for spending 20 minutes tweaking the line spacing of their resume. It's human nature to mix a sense of aesthetics with everything.
Except that almost nobody I know does that. It's quite the opposite, actually - most of the people I interact with don't give a crap about how the text looks, as long as the content is right. Sometimes it applies even to people earning money on publishing, like Internet journalists. I can spot spelling, punctiation and spacing mistakes immediately, almost subconsciously, after looking at the text and because of that I tend to annoy many people by insisting that no, a text full of typos, misplaced spaces and without much formatting is NOT of an acceptable quality.
Why people completely don't care about aesthetics is beyond me. Maybe I watched too much TV series (like Star Trek: TNG) in my childhood and now believe that pretty and functional are not mutually exclusive?
Note: In the Microsoft canon, Publisher is the desktop publishing tool for the masses.
The problem with Word is also it's greatness -- it does everything. It's a word processor. It integrates with SharePoint for content management and all sorts of whiz-bang features. You can make flyers. Insert cross-references. Translate stuff into German. Embed spreadsheets or crazy tie-ins to backend business systems. Draw stuff.
Word can write well to blogs (most of the time). But you need to create a new "blog" instead of a new "document." Word 2007 & 2010 both do this very well.
I've been using MS word for at least 15 years - but 99% of the time when crafting documents, I do not use MS-Word. Much of the time I simply use my web browser (as I am now.) A lot of the time I use mail.app.
For the 3-5 pages of notes, I switch to textedit - which I love, and is awesome but does have a bad habit of steadily increasing the number of open documents I have (Quitting doesn't close them - next time you restart they all come back - I understand why, but it doesn't change the fact that I have to, about once a week, manually do some garbage-collection to keep the number of open docs down to a reasonable number)
But - when I'm putting together a 50-100 page technical specification, in which I'm embedding PDFs, figures, captions, cleaver headers/footers, carefully watermarked "DRAFT", Auto-updating table of contents, section breaks for multi-column sections, nicely crafted tables, and, most important of all for me - the ability to send this 75 page document to six reviewers, and get their comments nicely organized in electronic accept/reject mode - I am happy that MS Word is available during that 1% of my workflow.
I agree with the author for the other 99% though. Text, or one of its markdown variants is a helluva lot more 2012 friendly.
I assume you're talking about how Lion apps reopen the last open docs by default - you can disable this (for all OS X apps) in System Preferences > General > Restore windows when quitting/reopening apps
i'm switching as many clients as possible away from Word to google docs where it is possible and makes sense. just yesterday i had a client ask me for some software to write and submit docs on a Mac notebook for her online classes. it took 3 minutes to set her up with gmail and google docs and show her how to share.
the interface is clean, no ribbon shit, nothing extra. it's cloud wordpad++. it's inherently cross-platform and free.
there is a place for word, but that place is small in today's world, and even smaller for the asking price.
the versioned editing is useful. but i'm fairly confident there is an automatically git-backed revision/collab cloud editor out there...the name escapes me.
The tools within Word that help with the task of document/story creation are underapreciated. Outline view, spell checking, comments, and synonym/dictionary are very useful for my kids and myself. Even the autocorrect feature that the author decries can be quite useful if you customize it.
My special needs son uses a program with Word called WordQ. The combination of the features above plus WordQ have made an enormous difference in his abiity to express himself through writing. Sure, he won't be writing a Web site with Word but he is writing his own stories.
I consider Word to be one of the greatest programs on Windows. It has always did well what it was meant to do - a noob friendly professional publishing tool.
Heck, I use it on my Mac as well. A major flaw mentioned in this article (to edit web documents in word) is like editing vector graphics in Photoshop - it wasn't built for that.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadIf you only accept resumes in Word format, you're not the dinosaur I want to work for.
True story.
Today I sent a link to my CV online, in HTML.
I found out later that they want it in word so they can edit it, incorporate the cover letter, their own notes etc. Not a system that instilled me with confidence.
Hrm. I may need to knock the "Word" format output option off my resume generator.
There are plenty of people who would submit in whatever format is required to land the job/contract/anything they desparately need and that positive quality is called 'perseverance' :)
However, I don't want to work for a company that uses external recruiters that put stupid, restrictive requirements on applications either because they are too lazy to do their job well for the $10k+ commission they get for new placements.
It's the same article. So are both SMH and Slate syndicating from the same source or is Tom Socca employed by both?
Cheers.
