… you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld …
Great word! And, sadly, apt.
I’m surprised at all the OpenOffice mentions, I though all the ‘cool kids’ were using LibreOffice because sun microsystems is the devil. Also one of the biggest hair pullers for people in todays graphics industry is people who insist on trying to use Word or Powerpoint for any and everything, ie open an image post it into a blank document, use the automatic email thing to send it to the designer/printer, and then wonder why people keep telling them to stop doing that since it’s so easy (for them).
Anyways I recently I went back to school and have been encouraging other students to use Google Docs since all our school email accounts were switched to Gmail (thank god, that last system needed to put down like Old Yeller) which most have been receptive to. And since I’ve been taking a class for it it’s making much more sense for me to use InDesign when I can, since it handles text in a more sensible and elegant manner, and is much less likely to bug out when exporting to a PDF.
Clippy’s not so bad once you get to know him.
(But seriously, clippy has been gone for a long, long time. It’s kind of amazing how long a shadow clippy cast on the software industry.)
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Word may cause a word to appear on your screen, but have you ever had to deal with a 150 page dissertation with stuff copied into it from all over? It’s a formatting atrocity. Word documents become so convoluted that they are more work to correct than to retype from scratch.
As a guy who’s used text editors for 35 years, including every version of Word from 1.05 to the latest, I can assure you that Word creates much bigger messes than all other editors put together, multiplied by a hundred.
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Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+V - Paste as unformatted text.
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Low-hanging fruit…
One could write a seriously thoughtful article on how arbitrary and complicated Word is to use, on how closed and unreliable the file format is, the constant shifting of the ground beneath one’s feet, or about alternatives which are better in specific ways, but that would take work!
Frankly, I don’t think Clippy was that bad - badly targeted, too intrusive and the technology just wasn’t there, but its spiritual successors are Siri and Google Now. At the very least, it provides an on-screen rubber duck! 
So… if I come up with a file-format based upon a variant of JSON, compressed with RAR, and only really usefully used in, say, IsomorphWriter and IsomorphFormulaGrid, can I submit it to an international standards organization and call it OpenJSON?
Then, afterward, can I claim in my marketing materials that IsomorphWriter and FormulaGrid use “open” file formats?
Maybe then I should port IsomorphWriter from IsomorphOS over to Mac OS, but make the Mac IsomorphJob Suite process OpenJSON (a “standard”) in subtly different ways from the IsomorphOS version.
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Since you’re not a convicted monopolist software company with tentacles bearing funding money in every standards organization the mind can conceive, I suppose the answer is no…
Well, a few weeks ago our CS Department chair forwarded an email to all current CS students about an opportunity to be a Microsoft Student Partner for our campus with the text explaining that “… you’d basically be the Microsoft student evangelist on campus.” While it was unclear rather or not if this was a paid position, it did seem pretty much like a shill - paid or unpaid - to me. This was, of course, within 15 minutes of the head of our CTS department sending out an email warning everyone to not use IE until the latest zero-day exploit could be patched.
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What version? The problem is not IE so much as institutions never upgrading to new releases. Would be surprised if this notice applied to IE10 or IE11.
(To be fair, some versions of IE require an OS upgrade.)
Aha! Speaking of OS upgrades, MS really got me this time round!
This only applies if I buy through official channels, which I kind of like doing to avoid my computer getting the twerkies.
I use Excel a lot, like, more than anyone. Running Win XP with Office 2007 at home / office, wanted to upgrade to Office 2010 to match pace with clients. Unavailable. Can only, here in the UK, buy 2013. OK - bummer. Read a bit about 2013. Must upgrade Windows to match.
So suddenly, I’ve got to spend >$700 (I get the professional packages, I’m a good boy). Or stay in 2007.
Over my spectrum of clients though, multiple versions of Excel … suddenly I’m thinking - what! Do I need to run multiple instances of Windows with multiple Excels in order to stay in line with clients? [Yes].
This all got a bit complicated. I get upgrades, and perfectly happy with that, and the loss of reverse compatiblity. But this situation, when I can’t even get the MS Office version I need, is starting to tip some balances.
In favour of? Er … Errr … I throw it out to the audience. I program VBA and design / build complex and, if I may say - and I will, bloody clever models and predictive stuff.
