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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.




> next time you restart they all come back

I assume you're talking about how Lion apps reopen the last open docs by default - you can disable this (for all OS X apps) in System Preferences > General > Restore windows when quitting/reopening apps


Some apps annoyingly don't seem to respect that setting. For example TextEdit and Xcode.




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