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.

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.

  * A wiki.
  * Google Docs.
  * Assembla.

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.

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 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.

1) He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple releases.

2) He complains about the XML markup when you want to publish something to the Web through copy-paste. Has the author ever saved a Word document prior to publishing before? There are a variety of choices when saving a file, including the options to save as Plain Text (which removes all formatting), or even as a web page. No idea if the save as web page feature works well for complex documents, but to overlook this when complaining about publishing a Word doc as a web page demonstrates woeful ignorance of the product being criticized. This is especially ridiculous considering he highlights 3rd party programs that convert .docx into .txt. Why not mention that Word does this out of the box?

3) "The fundamental unit of Word is the single, proprietary file, anchored to one computer. Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files." As far as I can tell, the author pulled this one out of his ass. The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack released by MSFT allowing earlier versions of Word to open .docx files. The 3rd result is the Wikipedia page for "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format that all Office documents are saved in. (The 1st result is a free online 3rd party .docx to .doc conversion service.)

And these were just the things that immediately jumped out at me....

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Word and ways in which the software can be improved (apparently feature discovery...), but by not understanding how to use even the most basic features such as "Save to Plain Text," I have difficulty putting much stock in this individuals personal gripes.

(Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but not within the Office division. The above is my own personal opinion, etc., etc.)

Word, with all it's features, benefits, and menus does not cater to the world of digital text swapping and collaboration. Compared to a plain text editor, the print document focus in Word means that users need to make several annoying modifications to every document they work with, and if you're publishing stuff online you'll work with many documents. And to top it all, a Microsoft Office application will be by far the slowest app on an Apple computer, regardless of the specs of the machine. (it'll start faster than photoshop, but slower in terms of responsiveness.)

To understand this perspective, you have to understand the program the author compares Word to, TextEdit, is the notepad.exe of the Apple world.

It sounds like you want the "Web Layout" (or possibly "Draft" view).

His rant is partly centered around the fact that word's default settings are poorly chosen for someone in the digital publishing world.

As far as saving to plain text and copying plain text, those are two different things. Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. I've never had that happen to me though, so maybe he's doing something wrong.

I find Word very frustrating to use. I don't feel like I'm using it, I feel like I'm tricking it and at any moment my text will simply change fonts or tab depth or something weird.

That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

I always past and then again copy text into the address bar of my browser or notepad for longer text. Not ideal, but it works.

If you find you always desire to paste without formatting, you can remap CMD+V in OS X:

  * Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts
  * Click the + under the right-hand list to add a shortcut
  * Application: All; Menu Title: Paste and Match Style; Keyboard Shortcut: type CMD+V

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

It's unfortunate that the case where you wouldn't really need to attach a Word document and should just paste in the contents into email (just some plain text) is the case where Google Docs works just fine, and the case where you really need a Word document (complex table layout & floating pictures) is the case where Google Docs just doesn't work that well.

Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!

Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.

And web browsers, for example, don't generally have a "Paste as Plain Text" option inside of text fields.

(And btw, I do use Office 2010 every day of my cursed life...)

Clippy is still very symbolic of Microsoft's overall UI approach, "helping you help yourself", and very appropriate here, since it continues to pervade the new ribbon, wizards, etc.

> He complains about the XML markup when you want to publish something to the Web through copy-paste. Has the author ever saved a Word document prior to publishing before?

He's not talking about saving, he's talking about copy-paste. This has been a huge headache for me as well when dealing with web-based CMS's -- 90% of our editors' bugs came from pasting simple text into our CMS. No matter how much we taught them to paste into Notepad first, then re-copy and re-paste into the CMS, they never always remembered. I HATE Word for this.

> The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack...

That's the whole point. It's kind of a huge pain for users to keep track of compatibility packs and whatnot. It's as annoying as it would be if there were multiple PDF formats.

I suppose its a testament to the faith I had in Word that I didn't try printing it before I sent it out to employers. Others may view it as a lack of testing on my part, which is somewhat embarrassing for a programmer.

