I’m a fan of M$ cause it’s easier to find reliable pirate software for windows.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Windows and OSX. You suck at computers if you can’t drive both. They do the same thing.
People hate on Word cause it SUCKS SHIT. I will help anyone with basically any computer task, except Office programs. If you are doing any serious document layout you are doing yourself a massive disservice by using Word instead of InDesign.
InDesign is probably one of the easiest Adobe programs to teach yourself quickly, it is impossibly precise and setup for prepping documents for print or web. Word doesn’t allow pixel-precise positioning of objects which is vital if you care about setting out things the way you want. It is not great with backwards compatability, but if you think your buddy might need to open the document you’re working on in CS6 in an earlier version all you need to do is save it as an .idx format and it will be openable in any version of the program.
Also earlier this year Adobe switched off their authentication servers for the CS2 suite, so they upped versions of their CS2 software that didn’t require authentication. It’s not technically legal, but you can go to adobe.com and download a full working version of CS2 that will never expire. Just sayin’
Furthermore, here is my solution to the author and others. Word sucks. Hurt M$ by pirating the Office suite instead of buying it if the people you work with insist on using it.
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I use Apple because they use the right priming words for me before they tell me the price. They just “get me” that way. It’s the sort of personal care one expects from the best.
one expects from the best.
Pass me the vomit bag (unless that was self-aware facetiousness).
I find the idea of Genii preposterous. When my home machine breaks I don’t have to book in a time or wait for my machine to be fixed and returned. I take it to my guy who will ID the problem, show me the options of what I can buy as replacement for the faulty part, replace it on the spot, ensure the machine is running correctly with new hardware installed and then send me on my way for the cost of the hardware only.
That’s the kind of service I would consider the best.
Wow, yes, that was sarcastic and self-deprecating. (and pretty funny if I say so myself.)
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I take my macs to a local guy who does a good job. I have never had to do it until they were past five years old and it turned out to be futile anyway because of software changes. Browsers and teh internets being what they are. I can’t function without a browser that works and you just cant get one for pre-intel macs anymore. I have limited patience for fiddling, though. Your experience and talents may differ.
Pixel-perfect positioning of text would be called typesetting. Positioning things such as tables and objects would typically not be included. Your semantic games are silly: don’t you want to be able to set out a document the way you want? I do.
Also I’m clearly not suggesting that the average user should replace Word with InDesign. I’m saying that the internet allows anyone to learn anything and I have no interest in being an average user and nor should anyone.
Good call. Supporting the local dude often gets you the best service in most cases. Sadly, the way Apple is designing products these days you won’t be able to service anything yourself soon. I am no hater (I am typing this from my work imac) I am just a strong believer in upgradability and user serviceability of products, especially when they are as modular as computers.
Point: Missed.
In Word I grab an object or table, stick it where I want it, grab the sides to size it.
That’s how InDesign works too, but I can actually stick it where I want it, not in the pre-determined positions. I’m not telling you to replace Word if that’s what works for you I’m telling you that your arguments for why Word is superior are not very good ones.
Wow! I think that totally lays bare the corporatization of the university campus right there, no? That’s… yeah. I think that really depresses me… Cause I’m sure at least some poor grad student took it up if it paid, because, grad students are poor and underpaid bunch.
Dunno, really. I already try to warn people not to use IE of any version, so I mostly just laughed at the warning.
While I personally avoid MS products for my own systems, I’m very much understanding that most people are going to be more comfortable with whatever they’re already using, even if there is something that’s much better (usually much better based on criteria they don’t understand, especially when it’s being explained to them by one of my techno-geek compatriots.)
Around 1996 or so, I started working as a temp. One of my first assignments was a job cleaning up a document, a proposal being drafted by a small non-profit. The document was composed on Microsoft Word. I’d never used Microsoft Word before; I’d used WordPerfect, and a few less known and older word processors. I’d been reading up a little on HTML, and so I had some concept of defining categories of content first, then specifying the formatting of each category. This early version made it fairly easy to define and redefine styles, and the existing document was mostly well-laid out anyway. I spent the first few hours of the job clearing out the extraneous ad-hoc formatting, and rationalizing the styles list to about four styles that covered everything. The guy I was working for came by, asked me to adjust the font size for subtitles, and was impressed that I did it for the entire document in one go.
