Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die 479
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"
It gets worse (Score:5, Interesting)
Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Joel Spolsky has an excellent write up on why the Office file formats suck. A must read.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html [joelonsoftware.com]
He actually worked on Excel leading to funny anecdotes like this one
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html [joelonsoftware.com]
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
He discusses why the file formats are the way they are, but I'm not sure he says they suck.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
the only big difference is now word and excel are in XML. sometimes, and only partially. but hey it is an open standard now right?
Windows including 7, word, excel, and their file formats haven't changed much in 15 years. Mostly a few new features, and cosmetics. You can pull out a windows 95 and office 97 for dummies book and be able to do everything in them with windows 7 and office 2013.
That is the true state of things.
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:4, Insightful)
the only big difference is now word and excel are in XML. sometimes, and only partially
The main thing that isn't in XML is any embedded media files, and encoding those totally as XML is a really bad idea. "Let's encode our video as XML!" sounds like one of the scarier jokes that people tell about the W3C...
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:4, Insightful)
You can pull out a windows 95 and office 97 for dummies book and be able to do everything in them with windows 7 and office 2013.
That is the true state of things.
Erm Ribbon bar. Also the current version of Windows is Windows 8, despite what people would want to think.
The true reality is that Microsoft have pissed user interface consistency against the wall. So what you said is true of Windows 7 and Office 2006 but no more.
Doesn't change the fact that the GP is still wrong though, I'm just being pedantic.
Re: Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Office Documents are a "done" trchnology now. Microsoft frankly doesn't give enough of a damn to bother fixing it at this point... Is operational leverage over big installs that there is still "secret sauce" embedded in the spec.
Microsoft can throw HUNDREDS of millions of dollars at devs to implement the crappier parts of win/x86 MS Word formats on ARM or PPC with each revision. Ultimately rewriting just helps people get away from MS at this point, why bother.
Much of Bill's strategy in the 1990's was simply to swamp even their own partners and OEMS with so much incompatibility they spent all their time fighting eachother and not him.
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really believe Word has advanced and improved since 2006?
The disbelief part is that an article from 2006 is still relevant to describing Word.
Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you really believe Word has advanced and improved since 2006?
There is a recurring problem with software development in recent years, where one player has become dominant, the barriers to competition are so high that it has no real challenger for a long time, and the result is stagnation. There are numerous examples: Microsoft Office for business documents and spreadsheets, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics, Autodesk applications in the 3D modelling space, IE6 as the classic beloved of web developers everywhere, and as an odd one out just to make the point, Linux if you want an OSS operating system.
There are a few ways out of the trap, but the big problem is that the people making purchasing decisions often aren't interested in assessing the quality or productivity benefits of alternative software, or even able to make informed judgements about those things if they wanted to. No-one ever got fired for buying the market leader, so while they know that the new subscription pricing model will give vendors even less incentive to actually improve anything or the support contracts are probably far more expensive than they're actually worth or the TCO will be horrendous because of usability problems, they'll carry on using these leading products anyway so their careers aren't at risk.
That creates a vicious circle where no-one is willing to invest the staggering amounts of time and money required to build a heavyweight competitor that can effectively challenge an incumbent. Instead, we get open source clones or cheap-and-simple web/mobile apps, which do a good enough job to save some users paying for the heavyweight commercial software, but in most cases offer little real innovation and almost invariably lack the quality and feature set of the established big names. That's why the professionals spending serious money keep buying those big names, and so the cycle continues, with little incentive for software giants like Microsoft to improve their cash cows or innovate with entirely new products.
I think the most likely way out of this in the long term is for a new product to arrive that changes the rules and moves the market. With formal printed documents becoming less popular and an increasing emphasis on on-screen presentation and collaborative editing, is a word processor still a good model to manage business information? We have far more powerful (and systematic) formatting capabilities in numerous browsers that can render HTML+CSS content. Probably every programmer reading this routinely uses far more powerful editing, review and collaboration capabilities in their everyday tools. I don't just want Word 2014 any more. I want something that helps me collect, organise and share information in ways that match how we'll be living and working in 2014. And a tool that does that might have a small chance of breaking the Word stranglehold.
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)
With formal printed documents becoming less popular and an increasing emphasis on on-screen presentation and collaborative editing, is a word processor still a good model to manage business information? We have far more powerful (and systematic) formatting capabilities in numerous browsers that can render HTML+CSS content.
You must be kidding. Microsoft Word has far more formatting capabilities than any HTML + CSS content I'm familiar with. Try creating text with a multi-coloured gradient fill and a drop shadow. Try representing a complex mathematical equation. Try inserting a pie chart. Try inserting a date field that updates automatically. Try rotating a block of text by an arbitrary number of degrees.
Then consider that fact that many people using word processors in business today are capable of doing all these things without knowing a single thing about coding.
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually HTML+CSS can do all those things. Your comment about programming is weird, because presumably you would just use a WYSIWYG interface rather than writing the code by hand, the same as any modern word processor.
The real problem with HTML/CSS is that it isn't designed to format documents with precision, it's designed to describe the presentation of information. In Word when you set a font to 14pt you get a 14pt font on the screen and on your printer. In CSS setting a font to 2em or 24px results in an on-screen/paper font size that is dependent entirely on how the browser is set to render it. 2em is relative to the base font size selected by the user, 24px is relative to the DPI setting of the screen and the zoom level of the browser.
I would love it if everyone used HTML/CSS because then documents would display in my preferred way with my preferred fonts and scales, but most people just want to quickly create something that looks exactly the same on everyone's screen and on paper.
