Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester 367
An anonymous reader writes "A Forrester Research report has found that companies use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity and are beginning to consider other alternatives as the Web has changed the way people create and share documents. The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option."
Microsoft surely knows that some other options are creeping slowly into the view of even the most Word-centric users, though. User I dream about smoking writes "Microsoft is testing new capabilities for Office Live Workspace, its online adjunct to Microsoft Office, that will make it a closer rival to online application suites such as Google Docs. Microsoft will start beta testing an updated version of Live Workspace later this year that allows users to create and edit new documents online."
MS Office has been online for years (Score:2, Informative)
MS has had online capability for years now where multiple people can open and edit documents at the same time. It was just over the corporate network.
Re:The way I write (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a video explanation of why you shouldn't e-mail documents [youtube.com]. I completely agree with it. Creating twenty-five copies of the same document at various revisions is an error-prone habit.
Re:File Compatibility, not Habit (Score:5, Informative)
Shee-yit, Word isn't 100% compatbile with Word documents ! I frequently need to 'repair' Word 2007 documents before I can re-open them. This of course begs the question, if Word can repair it, why doesn't it just open it ? This question is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Moving to online Office may kill Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Strangely, my paid-for Google Docs account doesn't say "Beta" anywhere. I guess it must be only the free version that's beta. Shock! No other company does that. ::rollseyes::
Somebody has to do it. (Score:4, Informative)
Go ahead, mod me offtopic, but somebody has to do it. http://begthequestion.info/ [begthequestion.info]
Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Informative)
Personally I wouldn't trust important documents to stay on the web server. What happens when google goes belly up and starts shutting down their web servers?
You are aware that all Google Docs can be backed up locally with Google Gears and also converted into a number of popular formats?
Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Informative)
In many cases even a underpaid, undervalued, overworked EDS 1st line worker can have access to very sensitive data on the customers servers and PC's. I certainly did back in the days when I worked/slaved for them.
Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:4, Informative)
Now, if the students were submitting something for publication (some in-school publication that would not require electronic submission), I can see violating exact formatting specifications being a disqualifier, but that should be handled seperately than any grading that should be examining the student's writing, logic, grammar, and syntax, with only a fraction of points hinging on format.
Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't Open Office support .doc files and Times New Roman font?
Ms Word still best (Score:1, Informative)
I think word probably is still the best for most. OpenOffice lacks many of its features and useability. I have used both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office and always end up going back to Microsoft Office. With OpenOffice there are all sorts of little annoyances that start to add up quickly that make it quite unuseable, for instance it would only let me drag position floating boxes and items in a document by increments of roughly twenty pixels. It doesnt have an off document scratch area in the space surrounding the document, etc. There is nothing in OpenOffice that can do what Word or Publisher does.
I also think web applications are horrid and would never use them. I dont even use web e-mail. The reason is it is slow, clumsy, if you lose your internet connection you cant work. Plus you have everything you are doing sent to a server so there is no privacy. No thanks.
Re:Googles playbook (Score:3, Informative)
Google Docs supports an offline mode. You will likely need to install the Gears plugin for your browser to enable this.
Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I use Microsoft to fight the evil G$$Gle empire (Score:3, Informative)
Where did you find MS Word for free?
There you go. Word 5.5 for DOS for free directly from Microsoft:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe [microsoft.com]
Re:I have never liked word. (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently it's not just Word. I've been having that experience with Windows 7 since the beta was released. I installed it in VirtualBox and have spent the last two days trying to find a way to:
I also despise the Ribbon the more I work with it. Luckily my work hasn't upgraded to the latest Office yet and are still using Office 2003.
Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:4, Informative)
The point being why should he be required to go out and purchase a $500 Office suite to comply with a sixth-grade teacher's demands?
What if he didn't have MacOS in the house, only Linux?
As long as the paper meets the content & formatting requirements, the application used to create it should be irrelevant to the teacher. Marking a kid all the way down to a D just for having the wrong font used is petty.
Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Informative)
They have a history of easily folding to law enforcement, which makes me uneasy about hosting corporate stuff online.
Actually, I remember google being the ONLY web search company that stood up to the DOJ when they wanted all search data from a random sampling of users. The DOJ was arguing the constitutionality of some "think of the children" legislation about blocking on the internet...
Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How hard can it be to switch? (Score:2, Informative)
I remember when we first got Word at work (long time ago) sitting down and reading things about Styles, numbering and all that. I was working with people doing technical documents who were manually numbering, and I couldn't convince them to learn it, despite all the time they were wasting adjusting numbering.
Re:Googles playbook (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:3, Informative)
Times New Roman is still part of the Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts. Microsoft removed the download from their site, but they can still be downloaded in an unaltered form.
Sources:
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web [wikipedia.org]