Wait, what?
In any event, he's clearly not the right customer for the product. Neither am I; my pathological hatred of Word has dimmed over the years and settled into a mild perpetual annoyance. An itch, if you will, that you dare not scratch too long or it will likely draw blood. And I got to that point even before I got hired at Microsoft four years ago.
But I've also seen times when some of Word's abilities (like the "Track Changes" feature being dissed in the article) are not only useful but essential. Example: a language spec being worked on by several people and actively reviewed by several dozen more.
Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-large business who's using it to churn out various types of paperwork -- not for the person who's just trying to write some text.
I've heard it said that Microsoft's "right" customer is themselves. They're a gigantic company that builds gigantic documents. Many of the esoteric features of Word were developed because somebody in Microsoft wanted to use them.
> <img id="obligatory-clippy-joke" />
> "[MS Word] has become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work. Part of this is Microsoft's more-is-more approach to adding capabilities, and leaving all of them in the "on" position."
> "Publishing a two-word sentence as a Web Page, then pasting the source code back into MS Word yields an eight-page document. Egads!"
> "Track Changes ... makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor."
> "A tool that's lost its purpose makes a great toy."
Personally, until a better (read: equally universal) format comes out, I've got my document library saved as both .txt (unformatted + UTF-8 encoded) and .doc (formatted). Everyone uses both, at least.
Till exists in such popularity simply because spellcheckers won't correct it. Til brings up the red underline thingy, and people want to assume it knows what it means. Sadly, most people listen to it.
Till isn't what you mean. Til is. Fuck spellcheck, if that thing actually was smart you wouldn't have any headaches.
That's the sad thing about technological achievement. Most of the time it occurs because enough people start following the default behavior.
Don't get me start on how 'referer' became the default spelling for the HTTP referrer.
I think it is only if you have some complex workflow dependent on VBA and links and all that crap that you would have a problem, and I think most people tried that garbage in the late nineties and never did it again. Mail merge is the only stupid automated thing that sort of works, and Libre has that.
The clutter in Word permeates many Windows apps (not just those from MSFT -- take a look at WinZip, for example). Most everyday windows users have become used to this and are unlikely to change. This doesn't even count businesses that base their enterprise around MSFT products...
With Microsoft's push towards Windows 8, maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite. Until then, people will continue to use what they know.
Laws never disappear from the books, swords are never beaten into plowshares, and Word never, ever loses a feature, although some of them do get hidden.
I remember Excel 5 being fast and not sucking. Word 2.x wasn't bad either. However, you have a point, Word has been additive over the years.
... so, besides being aware that your microcosm is not representative ... I don't see how can word die (as it should). There are too many people that cannot drop it due to all the required learning to move away (e.g., most people do not even know there are alternatives to Word).
Not being facetious, let's name em.
Technical superiority won't defeat Word. Office is on every business desktop because of the licensing regime that Microsoft has been very successful at implementing.
Why do you need any more? Legal itself is a huge field and a lot of the work produced are obviously documents. Even if it's just the legal field that use Track Changes, it seems like it would be a huge win.
It's not like Tracking is forced upon anyone. It's an extra feature that stays out of the way unless you want it there. I dont understand why this is even an issue.
In the Engineering/Consulting industry we use it often to collaborate on proposals, reports and other documents. Key clients - many of them utilities or energy companies - also prefer Word documents and use Track Changes.
It's very hard to move away from that momentum, partly because you can't use another tool and just export to .doc/.docx due to the format being so arcane.
For what it's worth though, Track Changes is what Word does pretty well. I rarely use it outside of work though, preferring something like Byword on my Mac or just TextEdit.
"A lot of software developers are seduced by the old '80/20' rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
"Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release 'lite' word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC."
Does she NEED Word? Technically not I suppose, but Word is the tool that makes her job the easiest. That being said she still curses Word and Endnote all the time, so there is no doubt room for improvement.
LaTeX is much better if everyone uses them. However, most people use Word, and at that point, you may as well too. Anything I write I write in LaTeX and convert to odf, then save as doc, but most people only know word and will not be able to work with anything else. For instance, I once sent my supervisor a beautifully formatted latex paper. She replied and said that she couldn't give any feedback without a word copy of the document. Sigh.