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Microsoft Word has far more formatting capabilities than any HTML + CSS content I'm familiar with.
Then, with respect, the problem here is partly that you're not familiar with what these other technologies can do. In a way, you're making my point for me: people stand by Word believing that it's a good tool, because they haven't seen ideas from different fields where things are done much better.
Some of your specific examples can be done directly in HTML and CSS. Others might be better done using related but more specialised tools such as MathML and SVG, but then in Word they tend to be done by placing a b
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, very easy. Just go learn MathML, SVG, and JavaScript. Apparently your idea of the "real world" is where everyone is conversant is 4 or 5 programming languages. As opposed to what actually happens in almost every business around, where people with minimal knowledge of computers and zero knowledge of programming can produce what I described with a single, widely-known application.
The assertion that Microsoft Word should be deprecated in favour of a hodgepodge solution like yours, in the majority of situations, is laughable.
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:3, Insightful)
enough said!
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:4, Insightful)
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Consider TexMacs - uses scheme-like macro language (and scheme) - much better.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
This is true. I'm a physics graduate student and I use it for all of my homework and I even use it for taking notes in class. The shortcuts are so intuitive and easy that I can manage to spit out complicated formulae just as quickly as it is written down on the board.
Unfortunately, the system isn't very stable and at times needs to be restarted after a long session of a couple of hours of running. I was once rushing to finish some homework that was due in an hour and the underlying whatever-lisp became corrupted somehow that everytime I activated an figure area, it would crash. I had to literally reinstall the program to get it back to a useable state (and I was able to finish the homework on time!)
Nonetheless, it is a powerful and awesome program, but alas, like most OSS projects lacks the man-power to become the stable, reliable tool that it could be. I personally have considered carving out sometime to contribute to TeXmacs since I use it on such a regular basis.
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https://www.writelatex.com/ [writelatex.com] and https://www.sharelatex.com/ [sharelatex.com] and several desktop latex editors seems to work OK despite your logic.
The main appleal of LaTeX is precisely that you aren't supposed to continuously re-render it, you are supposed to write things. Then you twiddle how it looks a bit at the end.
Optimizing web pages for speed of rendering the output seems reasonable, but I'm not sure that should be a big consideration in a document format.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
you are supposed to write things. Then you twiddle how it looks a bit at the end.
That's hardly how any business document in existence is written. Layout is considered at the same time as the content. Presentation is often more than 50% of the value of the document. It is essential to be able to make edits right in the final output. Nobody is willing to print the DVI, then mark it up with a red pen, and then to find corresponding code that programs that piece of the document, and then to change it ... and once you change something on page 1, things cascade down to page 100 - pictures and tables jump onto different pages, blank areas show up where none were before... this means you need to redo the DVI and review after every change. To compare, a WYSIWYG wordprocessor gives you exactly what you are going to print for given page settings. You just go from the first page down and make your changes. That's why MS Office (and WordPerfect before that) rule the office space, not TeX. Those wordprocessors do a pretty good job on having things done your way, with background pagination and other niceties.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. TeX uses a procedural approach, which is really not a good idea for a document. A declarative approach would be much better, and there are alternatives such as lout the demonstrate how well it works. Heck, even TeX has both styles and formatting codes available at all time.
HTML, much abused, has a much saner model. But there is a distinct lack of good editors for HTML. Which also proves zealots wrong who say "a good and well documented format will attract support". MS Word is still the most widely supported document format. Better documented alternatives (lyx, html, lout) are impossible to import/export in anything but a handful of programs.
And to be honest, Word 2007 is a completely different beast from Word 2003. I would even go as far as calling it quite usable - it deals nicely with styles, and it finally has an acceptable equation editor. Float placement is still a bit of a gamble, citations are best left to other software packages, but it is really not all that bad any more. Good enough - typical Microsoft software.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
They're all solving different problems. TeX is designed for typesetting, which HTML and Word formats aren't well-suited. HTML does structure well, but it's useless for typesetting. OOXML is a weird mix, not really well suited to either task. It's better than older formats, but it's still incredibly painful to generate, and near impossible to read. If I had to guess, it's designed to give MS the ability to say that the format is open, while still making it difficult for competitors to support.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, there's the TeX engine and the default macro packages which are different things.
Actually, I was talking specifically about the generic TeX engine properties that make it virtually impossible to use it for incremental redisplay and similar purposes, so you have to go WYSIWYM instead, but then TeX isn't the foundation for the document platform itself but just the output module, which is what I was pointing out. It also doesn't work well for compound documents, not just simple hand-edited text ones ("simple" as in "not compound", but not excluding structured and large ones, of course), but that's sort of outside of TeX's scope (if you ignore Web2C's [\immediate]\write18, or yet another converter to "lower" the document data (for example, data linked to a live online resource) into something "set in stone" that TeX can actually typeset), so perhaps that would be an unreasonable request anyway.
You are not bound to plain TeX or LaTeX or a few others, write your own.
That doesn't solve the problem I was referring to. One potential solution that occurred to me the other day was that since TeX's state tends to be small, and the processing is "paged" in the last stages of TeX's internals, one possible option would be memoizing the internal state of the processor and resuming the execution only from the nearest place preceding your edit point in the input stream where the last state snapshot took place and going on from there. But that still requires a modified TeX implementation, and it doesn't work for multi-pass processing that, i.e., collects page number references to scatter them throughout your document in a later pass (a single inserted character could change the page number on a page reference on the very page you're editing right now, and there's no way to know without running all the full document passes again, and there goes your real-time redisplay), and that tends to be quite common, so tough luck.