Not a complaint, not a cry for help, but a recognition of the frustration initiators out there.
Oh btw I’m running Office on OSX via VMWare Fusion - it fuckin’ rocks ilke a Tennessee prom night. Available from your local distributor.
That’s a possibility. Or I’m heading out there in a few weeks - can see a bunch of stuff at
Still reading DRM annoyances like “2 PC / 1 user” - JFC when will they simply license ME / my business to have it wherever I want to use it??
Microsoft is amazing btw - £ cheques to Peregrinus@theshillexchange.net
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Hello,
My problem is kind of the reverse: I have used Word without problem to write papers in the 10-20 page range, and when I get them back from our marketing department, formatting for things like italicized and bold text is usually stripped.
While I have not used it in a very long time, Corel’s WordPerfect Office suite is readily available, and it does claim to offer compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.
An iOS app called Editorial. It’s a plain text/markdown editor with Dropbox support and a macro language (and a built-in python interpreter if you need to do any heavy lifting). I did it on my iPad Mini with Logitech keyboard folio in a booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair as part of an experiment – this part being to see if I could write effectively on a gizmo I could cram in a jacket pocket.
Initial publication happened here (it’s a WordPress site run by a department of Arizona State University) and then reformatted and republished on my own blog
(a Movable Type system).
So it never went within a mile of anything that can read or edit Word documents.
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When the document in question is up to 400 pages long it’s a different matter. (You try living with my orthopedic gloves and anti-inflammatory gel for a week or six while doing my job. You might wish for a pickaxe …)
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Third comment on Charlie’s blog:
Word!
Beat me to it.
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It’s astonishing to witness how much capability is built into Word … and how little of that capability gets tapped by 99% of users. It is all the things claimed by its detractors … and defenders. As someone whose entire career has been writing-centric, I go all the way back to the dedicated Wang Word Processor terminals…and typewriters before that. I tried nearly every new software package and was forced to use some real clunkers that were declared company standard (MultiMate, anyone?) Word came along and established a standard that was functional and relatively lean…and then began a two-decade mutation into the horrific blob it is today.
I really don’t need much to write. So I’ve settled on Google Docs for business, Scrivner for books and complex docs, and a decent inexpensive publishing program called Serif PagePlus for anything that requires some layout. (Does anything InDesign can do, and is a lot easier to use.)
My experience drives me to simplicity in the tools I use everyday…and good functionality in the special-purpose applications. Word has fallen off the table because it fails to meet either need.
That said, I can see MS trying to fix things in the latest version of Office 360. I still don’t need it though.
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Nope, it’s not .docx; my publishers move v-e-r-y slowly and their workflow has to be lowest common denominator, so they standardized on Word 97-2003 level .doc as a file format for their copyediting workflow. At least one of them doesn’t even officially support Word for Mac, let alone LibreOffice, but only Word on Windows XP – blame their corporate IT support people. (NB: “my publishers” are imprints of Hachette Livre, Holtzbrink/Macmillan, and Penguin Random House.)
Final note for the likes of user OwlPower above: I’ve been using Word itself on various platforms since 1990, have a masters in computer science, and used to work as a software developer before I switched to writing full-time. If OwlPower works in MS’s office application development group, or develops add-ons for Word as part of their day job, then they might have status to lecture me on “not understanding the technology”. (Otherwise, not so much.)
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There’s definitely something in this, but I wonder whether Word is really the villain? When I started out, there were only daisywheel or dot matrix printers, and pretty much anything you wrote was in mono-spaced font. In fact, we didn’t even think in terms of fonts. This in turn meant that writing was about words, rather than appearance. Word, and inkjet and laser printers made it easy to create stuff that looked almost as good as published stuff, and this in turn raised the bar in expectations, meaning that time that would have been spent writing was now spent formatting, aligning, and all the other junk.
It’s definitely an expectation thing. I find it easier to write e-mails than documents, because nobody cares about the formatting of an e-mail. Somehow that frees me up and helps me get stuff down.
I see a modern day analogy for this. It used to be the case that getting a website to work was an achievement in itself. Now, there’s an expectation that is should be beautiful (even if it isn’t doing anything very important), so a greater proportion of time is spent on fighting CSS.
Writers shouldn’t be typesetters, and programmers shouldn’t be graphic designers, but somehow expectations conspire to make it so.