That was the only really positive experience I’ve ever had with a word processor.
Every word processor I’ve used since then was needlessly complex and more difficult to use. In particular, the styles menu, or whatever the word processor at hand calls it, is intimidating, confusing, and filled with hundreds of pre-defined styles, with unclear dependencies upon each other, with names that suggest different styles have the same function, and with no easy way to edit them. While I prefer LibreOffice Writer slightly to the recent versions of Word, it suffers from its desperate efforts to emulate Word.
What’s most irritating, though, is that for most documents I see in the workplace, it’d be easier to use plain text and a nice, simple text editor – something about halfway between Notepad and Wordpad. Most of the formatting in Word documents is totally irrelevant, when the resulting document is just a few paragraphs of text. Particularly irritating is that “rich” formatting in email is commonplace. We end up with documents going back and forth for revisions, with managers complaining about inconsistent formatting in emails in which fonts, etc., should be totally irrelevant.
What Stross gets at most, and I agree, is that the real problem isn’t that Word is so awful, but that almost every business and government agency insists on all documents being submitted in Word format, even when plain text, or when formatting is really required, PDFs, would be much easier for everyone.
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My criticism of MS Word is that when everybody pretty much was forced to switch to it in the mid-90’s, it lack a lot of the features of the software it replaced. Going from WordPerfect, there was no code view (which I still miss to this day as sometimes things go funny and they are really hard to fix) and a lot of automation capabilities. It took years for MSWord to be able to have an image that was a call to a file as opposed to an actual embedded image and when it did it did not work until a few years later, and even then one had to visualize every page on screen for the images to get printed (not fun on a 200-page document).
Same with PowerPoint. Freelance kicked PP’s ass big time when PP came out.
They are just BAD pieces of software that became de-facto standards through monopolistic parctices
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The requirement is more complex than just a file format: at this point, there are four separate entities in the process – the author, the publishing company (in the person of the managing editor), the copy editor (who is a freelance contractor, like the author), and the typesetting agency (who are also outside the publisher).
The typesetting agency needs something they can import – usually into InDesign or Quark Publishing System. (And as someone who’s married to an InDesign driver, you haven’t heard swearing until you’ve heard a typesetter swearing at what InDesign does with a Word document!)
The copy editor and author need something they can track changes and annotate, which produces typesetter-friendly output.
The managing editor needs to be able to monitor the workflow and see what everyone else is doing.
The whole shooting-match needs to be cross-platform, because there’s no telling what hardware or OS any given random freelancer uses – and bear in mind that authors tend to range in age from 35-75, aren’t necessarily good with tech, and get cranky if you try to dictate tools to them. (I know several who still use weird 80s vintage WPs running under DOS, to this very day.)
The fall-back position is to do everything on paper. Publishers hate this because it adds time (round-trip via postal service) and costs (typesetters charge by the hour and it takes longer to typeset a MS by hand than to import and tidy up an electronic file).
I suspect that the long-term answer to this conundrum is to move everything to HTML5, for which acceptable authoring tools already exist. In the short term, we’re stuck with Word .doc files, with the proviso that LibreOffice is often acceptable for change tracking on simpler manuscripts created in Word – if the author understood what they were doing and didn’t make a bletcherous mess of the styles.