Apparently you need to be reminded. TeX is a system for "automating stuff", not a system for interactively enabling tweaks by hand.
Apparently, I failed to get my point across. Of course TeX can do that, but the document application with TeX export has to export the document structure into the TeX file properly, and I have yet to see a complex application doing it in a user-friendly way. Nowhere am I suggesting that *TeX* is the right place for the necessary user interaction. If you're accusing me of a desire to do stupid things, you had better point out which ones, since I fail to see which part of my requirements is unreasonable.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
enough said!
MS Office is designed for use by the 9-to-5 clerical worker --- not the outside studio or in-house team that designs your four color catalogs, print adds, brochures and annual reports.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
So much this!
Word is popular because it is can be manhandled by just about anyone with basic computer skills into producing a passable document. Most people doing anything more complex have a variety of tools available with various trade-offs in functionality and learning curve.
This is largely true about most popular products. Tools which are technically inferior for a purpose are used because the gap in technical fitness is smaller and lest costly than the difference in skill required to use the better suited tool. Cheaper to have the hammer than can pound in most nails when you don't really care as long as it holds, then go get the specialized hammer when you do..
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So much this!
Word is popular because it is can be manhandled by just about anyone with basic computer skills into producing a passable document.
For really, really low levels of passable.
Our department used to cringe when we got word documents to turn into other stuff. The typical action was that the person would start working in Word, get the project almost done, then suddenly found that they couldn't do what they wanted to do. So we would get a partially done document that we had to get into InDesign. Catalogues, even Posters. Lots of manhandling. Lots of fail, especially from a program that needs manhandling to do some pretty basic stuff.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
The primary argument used to dismiss Libre Office as a viable alternative to MS Office is that it "can't do anything more complex than basic document editing".
And yet here we are, explaining why MS Office is the popular choice because it only does the most basic stuff that 9-to-5 clerical workers need.
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My primary argument against Libre Office is that when I'm using Microsoft Word, its because someone else needs it in word doc format.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:4, Funny)
It's like going to buy vehicle for a job where you need a small truck, and instead coming back with a Ford Pinto with fins, racing stripes, stickers all over it, and a flimsy roof rack to give it something resembling the carrying capacity of a small truck at the cost of stability problems. It looks really modern due to the new paint job, and they've replaced that fuel tank that catches fire - however this time it's made from magnesium and still catches fire.
Car analogies aside it's fragile and overcomplicated crap for the 9-to-5 clerical worker and has spawned a vast support industry to teach people how to get around its stupid quirks.
Re: Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:3)
No, that's pretty good. Businesses NEEDED a small pickup truck. Something that was a step up from a typewriter, and could let things "look pretty". An excellent word processor was GEOS, or AppleWorks, or Gobe.
Ms Word is a bad engine with pretty stickers on it. No matter how much fancy bling they added, it never fixed the basic fact that MS Word "format" is half structured document, and half inserted binary blobs of display "logic".
The problem is that everybody else can make very well formatted MS Word doc
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MS Office is designed for use by the 9-to-5 clerical worker --- not the outside studio or in-house team that designs your four color catalogs, print adds, brochures and annual reports.
No, Word is a layout editor, where you cannot get away from the paper concepts of "pages" and "margins". It's about the worst program there is for entering plain text.
The last of the text processors died when Word Perfect lost its plaintext mode and became WYSIMOLWYG just like Word.
And, no, LyX is not a good alternative either. It's so slow it's painful, and still suffers from the silly paradigm that you want to "publish" your document, not just use the text as is. It's the job of a publisher to typeset a
Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job.
So his publisher is forcing him to use Word. I would be annoyed as well. I know at least some publishers accept PDF (and some even LaTeX). So maybe he should just choose a different publisher.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
Publishers sometimes will accept camera-ready PDF, but that's a _lot_ of work, and in the age of digital publishing, a complete non-starter, because PDF is more like paper than text. Submitting in MS Word is much easier. It's a royal pain in the ass, especially since the MS Word document is essentially a consumable, and is thrown away as soon as the publisher goes to typesetting. It means that page proof edits have to be done by hand, and that second editions often don't capture all the page proof corrections, because those corrections never go into the word document unless the author does it, but that's also time consuming, because the author has to not only incorporate the page proof edits, but all of the copyedits as well.
The whole thing is a monumental waste of everybody's time—if it were possible to do all the edits to the same document, throughout the life of the book, it would be much more efficient. Style-sheet-oriented HTML is actually a better choice than Word, but nobody uses it because there isn't a good HTML editor that does change control.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
Both Word and HTML suck for physical publishing purposes, as neither truly describes a page layout. Anyone who's been frustrated by paragraphs suddenly flowing over a page break, or tried to view html on different browsers has experienced that problem. Sending the publisher a Word doc gives you no guarantee that why you get back looks like what you had on your screen. PDF and PS at least nail down the exact page layout.
There are great uses for flexible standards like ebook format, because they aren't restricted to a particular page layout. Ebooks can flow to the readers screen size and whatever font size they picked. PDFs suck for digital books because they don't reflow.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Interesting)
The situation in publishing is very different than what you're imagining. Word is just how the text gets edited up to the point where page production starts. Then the whole thing is converted to InDesign or QuarkExpress. The reason to use Word is actually just because it's convenient and supports change tracking and reviewing, so it's convenient for communicating copy edits and dev edits to the author, and allows the author to accept or reject changes proposed by the copy editor.