[1] http://jamiebriant.tumblr.com/post/20967362687/1-what-ms-wor...

> 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.

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)

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".

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.

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.

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.

I don't understand how people can write articles like this. I remember reading something similar a few years back where someone criticized Wordpress because, "it is designed as a blogging platform from the ground up, it doesn’t lend itself to people who want to build a website without a blog."

When I wrote an article on it at the time, I compared this line of thinking to "because this car was build to drive on the road, it doesn't lend itself well to serving as a boat".

Yes, you could use a boat as a car, and yes there are better boats than a car, but that doesn't mean it's a valid point against cars.

The church committee stared at them blankly and asked, "Can we have something simple like write something up in MS Word?" Even with WYSIWYG features, they didn't get it at all, but they did get MS Word. My friend tried to protest saying, "But actually, you don't want MS Word. This is so much better for technical reasons, and you can format text exactly the same, blahblahblah."

The fear that non-technical people have to try to use a brand new system they've never seen before is not something with which I'd ever be able to empathize. But I am able to sympathize, especially after the day I tried to teach my dad how to use gmail to attach photos (using gmail's drag and drop feature no less!). It was so frustrating to see he didn't get drag and drop, but he finally did manage to click some buttons, after a LOT of hesitation.

Non-technical users don't care that Word adds on all that garbage. They don't even notice. They do care that their experience is that Word just works. And they're afraid of changing.

I know that none of this really matters. More and more people seem to be getting more technically savvy every day. New technologies will leave old technologies behind, whether late adopters like it or not. Heck, even my dad can use gmail now. But part of me feels mean and guilty for making these non-technical people suffer through the transition. Not that I have any solution for that issue.

Because I like analogies: I'm really bad with woodworking. Everything I do ends out being really hacky because (I'm usually told this after) I don't use the right tools. Even if I can use a saw for something other than its intended purpose, is it really the saw's fault if it performs worse than the right tool for the job?

However, making anything look like a Microsoft Office app is offensive to anyone who actually knows how to use these tools.

I always tell people to embrace change.

Yes, that's the whole point. The fact is that Word is still seen as the go-to default solution for text editing, but now that the web is the go-to default solution for publishing, there's a big mismatch. The purpose of this article is to highlight that mismatch.

So we need a new go-to solution for text editing, but nobody's really found it yet, and it's hard because HTML doesn't support a lot of features that people are used to in Word.

If you only accept resumes in Word format, you're not the dinosaur I want to work for.

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.

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' :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not being facetious, let's name em.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

In biology (in government and industry) we use both. And we tend to use Word because that's what everyone else is using. But WordPerfect and LibreOffice generate TOC and figure lists, and track changes just fine. LaTeX and git also accomplish those goals. But the problem is working with other people in different groups, companies, levels of expertise, preference, etc. When track changes is breaking between LibreOffice and Word you just revert to using word to find the changes, and then incorporate them by hand into your LibreOffice document. Or, since you're using Word anyway and it does accomplish your goals, you just switch to Word.

Working in any setting aside from a self-contained research unit or the academic world, you just learn Word. In my case I learned Word and I use all of the various variable-esque and markup I can to make generating TOC, figure/table lists and references and adjusting values easier when working with people who just use Word because that's what you write reports in.

Even in an academic setting, if your advisers use Word (and prefer Word over dead trees) you're going to be creating Word documents for your thesis and academic papers (the journals mostly don't care because they re-typeset everything anyway) because you need their expertise to make your work awesome.

So, what about LaTeX? I like the idea more than the practice. Making basic changes (or what would be basic with CSS, Word, InDesign) to templates is mindbogglingly complicated to beginners. I'm not sure it's even particularly easy to create custom templates and formatting for experienced LaTeX users. However, once you have the Ecology, Washington Department of Fish And Wildlife, USDA, etc. LaTeX template all future publications for those is much faster.