In biology (in government and industry) we use both. And we tend to use Word because that's what everyone else is using. But WordPerfect and LibreOffice generate TOC and figure lists, and track changes just fine. LaTeX and git also accomplish those goals. But the problem is working with other people in different groups, companies, levels of expertise, preference, etc. When track changes is breaking between LibreOffice and Word you just revert to using word to find the changes, and then incorporate them by hand into your LibreOffice document. Or, since you're using Word anyway and it does accomplish your goals, you just switch to Word.
Working in any setting aside from a self-contained research unit or the academic world, you just learn Word. In my case I learned Word and I use all of the various variable-esque and markup I can to make generating TOC, figure/table lists and references and adjusting values easier when working with people who just use Word because that's what you write reports in.
Even in an academic setting, if your advisers use Word (and prefer Word over dead trees) you're going to be creating Word documents for your thesis and academic papers (the journals mostly don't care because they re-typeset everything anyway) because you need their expertise to make your work awesome.
So, what about LaTeX? I like the idea more than the practice. Making basic changes (or what would be basic with CSS, Word, InDesign) to templates is mindbogglingly complicated to beginners. I'm not sure it's even particularly easy to create custom templates and formatting for experienced LaTeX users. However, once you have the Ecology, Washington Department of Fish And Wildlife, USDA, etc. LaTeX template all future publications for those is much faster.
If you want to know the actual one true solution to kill Word for academic, industry and government publishing it's this:
Modify Lyx (or make something like it using Markdown or reST) that uses sane defaults (I think WYSIWYM with a live preview is probably okay for everyone except the "lost dog" folks), some auto-correction, spelling and grammar checking tools and has the ability to easily and correctly make headings, adjust page headers and footers, footnotes, endnotes, and insert and edit figures, tables (the table formatting tools should be very powerful, ideally also the ability to include data from Excel and also tie into R, SAS and SPSS), images and variables (for things like n, p-value, species names) and integrate it with Evernote, Endnote, Papers, Mendeley and BibTeX (though, supporting BibTeX gets you pretty far). Now, make an extensive repository of formats for publications (like PyPI, rubygems, etc. but for templates from academic journals etc.) Ideally the templating should be powerful enough for experts to create anything they can imagine and simple enough that the Masters student studying the behavior of Little Auks can get her short fact sheet to look how she wants it to for her presentation to the Reykjavik Ornithological Society (using system fonts should not be difficult or require any amount of documentation reading).
Now you need to add collaboration tools. Track changes, highlighting, and commenting gets you to 90% of use cases for Word. Add in version control that is easy and makes sense, the ability for multiple people to live edit the same document and good merging tools (for multiple offline changes to the same document by different people) and suddenly your software is more useful than Word.
Oh, and it needs to be open-source, because us science-ey folks are increasingly grumpy about closed-source things, and we already have to buy the Microsoft Office suite to deal with documents and data from multiple different sources. It also can't be multiple gigabytes to download bec...
All this means they are doing extra work with bad tools not made for their needs. They might not see it, but that's lame.
Any thing using a parliamentry system to draft laws has a lot of fuzy areas and some non obvious gotchas.
I while back i had a whole day being briefed on the new employment laws one of my collegues asked well why did they not draft the wording so its clear exactly when you are allowed to discriminate on age grounds.
The General Counsel who was leading the course gave a wry grin and said well there are lots of lawyers in the House of commons so maybe they wanted to create loads of work for there lawyer friends
* whose father is an academic lawyer
* who has actually developed software for drafting and reviewing legal documents within parliamentary procedure
I can tell you that all the above is entirely true.
In any case, the vast majority of legal documents in everyday use aren't developed in a parliamentary system, they're developed within the framework of contract law, where sensible refactoring and variable naming would go a very long way if lawyers had the tooling and training to make use of them.
Legal text doesn't look like natural language and doesn't behave as one.
What kind of definition of "look like" are you working with? I see words that are in the dictionary, plus I can parse them into meaningful sentences. I have no idea how "text" is supposed to behave anyway... It's about what humans do with it, and that happens to be the same as with other texts: humans read it and do stuff based on that. Sure there are differences, just as a letter of recommendation differs from a novel, but if you are claiming it's a different "language" you'll have to back that up.
You can always find keywords and function names from a program source in a dictionary, but it doesn't make program source a normal text. The main difference is that a legal document can be evaluated and it transforms input to output; novel doesn't.
I've never worked anywhere that they didn't despise Word.
Why won't it die? Why?
Why?
Because no one single alternative is vastly superior to it.