What would be better would be a common document format that is used by the tool authors use, the tool copy editors use (probably the same tool) and the tool designers use. The designers would simply style the text for a specific page layout, which avoids the issues you're talking about. Significant edits after layout would still break the layout, but that's something the designers have to deal with during the final edit of the page proofs anyway.
The problem is that neither Microsoft nor Adobe is at all interested in an open format for their tools, for reasons Stross explains pretty well in his article. And since there is no competing tool that _does_ provide this functionality, the situation persists. What Charlie is complaining about now is what I was complaining about in 1997 when I co-wrote the DHCP Handbook. I find it amazing that nobody has successfully broken this deadlock, despite all the changes in the publishing industry since 1997 (it was actually old news even in 1997).
Anyway, the reason I mention HTML as a good format is that if the tools supported it, it could literally carry through all the way from the author to the final electronic book. Any shared format would work; HTML just happens to be insanely popular and widely used, which is what makes it (IMHO) the right choice.
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Submitting in MS Word is much easier.
For whom? Not the guy writing a book on Linux...
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy to format a document in Word. You just need to use styles.
NEVER try to figure out why a paragraph or couple of paragraphs are behaving the way they are in Word. That is the way to madness . . ..
Create for yourself a collection of styles that make paragraphs do exactly what you want them to do. Refine them, and use them to impose your will upon the paragraphs that you do not understand.
Now . . . I'm trying LyX. I want to see if it is even remotely adaptable to doing lawyer work.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time, it demanded WordPerfect because docs had to be just that. Aggro clerks of court would shitcan anything that deviated from the expected (monospace) fonts, spacings, margins. I'm sure that's still true, though I know standards have slipped a bit - proportionally-spaced fonts are allowed now (Times New Roman seems to have become the standard.)
I took a summer job helping a white-shoe law firm convert from WP51 to Word over one summer almost 20 years ago. It *was* madness back then but their IT department was all over that windows 95 shiny shit.
Word sucks, but like Excel, it's a highly-evolved (or at least accreted) multi-tool. There's no single replacement for it.
-Isaac
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:4, Funny)
One of Charlie's comments on his blog described Word as "a rail-mounted Gatling gun firing Swiss Army chainsaws". I want one.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Funny)
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LyX doesn't do form documents. It's useless for basic lawyer work.
I haven't found a class or package that does legal pleadings.
LyX is an absolute non-starter for lawyer work.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:4, Insightful)
Most major publishers want to format it themselves. They've got professionals for that, and software designed for page layout. (NOT Microsoft Word.)
The effort you put into formatting it is a waste. Let the pros do what they do best. You do what you do best, generate the content.
The real issue here isn't the publishers, but businesses of all sorts, wherever documents are passed around for editing by multiple people. It would be great if those processes could avoid formatting issues, at least until the content is set, but they rarely do. So they need a format that everybody can mess with. Right now, that pretty much universally means Word. PDF won't cut it, since you can't edit it. ODF and other formats are just as good (i.e. pretty crappy, actually) but MS has pride of place: everybody else is using it and changing to a different standard is a huge hassle.
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Well, Stross is a stauch libertarian, so why doesn't he let the market sort it out instead of whining?
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I think the reason for this has to do with Word's commenting and revision tracking features, which are convenient as the document is passed around amongst the publisher's editorial staff.
I used to write fiction using reStructuredText and a literate programming tool. I had a convenient toolchain set up where I could tangle different kinds of documents (outline, chapter, synopsis, alternative scenes) into reStructuredText documents, then convert those into HTML or PDF if plain text wouldn't do. It was a sweet system that didn't get in my way by making me think about formatting (until it was time to generate a manuscript), wasn't subject to file corruption issues, and played well with source control. It met my needs.
The problem was that it didn't meet the needs of the people I had to collaborate with. Everyone in my writer's group wanted ".doc" files, wanted to return their comments and revision suggestion in ".doc" files too.
I suspect the reason his publisher wants ".doc" is that they use it just this way, to pass manuscripts around with comments and revisions neatly packaged into a single file. There are other ways of doing this, of course, but then you have to consider that they've got to get *all* their authors to use the same format, or figure out how to convert whatever formats they might receive into word. It's easiest for many to go with "Give me a word file and I'll return a word file."
For me, formatting didn't matter at all. I've also tried Lyx; I wasn't particularly enamored of it, since I didn't need to write equations or things that had to semantically marked up. All I needed was words on the page, and since I always ended up sending and receiving ".doc" files, I just went to OpenOffice, now LibreOffice.
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I'm not so sure... (Score:2)
should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible
I'm not sure that's true. I keep thinking of different systems that use both style sheets and control codes. HTML does essentially the same thing, so does LaTeX; allowing local edits and style-sheet based edits. How are they fundamentally incompatible?
ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, let's enumerate all the structural untidinesses of Word. Let's blame that application -- which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp) but because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do -- for the inelegance of its data model. Let's compare it to SGML, which is so much nicer and easier and so much more elegant if you're a programmer and can appreciate that sort of elegance, and if you're not a programmer, well then for god's sake why are you touching a computer?
If you want SGML, you know where to download it.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp)
Actually, that's most likely the reason why it succeeded. 1) MS pushing their OSes through anticompetitive practices (confirmed in court!), 2) MS having intimate knowledge of their own OSes helping them write better apps, 3) customers buying MS Office for various reasons including more hassle-free operation on their PCs, 4) the whole network effect thingy kicking in.
Re:ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
1) The OS is not office. The OS was anti-competitive. Internet explorer bundling was anti-competitive. But at the time when this was going on my computer shipped with Word Perfect installed on the Microsoft OS. Even now you typically will *sometimes* get an MS Office TRIAL version unless you expressly pay for Office as well. This is quite different from Windows where you're hard pressed finding a computer without it.