If you want to know the actual one true solution to kill Word for academic, industry and government publishing it's this:

Modify Lyx (or make something like it using Markdown or reST) that uses sane defaults (I think WYSIWYM with a live preview is probably okay for everyone except the "lost dog" folks), some auto-correction, spelling and grammar checking tools and has the ability to easily and correctly make headings, adjust page headers and footers, footnotes, endnotes, and insert and edit figures, tables (the table formatting tools should be very powerful, ideally also the ability to include data from Excel and also tie into R, SAS and SPSS), images and variables (for things like n, p-value, species names) and integrate it with Evernote, Endnote, Papers, Mendeley and BibTeX (though, supporting BibTeX gets you pretty far). Now, make an extensive repository of formats for publications (like PyPI, rubygems, etc. but for templates from academic journals etc.) Ideally the templating should be powerful enough for experts to create anything they can imagine and simple enough that the Masters student studying the behavior of Little Auks can get her short fact sheet to look how she wants it to for her presentation to the Reykjavik Ornithological Society (using system fonts should not be difficult or require any amount of documentation reading).

Now you need to add collaboration tools. Track changes, highlighting, and commenting gets you to 90% of use cases for Word. Add in version control that is easy and makes sense, the ability for multiple people to live edit the same document and good merging tools (for multiple offline changes to the same document by different people) and suddenly your software is more useful than Word.

Oh, and it needs to be open-source, because us science-ey folks are increasingly grumpy about closed-source things, and we already have to buy the Microsoft Office suite to deal with documents and data from multiple different sources. It also can't be multiple gigabytes to download because I need to be able to tell my colleagues, "Hey, you should use this, it's easier to make pretty things, and the collaboration tools are more useful than Word's."

But even that only gets you the people who are writing for (essentially) print. If you have output formats that create sane, semantically correct and useful HTML (for people writing for online magazines, blogs and static pages) and HTML/CSS for people who want to use it as web publishing system you've got a tool that could slowly start gaining a foothold.

If that were the case, then what do I care if people are using a different program to open them?

It's not word, but it may be acceptably close.

... 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).

> <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."

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

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http://document1.docx.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

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.

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.

THAT is probably a use case which happens more often in corporate America than the author's more specialized world of online publishing.

I don't think Word is the ideal tool for this case neither (I hear cursing directed at Word all the time), but it is the de facto standard.

As much as I want believe LaTeX is better suited for this task, nobody will use it. (Disclaimer: I last used LaTeX 12 years ago.)

If you want to write only text, use a text editor.

If you want a publishing tool, use Word or Pages or whatever.

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.

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.

Sure it's all true what he says about Word, but the delicious irony is that his very own creation is slinging the arrows.

Word and its imitations, therefore, simply became a go-to typesetter and printer driver for simple tasks that didn't require LaTeX's precision, and a read-only viewer for documents people emailed to me.

It's the same article. So are both SMH and Slate syndicating from the same source or is Tom Socca employed by both?

Cheers.

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.

    resume.doc : resume.html
            gnuhtml2latex -s resume.html > resume.tex
            latex2rtf resume.tex
            mv resume.rtf resume.doc

    resume.ps : resume.html resume.tidy
            html2ps -Tn resume.html > resume.ps.tmp
            mv resume.ps.tmp resume.ps

    resume.pdf : resume.ps
            ps2pdf resume.ps resume.pdf.tmp
            mv resume.pdf.tmp resume.pdf

I've got all of these at my fingertips.

And yes, I've told plenty of recruiters to grab my resume from my homepage URL, or sent them the link rather than the document itself.

How you have all your text sans any Word formatting. Horribly difficult, I know. This article's author is just annoyingly ignorant.

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'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.

He also complains about the file format. I agree as well that this could be done better, but they aren't doing a real bad job. In any case, _he_ certainly has no idea _why_ it's done the way it's done and is in no position to criticise it.