Microsoft won the Office wars in the mid 1990s by bundling all the major applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, later Outlook and possibly Visio, I don't recall) in a single package that cost less than buying the alternatives (WordPerfect, AmiWord, Lotus123, Quattro, etc.) individually. WordPerfect (the most popular word processing program at the time) got caught flat-footed with the shift from DOS to Windows 3.1, in part due to illegal monopoly actions as alleged in a still ongoing suit by Novell (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell-micros...).
Effectively, Microsoft poisoned the well: individual competitors couldn't outflank it, were starved for cash, and couldn't collaborate on a single alternative. Sucks to play in a proprietary world when the racetrack owner's got a horse in the race.
My own history: I'd previously used a few word processing / text editing tools, including MacWrite, WordPerfect, WordStar, vi, DOS EDIT, EDT, EVE, and AmiPro. I always found Word to be fussy, and during this period started using Linux. I recognized the value in learning a single tool that couldn't be crushed by competition or abandoned by a single vendor, and so returned to vi (as vim) for virtually all my editing, with some fill-ins from Emacs, Lyx, and the odd usage of Abiword (quick letters for postal mail) or OpenOffice/LibreOffice (if I actually have to deal with Microsoft formats). Occasionally Google Docs. And a lot of web forms (most of which go to a spawned vi editor via Vimperator, such as this one). Office97 was the first and last time I really used Microsoft's suite (though I've certainly been exposed to it since), and the less I have to be exposed to it, the better.
What I've mostly found is that text editing suits my needs far better than word processing / DTP. And there are very few compatibility issues.
There's a lot to be said for wysiwyg. Most people are unwilling or unable to learn or use formatting code in plain text and no immediate rendering of the result.
But fundamentally there's no reason why anyone should have to deal with plain text source that produces nicely rendered output (unless we want to). Computers are really, really good at displaying things nicely, and hiding details.
The problem is that Word (and the creeping Sharepoint ecosystem) are much too powerful for almost everyone's needs. My work is typical: all our documents are a single font, and they have tables. The docs are kept in Sharepoint, and we do nothing with Sharepoint but keep documents.
That over-engineered solution would be better replaced with a very simple word processor like WordPad or some similar rtf tool, and the file system.
I don't need to use the truck that takes space shuttles from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad just to get to work.
The Slate article could have been a lot better if the author noted the distinction between WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM. Followed immediately by the standard observation that WYSIWYM is a tougher nut. Most of the solutions I'm familiar with rely on either markup (HTML, LaTeX, Wiki parkup, markdown, etc.) or structural conventions (my text docs strongly resemble 1970s typewritten documents in line-length, paragraph style, etc. formats).
The great thing about LaTeX is that your document is entirely semantic, and the style is applied by the stylesheet. With tools such as Lyx, this is reasonably intuitive, though stylesheet production itself is a nontrivial task. Similar concepts exist for Web, obviously, with HTML and CSS.
The problem is that for the typical user, print remains a simple conceptual model to understand, regardless of how brittle it is in a world with mulitple output formats. There's been a lot of thought put into this area over decades, and for a good tool to emerge and become prominant is yet another tough nut.
I agree (from a limited and somewhat old exposure) with your assessment of Sharepoint. I've mostly seen it used as "Christmas Tree" in which individual document blobs (or other objects) are hung, rather than a Wiki in which documents are interlinked, readily refactorable, and dynamic.
It's not word, but it may be acceptably close.
If that were the case, then what do I care if people are using a different program to open them?
> Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing.
Well yea. I dont think anyone will argue with that.
> Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my document was carrying. Here's a snippet:
The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?
>Word's idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor.
First of all, this is incorrect. In the latest version of Word, if you have files stored at a shared location you can collaborate by both editing the file directly like in Google Docs. Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome. It does exactly what it's meant to do. Any changes you make while tracking is the displayed. I dont understand what "world most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor" has anything to do with the tool, rather than the editor himself.
> When I was writing a book, which required lots of alone time with a giant file—and lots of word-counting, which Microsoft is good at—I stuck with Word.
Good for you.
No, but it's a huge surprise to users that copying and pasting from Word into a completely different program (say, a rich text editor in a web browser) brings all that crap along. Unless it's pasting into another Word window, it should paste the plain text. There is absolutely no situation where pasting Word's pseudo-HTML into a non-Microsoft program is the right thing to do. As you mention, Word's formatting is hideously complex, so why even bother? It isn't going to work. Just paste the text.