2) Office never used intimate knowledge of the OS. None of the Office features then and now require any undocumented APIs. About the fanciest thing Office was doing when taking the lead was adding it's document formats to the "File > New" context menu and that is also well documented.
3) Hassle free operation was the GP's point. Office did what people (not geeks or technical writers but common down to earth folk) wanted it to.
Secret APIs (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft used secret APIs [pcpro.co.uk] to give its programs an advantage over competitors. That had a big effect in the 1990's. It is apparently still going on in some things but we'll have to wait, as usual, a long time before it turns up in court records. And like before, the damage will have been done. The only way to stop it is to stop using M$ products.
You can find more like that if you wade through the material of the Comes V Microsoft case [groklaw.net] at the now archived Groklaw site. Basically anything bad that has been said about M$ and the people that work there is true.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Interesting)
because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do.
That may be how it got the crown, but that is not how it kept it. The scrappy upstart company is very different from the Microsoft of today. For proof I submit the release of Vista and Win8 with no apology. At least with MS Bob, there was remorse!
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No, loathing not really contagious (Score:5, Interesting)
If he has a better idea of how to set up a word processor, he didn't see fit to share his thoughts with the rest of us. But serious suggestions only, please. If the author wants Microsoft to make Word more like vi, I think then we'd really see some "loathing both understandable and contagious" from ordinary users.
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This critic just comes across as whiny to me.
Also non-technical. He's a writer who dislikes Word and managed to find a few technical sound-bits to support his argument, but doesn't seem to understand them. For example style sheets require the use of control codes. It's just that the control codes can specify the change directly, or they can refer to the style sheet.
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Someone who users MS Word more than anyone reading this site has spotted some problems and you are bitching that he is "non-technical"? I suppose if he used the program less and did some technical stuff instead you would dismiss him as not using the program enough to comment on it?
We shouldn't blame the users for usability problems. That's where we have to lift our game instead of throwing insults back.
Not bitching, just stating the obvious. He's trying to argue that MS Word sucks on technical merits, but doesn't seem to have a good grasp of those technical details. Did you bother to read his article? The bulk of the article was a history lesson of MS Word file format changes. The wikipedia articles he seems to be paraphrasing are mostly correct about how Word used to store the files, but not real accurate for the current format. He only spends a single paragraph to state the features he doesn't like i
Free software probably can't do better (Score:2, Insightful)
because Word is the quintessential example an app where you need a large paid development staff with varying skill sets, including many (UI design, usability, localization, QA, end user support, documentation, incorporating specialized features for customers such as law firms, integration with legacy enterprise software...) which historically have not been the strengths of FOSS.
And here's something that's often overlooked: even if FOSS could put together a team to do this (perhaps with some resources loaned
LibreOffice Write is excellent... (Score:5, Informative)
Beware of recruiters asking for MS Word format (Score:4, Interesting)
People, if you make it as far as an interview be sure to have enough paper copies of your real resume to hand around in case you've been screwed over by the recruiters. In one case with me they cut out five years of relevant employment because they wanted to put forward one star canditate and two duds. My current employer short circuited the process by interviewing all three and no longer users that unethical recruitment agency.
Typing above a table is still a PITA! (Score:3)
My problem with [MS] Word is this: If you have a table as the first item/object in your document and you'd like to type above it, it's impossible to do this! Moving the table lower moves the document margins as well! Solution is to delete it and "reserve" space for text with an invisible text box or type some irrelevant text first, which text you can replace with the text you want.
It's as pathetic as it is frustrating!
Ob WP Post (Score:5, Insightful)
Three words: Reveal, Codes, and Acerson.
With just those you could do damned near anything.
To this day, likely close to ten years since I stopped using WordPerfect, I still find myself clobbered by strange MS Word formatting edicts, with no obvious way to get rid of them.
At least with WP you could see why something was weird, and fix it.
W. Richard Stevens writes: (Score:4, Insightful)
has been a style rule for many years, yet it is amazing that most word
processors do not do this! I just smile when I pick up a book produced
with something like Frame and you immediately find these errors.
Needless to say, troff does this correctly, and has for 20+ years. A
friend commented to me that normal evolution would have gone Word to
Frame to troff, but instead, the computer industry has gone the other
way!"
-W. Richard Stevens, author of 7 popular technical books. [R.I.P.]
Re:W. Richard Stevens writes: (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, I can't imagine why people would use Word over this [sourceforge.net].
Christ. This article, like so many here at Slashdot, summarizes to: Usability matters. Usability matters A LOT. Open source developers still don't fucking get it.
Here's a thought: if you want people to stop using Word, why not make something better than Word? Shocking.
All word-processors suck (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used Wordstar, Wordstar 2000 (or 3000?), WordPerfect, MS Word, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice writer and they all pretty much suck. Most people misuse them. They don't integrate well with other software. And they produce ugly results.
I wrote my master's thesis using FrameMaker which was quite a bit better. However, for my current document-production needs, I use LaTeX. I maintain the manuals for my company's software products and we have a great workflow for building the manuals. The same Makefile that builds the software also builds the manuals: PDF versions directly from the LaTeX and HTML versions using htlatex run on the LaTeX sources. Then a post-processor fixes things up so that our HTML documentation is linked context-sensitively from the web pages of our app, and special goodies like embedded training videos are placed in the HTML documentation at the right place.
The power and control we get from this workflow is unmatched.