(Last year I swallowed my pride and paid the Beast of Redmond for a copy of MS Offfice because I was faced with the job of editing/redrafting a six novel series, and faced having to use change tracking as part of the edit workflow. Yes, I could have done it in LibreOffice: but if it was you, would you be willing to gamble twelve weeks’ intensive work on LibreOffice interoperating perfectly with MS Word, when the document set you’re working on is a hundred pages longer than War and Peace and you’re making in excess of 12,000 tracked changes? All it takes is one annoying bug and you’ve lost three months of your life …)
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Well, clearly it’s not the software. It’s the fact you’re wearing gloves full of jelly…
On my resume, I call myself a “Power User” of applications. I was a technical writer for 20 years, and I am now an instructional designer. I’ve used WordPerfect, MSWord in every flavor from its first days, AmiPro, as well as the page layout programs PageMaker, InDesign, Framemaker, and a unix based program called Interleaf. If you want a book written in Word, I can compile an index, a table of contents, and make each chapter wrriten in a separate document number consecutively automatically. In other words, I’m a rock star in Word.
In the early days of my career, technical writers were very skilled at layout and design, and we knew how to pour files of one sort into another program so it wasn’t just beautifully written but also beautiful to look at.
Over the years, the technical skills needed to do this have been a problem for most organizations. They hire a writer to write a manual, and later maybe have a few revisions - they want it to be easy for someone else to edit. In reality, the revisions are never that simple and no one else ever touches these files but the technical writer, but there is still a belief that some unskilled person might need to edit the files. Also there is still a demand for the Word source files to be available to marketing people in an editable way.
So what has happened over the years, totally because of Word’s dominance and because most people have not the slightest clue how to use features beyond changing the font and the spellchecking is that I have learned to write everything in Arial with the most simple formatting and I have given up on trying to make anything look readable. I mean, my documents look much better than most people’s but not as good as they could look if I were using a better tool THAT OTHER LESS SKILLED PEOPLE could ALSO use without screwing up my stuff.
What tool WAS better? AmiPro. It worked very well. It was designed to make the styles (font/font size/font color/line spacing/ and indents combinations) very easy to find and use. It actually created books easily. It numbered well. Oh yeah, and the FUCKING BULLETS WORKED!!! But it was killed by Microsoft.
Yeah, i hate Microsoft Word and I use it every freakin’ day. I wish everyone would understand that Google Docs is a) free, b) easy to share documents with each other, and c) at least as good as Word and no one uses the features of Word that are not in Google Docs. Why this (did I mention FREE) tool doesn’t take over Word’s market share is beyond me.
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There actually is a code view but it’s very very hidden. Right click on the toolbar and from the right mouse menu select: Customize Quick Acess Toolbar >Choose Commands From: All Commands > Show All. Once you add this button to your toolbar, you can click it to show and EDIT all codes. Click it again to hide that view. This is so useful, I keep it permanently added to my toolbar.
And then they have to scan and OCR the paper in order to produce the e-book. I know I’ve bought e-books published in the last couple of years that have contained bizarre OCR-related typos.
Honestly, use of Word is just one of the many ways in which the publishing industry has its head up its ass. (See: DRM, e-book pricing, …)
I tend to agree this is misdirected hate. He should be hating on the Establishment. Almost everyone I know in business uses Word. So if you want interchangeable files you’re going to use text, RTF, or a DOC variant. PDF doesn’t count. Great common wrapper but PDF editors are rare.
Like other older people I transitioned through all sorts of other WP’s (Ami Pro, Wordperfect, etcetera). I dabbled in OO and now LO. Word is the surviving standard. Get over it. If it doesn’t work well for you then at least accept you need to use it for output-and-edit compatibility.
I also enjoy Scrivener. Guess what? It does a crappy job, compared to Word, of tracking changes from multiple sources (such as your editors and/or proofreaders) even if they were willing to use it.
The other side of the coin is to learn to use your tools efficiently. Don’t like the Ribbon (I hate it)? Then minimize it. You can gain a nearly blank workspace if that’s your thing. Learn to use Styles instead of ad-hoc formatting. In addition to format standards benefits it also gains outlining ability.
Charlie Stross is one of my favorite authors but his anger seems misdirected in this case.
Sigh… edlin. The nostalgia is enough to make me feel 12 years old again, writing Duran Duran fan fic.