For example, if I copy some content with formatting from Word and paste it into Google Docs it will try to preserve the format. Is that expected behavior? I dont know, but that's how it's designed and I think that makes a lot of sense. If I have a table in Word why shouldn't I be able to copy that to Google Docs?
I dont know enough about the clipboard programming to know if the program that calls copy can determine what comes out based on the paste program.
Also, I think the garbage formatting lines in that article will never be shown to the user. That will only be shown if you try to look at the formatting directly or if you're reading the HTML.
The end result is that you end up with two common flows:
* The program I'm pasting into is another Office app and supports (roughly) the same formatting, or
* The program I'm pasting into is a very rudimentary text-handling program and will just look for the plain-text version of whatever was copied.
Yes, there are a number of apps that fall into the uncanny valley by trying and failing to parse Office's output, but I suspect for most people this is a huge red herring.
p.s. I'm a Microsoft employee, but I have nothing to do with how Office handles copy/paste. This is just my opinion.
"A number of apps" meaning "every textarea on the web with contenteditable set to true"?
And it isn't "trying and failing to parse Office's output" -- it's more like "taking Office's word for it that the garbage on the clipboard is actually HTML, when it isn't".
1) You have a contenteditable region (or a rich text editor that otherwise can handle HTML).
2) User copies something from Word. One of the choices on the clipboard claims to be HTML. It isn't. It's pure garbage, understandable only to other Microsoft products.
The rich text editor has two choices: disable pasting HTML altogether (even from within itself, or from another application that actually does put real HTML on the clipboard) or deal with the garbage that comes in from someone pasting from Word.
The fundamental problem here is that Word puts garbage on the clipboard and lies about it, claiming that it's HTML.
Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)
I'd say that the track changes feature has a core of awesome that is made ugly by a really bad UX.
The worst case is making a bunch of fine-grained changes to a page -- say, a collaborator with poor grammar. Each change shows up with its own fat bubble explaining who made the change and when. You do, as claimed in TFA, end up looking like an anal-retentive a-hole (e.g., switching commas inside quotes 10 times per page results in 10 fat bubbles explaining each change). I simply don't do fine-grained edits with Track Changes on, because I can't bear to see order of 50 change bubbles per page.
Another problem with the track changes UX is iterated changes. You make a change, and then a change to that change (e.g., reword twice). Each one produces a bubble. Eventually you can't tell what the hell is going on. The owner of the document can choose to accept the changes piecemeal, which could result in chaos. You spend more effort trying to engineer a minimal set of changes than thinking about the content of the change.
It absolutely is a huge surprise. Word presumably uses its own internal format for copy/pasting within Word, and for copy/pasting in HTML format, it should strip everything down to a few minimal tags like <b>, <i> and such. That would be the logical, obvious and useful solution.
Sure it's all true what he says about Word, but the delicious irony is that his very own creation is slinging the arrows.
Slate would be an example of something that Bill Gates helped create because of the value it'd bring to the world - not because of anything from an economic standpoint.
What word actually is, for most people who don't need its advanced features, is an amateur desktop publishing tool. Word is for making fliers that you stick to the light pole. Word is for printing out notices that you stick to the coffee maker. Word is for writing pretty invitations for your 7 year old's birthday party. The same is true of virtually every "word processor" out there, including LibreOffice Writer. The switch from text editor to desktop publishing tool took place right around the time they started displaying page outlines in wonderful WYSIWYG. You don't need WYSIWYG if all you care about is the content, right?
But everyone has an inner artist, even though only a few are actually any good. It's amazing how much people (including myself) care about how their text appears on a piece of paper or a WYSIWYG editor. Sometimes, this distracts from the content. But as long as the content isn't being completely neglected, I think we should forgive people for wanting to control the font in which their writings appear, or for wanting their quotes to look "smart", or for spending 20 minutes tweaking the line spacing of their resume. It's human nature to mix a sense of aesthetics with everything. Word caters to that desire. In this respect, a PDF file is only marginally better from the point of view of the unfortunate recipient, and sometimes even worse.
So the problem isn't Word, it's people who abuse Word while performing tasks to which it is not best suited. For example, when you're sending a story to an editor, it's obvious that the editor only cares about the ASCII content and not your choice of fonts and margins.
I think the author's best point isn't so much that it's wrong tool for the job bur rather the job that Word is for is much less relevant now. Just like typewriters were obsolete when word processors arrived; word processors are themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't printed.