Re:All word-processors suck (Score:5, Funny)
You know the alternatives are really crappy when the better one is an Adobe product.
Re: (Score:3)
I use LaTeX. I maintain the manuals for my company's software products and we have a great workflow for building the manuals.
In other words, you've found a niche within your company where your LaTex skills are needed and appreciated. But how much of the routine clerical work that keeps your business afloat is routed through MS Office?
Rapture of the Nerds author doesn't like Word? (Score:4, Insightful)
That about says it. Nobody else cares. I've been using Word since it came on two 5-1/4" floppy disks and included a mouse and used every version since what? 1983 or so? (Before that I used Zardax on an Apple ][ and, of course, WordStar.)
There's not a damn thing wrong with Microsoft Word. It is quite adequate--superb, even--for 99% of the people 99% of the time. I've written several 300 page books with it, including extensive indices, sidebars, tables, graphs, and pics and it works just fine. No, you can't do EVERYTHING you might want to do with it. And you might actually have to put some time in learning how it works, but ONE thing is CERTAIN:
It's not going to go away. The chances of it going away are equivalent to the chances the United States will convert to driving on the left. Only the nerds care about the arcane details under the hood.
Nobody else gives a rip.
Re:Rapture of the Nerds author doesn't like Word? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm...
My mother, who is 84, finds LibreOffice easier to use than Microsoft Office, and she has Microsoft XP.
One place I worked had Microsoft Office as standard, but I found the way it presented fonts for selection clumsy & difficult to use, so I installed OpenOffice (this was prior to LibreOffice in 2002) and exported in .doc format with no complaints from anybody receiving my documents.
Microsoft Office does not come standard on most Linux distributions, and is harder to use.
LibreOffice is freely available for all major Operating Systems, and also for Microsoft's Operating Systems.
All Word Processors have problems, and there are things I don't like about LibreOffice - but I still prefer LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, even when I have to use a box with a Microsoft Operating System.
Microsoft is on the way out, its market share has dropped below 20%. Note that Linux is on over 90 of super computers (the rest are mainly Unix), most mobile phones are either Linux (i.e Android) or Unix (iPhone) based, eBooks are based on Linux, and so are smart TV's. Embedded devices almost invariably use a Linux kernel. Automotive electronic systems are standardising on Linux. The vast majority of computer graphics for special effects in films is done using Linux, with Apple holding the bulk of the balance. If you fly on an A380, the entertainment system runs on Linux. The International Space station converted totally to Linux a month or two back. Note that Valve has found that Linux is the future of gaming. Only on desktops & Laptops, does Microsoft still dominate - but Linux and Apple are eating away at that.
Linux tends to be a lot more efficient than Microsoft and a lot more secure. Plus it is a lot more configurable, even by mere mortals - and for power users, it generally has more to offer. Companies can bring devices to market with Linux faster than they can with a Microsoft Operating System (due to its Open Source nature and better design), and they can make a profit in a market that is to smaller niche for a Microsoft product to be commercially viable.
So, even in the United States, I expect that most people will be using Linux or Apple on desktops & laptops within 5 years.
Re:Rapture of the Nerds author doesn't like Word? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's not a damn thing wrong with Microsoft Word. It is quite adequate--superb, even--for 99% of the people 99% of the time. I've written several 300 page books with it, including extensive indices, sidebars, tables, graphs, and pics and it works just fine.
Will you hate me if I tell you that you could have created that book in less than half the time with Framemaker, the best publishing application of it's time, damn you Adobe for abandoning it! One major problem with most Microsoft supporters is that they live with such blinders on. "Word is great" is synonymous with "I've only ever worked with Word and now know so many work arounds for all its deficiencies that I'll never change." Word and Excel have so much legacy cruft that I find them mostly unusable. In the words of Larry Wall, simple things should be simple, and hard things should be possible. I can't think of a single Microsoft application that follows that mantra.
I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
What exactly makes Word so bad? It seems functional enough, and I fully admit that maybe I'm just not understanding the finer points of some programming strategies, so what's the deal? He obviously hates Microsoft for things like buying up all these focused program adons like spell checkers from other companies, and wrapping them into Word, yet seems to think we'd be better off with somehow managing dozens of such apps if they were still separate companies and programs. He then goes on to act talk about how he hates being forced to use Word when he does just fine with other options... like Vim, of all things.
He mentions things like control codes and hierarchical style sheets being "fundamentally incompatible" yet the way he describes them they are basically the same thing. He very well may have a point, technically speaking, but he sure does a crappy job of getting it across.
End the end, the article kind of reminds me of some guy who's bitching about how the automotive industry should have gone with diesel instead of fuel 70 years ago.
Re: (Score:3)
Word is good for casual word processing, but the cracks show when working on anything large, or where multiple people are working on the same document.
That said, those people who work on large documents or documents that get edited over a long period of time by different people have lots of tools available that support this (LaTeX, Scrivener, and Framemaker are the big three I see all the time).
I said it in an earlier post, but word is basically the lowest common denominator. It's a tool that basically does
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
What exactly makes Word so bad? It seems functional enough, and I fully admit that maybe I'm just not understanding the finer points of some programming strategies, so what's the deal?
Let's see, just a few off the top of my head:
- Terrible flow control. It you change page one, have fun tweaking all the rest of the pages to get things to line up.
- Lack of frame control. In order to create a large document or book with complicated multipage graphs or graphics, you need a strong set of rules for where to break up rows, etc. Not to mention the flow of any text around the frame.
- Non-organic styles. There is no easy way to change the style of logical parts of the document globally, for example, change the size of the font on the headers of a certain class of tables over all chapters. Or to put it another way, global definitions plus exceptions.
Word users are just used to the constant re-treaking of pages to make them look right. Just another example of Microsoft office leading to massive wastage of man hours.
Am I Asking Too Much? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm writing a document that will be printed out on paper with black toner.
At a minimum, I don't want e-mail addresses or URLs changed to blue, or underlined, or hyperlinked.
My number two wish is a switch that says:
Anything pasted into this document will adopt the formatting of the line into which it is being pasted.
I cannot think of a single instance, ever, when I wanted the formatting from some web page to be carried over into my document. My final wish is to find a word processor that assumes, or at least makes really easy to specify, that the Page One Header will not be used on subsequent pages. I don't recall how Word does that these days, but in LibreOffice it involves creating a style just for the first page. Assuming that you've managed to Google the specific forum post that tells you that.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My number one wish for any word processor, but especially Word, is a switch that says:
I'm writing a document that will be printed out on paper with black toner.
At a minimum, I don't want e-mail addresses or URLs changed to blue, or underlined, or hyperlinked.
My number two wish is a switch that says:
Anything pasted into this document will adopt the formatting of the line into which it is being pasted.
I cannot think of a single instance, ever, when I wanted the formatting from some web page to be carried over into my document.
My final wish is to find a word processor that assumes, or at least makes really easy to specify, that the Page One Header will not be used on subsequent pages. I don't recall how Word does that these days, but in LibreOffice it involves creating a style just for the first page. Assuming that you've managed to Google the specific forum post that tells you that.
It is a very difficult and arcane setting. Double click the header. ove your mouse over to the menu that word contextually provided to the top option confusingly named
"Different First Page" the following steps are optional. Sacrifice a virgin. Chant in Latin. strip naked and roll in bacon grease.
Re: (Score:3)
It's easier to use section breaks, for a variety of reasons. Of course, that's like saying it's easier to knife off your testicles with a scalpel rather than an axe.
Re: (Score:3)
1. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect from the menu. The AutoCorrect dialog box will open.
2. Select the AutoFormat as You Type Tab.
3. In the Replace as You Type frame, deselect Internet and Network Paths with Hyperlinks.
4. Click on OK.
RTFM
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, but why does Word default to assuming that I'm writing a web page and not a paper document?
Why does it always (not just default) assume that you are using "pages"? I would like to type a dozen chapters or so, each of around 20-30 kB of text. No pages. I don't want it to break my text.
Typesetting and page formatting is something I want to leave to the publishers. I don't want to write "documents" for either paper or web. I write novels, not pages.
I've tried using LyX - for two books. But it was even worse than Word. Crash-prone, slow, and reformatting that takes ages. Not to mention the 5
Re: (Score:3)
Only time I can imagine I can imagine taking the formatting from web site or outside source is something like a table. Sometimes it's nice to be able to insert those without reformatting them in Excel or something
If you ever take up teaching, you'll love the feature. Why? Because the lazy plagiarising shits that you want to fail your course will be easy to spot as they'll never figure out how to make the formatting match; if the margins march back and forth across the page by small fractions of an inch (without attribution: let's be fair) or the fonts change mysteriously, then you know you can kick them with good conscience. Lazy dumbasses are lazy dumbasses, and don't need to be cosseted.
Yes, some might be smart en
Re: (Score:3)
This points to a discoverability problem, something that just about every Microsoft product, including Windows 8 suffers from.
Too much stuff is hidden below seventeen layers of menu or worse, particularly in Windows 8, forces you to move your mouse to some magic corner of the screen to access. It's a huge time waster for beginners. Trying to figure this out on your own is a pain, particularly for people on a tight deadline.
RTFM or take the expensive community college class to learn how to use software e
The one true answer (Score:3)
troff + tbl + eqn
It does the job (Score:4, Insightful)
Word may have flaws, like every other piece of software ever written. But it does the job. Millions of not-so-computer-savvy people are able to created good-looking documents using it.
WordPerfect relied on the embedded codes model, but they never did get it completely right. For anything non-trivial, you pretty much had to go down to the code level, hand-placing the codes to make the text render properly. Copy-and-paste across formats was often disastrous.
Word's model might be conflicted, but it works. There are very few situations where the wysiwyg editor can't get the text to look like what you want.
If I'm creating a document, I don't really care whether the encoding is HTML or RTF or docx or whatever, I just want it to look right, and Word does that.
Why ranting is a nonstarter (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not rocket science if you want Word to die write something better and cheaper the market is willing to accept over word.
I hear a lot of talk, fancy words but no hint of what would replace it or what could be done to even start to remedy the situation other than clicking your heels and wishing the evil Redmond monster go away. Talk is cheap, real monsters don't go away because you ask them nicely.
This article has a ton of problems (Score:3)
First of all, if you're trying to make a statement of how a product must "die" due to transgressions from the 1980s, that's plain ridiculous. Someone who committed a drugs offence during the Reagan administration shouldn't be denied a job opportunity in the fall of 2013. Right? Let's pass judgments in the current state of things, not what we had to deal with 20 years ago.