But I'm not sure if I agree with OP's idea that Word is becoming obsolete. Maybe it's not very useful for technically oriented people, but we still have a long way to go before printing becomes obsolete, if it ever does. Even Google Docs shows page outlines by default, as if the document were meant to be printed on Letter-sized paper. Which means the best that we can hope for, for the foreseeable future, is that people will use the right tool for the job. [edited]
[Disclosure: I am working on this :)]
Thankfully, karma isn't really within bounds of a user on HN, or within any algorithm. :)
I don't see that.
When contracting I am always being sent Word docs for this and that. There's rarely a need for anyone to print them; the value seems to be in the ability to control layout and highlighting, embed nicely formatted tables, and include images or diagrams, all as viewed on a computer.
Even if we assumed no one was ever going to print these documents, only pass them around to a limited audience, what would be a better tool for the average person helping out on a project? If not Word then almost certainly something very much like it.
I've had some mild push-back from a few people when trying to get them to switch from Word, but it has the upside of you always knowing what the current version is, a problem the Wordists I've dealt with run into often.
A wiki, though, is a lost cause for many. I do not want to be the one having to teach people how to correctly format tables or embed images with the correct size and captions.
"Why do I have to learn all this stuff when we already know how to use Word?" is a common lament.
I have no experience with MS Publisher but the other two are certainly not. They are tools for professional typesetters, have a very steep learning curve and are priced accordingly. Using them to create Fliers, notices and invitations would be an overkill. In fact, now a days, they are an overkill even for a good number of books!
Except that almost nobody I know does that. It's quite the opposite, actually - most of the people I interact with don't give a crap about how the text looks, as long as the content is right. Sometimes it applies even to people earning money on publishing, like Internet journalists. I can spot spelling, punctiation and spacing mistakes immediately, almost subconsciously, after looking at the text and because of that I tend to annoy many people by insisting that no, a text full of typos, misplaced spaces and without much formatting is NOT of an acceptable quality.
Why people completely don't care about aesthetics is beyond me. Maybe I watched too much TV series (like Star Trek: TNG) in my childhood and now believe that pretty and functional are not mutually exclusive?
It's not uncommon for people to have a very poor understanding of spelling and grammar, and how this affects others perception of their work.
As an example, I've received bug reports that go along the lines of "This outcome is not what I expected????" but the text is beautifully formatted.
The problem with Word is also it's greatness -- it does everything. It's a word processor. It integrates with SharePoint for content management and all sorts of whiz-bang features. You can make flyers. Insert cross-references. Translate stuff into German. Embed spreadsheets or crazy tie-ins to backend business systems. Draw stuff.
If you want to write only text, use a text editor.
If you want a publishing tool, use Word or Pages or whatever.
For the 3-5 pages of notes, I switch to textedit - which I love, and is awesome but does have a bad habit of steadily increasing the number of open documents I have (Quitting doesn't close them - next time you restart they all come back - I understand why, but it doesn't change the fact that I have to, about once a week, manually do some garbage-collection to keep the number of open docs down to a reasonable number)
But - when I'm putting together a 50-100 page technical specification, in which I'm embedding PDFs, figures, captions, cleaver headers/footers, carefully watermarked "DRAFT", Auto-updating table of contents, section breaks for multi-column sections, nicely crafted tables, and, most important of all for me - the ability to send this 75 page document to six reviewers, and get their comments nicely organized in electronic accept/reject mode - I am happy that MS Word is available during that 1% of my workflow.
I agree with the author for the other 99% though. Text, or one of its markdown variants is a helluva lot more 2012 friendly.
I assume you're talking about how Lion apps reopen the last open docs by default - you can disable this (for all OS X apps) in System Preferences > General > Restore windows when quitting/reopening apps
the interface is clean, no ribbon shit, nothing extra. it's cloud wordpad++. it's inherently cross-platform and free.
there is a place for word, but that place is small in today's world, and even smaller for the asking price.
the versioned editing is useful. but i'm fairly confident there is an automatically git-backed revision/collab cloud editor out there...the name escapes me.
My special needs son uses a program with Word called WordQ. The combination of the features above plus WordQ have made an enormous difference in his abiity to express himself through writing. Sure, he won't be writing a Web site with Word but he is writing his own stories.
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Heck, I use it on my Mac as well. A major flaw mentioned in this article (to edit web documents in word) is like editing vector graphics in Photoshop - it wasn't built for that.