Second -- the whole technical argument being made seems to revolve around the idea that mixing "control code" and "style sheets" in a single format is bad. I've got quite a bit of past experience in writing software that builds doc files (the binary ones) and I can state with great certainty that this is NOT how Word works. Everything is a style, whether explicitly or implicitly by combining styles with direct formatting, and every style is able to be (and usually is) inherited from a parent style. You don't have to explicitly define the combined styles, and in more recent versions of Word they've made it much clearer that that's what is happening. (IMO Word 2007 is the first version where they actually got the UI right)
A lot of people are confused by all this because older versions of Word favoured UI simplicity over structurally beautiful documents. A lot of that has to do with trying to convince WordPerfect users to come over to Word..... anyone remember the complaints that everyone had in the 1990s about how Word didn't have a "Reveal Codes" function like WordPerfect? Yeah, that's because THERE ARE NO CODES like the author of TFA claims.
Third -- the Word style system is remarkably similar to HTML + CSS. It's hierarchical layout with the ability to override anything at any time. Presentation and content are "ideally" totally separate, and you can certainly work this way in Word if you are disciplined, but nothing at all stops you from saying "yeah I -know- this block of text is 14pt but I want this one word to be 12pt."
The author also drills pretty hard on the point that the format of Word documents has changed from one version to the next. Well, yeah....they added features like Table Styles and List Styles in Word 2002. Surely nobody is expecting documents that utilize this really helpful feature to older versions of Word..... right? This is no great conspiracy.....it's just a case of adding new features. Switching to the XML-based document format and standardizing the format with Ecma and ISO has definitely helped settle the format down, but if a word processor doesn't support a feature in a newer version of the document format, well.....tough shit. I don't hear anybody bitching about how Firefox 3.6 doesn't fully implement CSS3, accordingly people shouldn't bitch about how Word 2000 doesn't implement features new to Word 2010!
One last thing: I'm posting this to debunk some mythology and refute the author's claims, but I'm not defending the old-school Office document format....yeah, it was driven by a very 1990s need to be fast on old 286s etc. (same reason Windows 3.0 APIs lacked a lot of bounds checking, BTW) and the format is a proprietary file system unto itself (doc files always come in sizes of multiples of 8192 bytes because that was the size of a block of data regardless of its content). But those times are long gone now. We should have a great appreciation for the people who worked really hard on decoding all this ten years ago and published some good Perl modules on CPAN.... I've read all that source code and it is insane. And we should have an appreciation for those who pushed Microsoft to go "open" with their Office formats. Openness was pushed into Office without users even realizing it, which is good for everyone.
Re: (Score:3)
If those transgressions are still there (eg. the way MS Word loses images off the page where you put them) despite the passage of a lot of time then it's a perfectly valid opinion.
With the "ribbon", I can't really use Word anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
I have crappy memory. I'm not one to remember arcane macros or shortcuts. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V is as far as I go.
Never fear - nested menus always helped me find things.
Now with the Ribbon in Office, first I have to search each of 5 or 6 ribbon views. They aren't grouped very meaningfully so it's basically a linear search. Then if I don't find what I am looking for I am basically stuck, since I can't remember how to find items that aren't on the ribbon, and I can't really search on them, because I am not exactly sure what they are called. So I end up using Word like a glorified notepad.
The design team that killed the menus on Word (and those kids who are doing the same on browsers) don't realize the damage they are causing end users.
Re: (Score:3)
Nope. Go to little drop down list at the very top and choose "More commands". Then in the dropdown for "Choose commands from" select "commands not in ribbon".
And there you have it, and alphabetized single list of several HUNDRED commands that don't show up ANYWHERE in the ribbon...NOT organized by function so that you can find them even if you unsure what exactly you are looking for.
The whole point of nested menus is it helps you explore to even know what you are looking for.
Now get me my menus back in Chro
uh oh (Score:3)
It looks like you're trying to kill me. YOU MUST DIE!
So I'm not insane after all. (Score:3)
The behavior of Word including styles and formatting seems to be the invention from hell - some style templates seems to be as contagious as viruses and you can't ever get anything right as you want it. The number of times I have had to settle for "Good enough" are numerous and can't be counted.
At least with HTML I can get some control over things, but the downside there is that it costs a lot of time to produce a user-friendly document instead.
yes (Score:3)
Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model?
Yes, it could. Unfortunately, it doesn't because some morons have decided that copying is more important than inventing.
There are a couple of really good and different tools, like LyX. But honestly, the problem with productivity tools like these is that they aren't cool and sexy, so it needs momentum to carry the developers, because the coolness alone doesn't do it.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
More abstractly, there are lots of tools which have sprung up to address the issues raised in the article.
Word has kind of become the lowest common denominator. Just about everyone can open a word document, and just about everyone can make one. As soon as more features are needed, people turn to tools like Scrivener (popular with authors), LaTeX (popular with technical people), or even bafflingly painful but powerful tools like Adobe's Framemaker (tech writers in certain industries).
Re: (Score:2)
Features (or lack thereof) are not the problem. It's the incessant bugs, some of which have remained untouched since word 97.
Re: (Score:3)
I wouldn't call my latex experience efficient by default, instead I call the result pretty and this is all that count's. Also it gives your resume a certain well recognized format, at least by the people in the same club. Why would you deal with Winword noobs.
Re:LaTeX! (Score:5, Informative)
It's called Lyx - http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
Re: (Score:2)
If you like outlines/thumbnails etc. on the left and you're doing (interactive) books, try iBooks Author, just be prepared for a messy experience if you need to insert any WORD chapters.
Re: (Score:3)
We used it at one workplace. I am glad it is dead. You had to use to with the motif window manager, otherwise it would just not start. All the control symbols were in French, so you had to guess at their meaning. It wasn't good.
Re: (Score:3)
Funny how he claims its broken by design.
I use it very frequently, and while it is crap, it does actually work.
If you have used a rock to pound nails all your life, how can you understand the advantages of a hammer?