So while we are talking about old software, my dad gave me his work computer, a Grid laptop, for me to write reports on etc. It was a DOS type with an orange/black screen. He had this program called VP Planner +, which was a spread sheet program. It came on one disk (the computer didn’t have a hard drive) but literally had a book over an inch thick, I shit you not. Pretty crazy how a program that fit on a 1.4mb floppy (or was it SD floppy?) had enough going on to require a book that thick.
I learned enough on how to use it to catalog and track and make graphs of my comic collection. I still have the files on floppies somewhere.
I had a Grid desktop with a 386 in it. It was old when I got it, but an upgrade from the PS/2 I had before that. Tandy had bought Grid at some point, so that made it my 2nd Tandy computer (the 1st being a TRS-80 Model I, which I still have).
Anyway… that Grid was new enough that I could run Word on it. (It was also the 1st computer from which I accessed the Internet.)
It wouldn’t be entirely surprised if mail merge is deliberately neglected. Probably not going to be actively excised; but if there is a mail-merge function that MS actually cares about it’s the one that you pay the enterprise monies to use with Power Platform server-side document generation as connected to the various Dynamics 365 CRM modules.
The Excel-heads seem to have a stronger position in terms of keeping their tool of choice from being taken out and deprecated in the back of the head in favor of some fever dream of PowerBI and SSRS and Azure data lakes or something; but even there the new stuff (like the python implementation) is fully cloud-ified.
The bloat is for a number of reasons. As other have mentioned, feature creep is a problem. Also when MS dropped Front Page and imported it’s (utter shit) functionality in to Word the bloat got worse.
The other problem is a reality of economics. The amount of time required to optimise the code is, in pure dollar terms, just not worth the effort. 6 months work to save a couple of gigs isn’t cost effective
There are a lot of reasonable complaints about laying out documents in Word, but it is something of an improvement over the bad old days of manually trying to shift objects around and flipping back and forth to some sort of print preview in a desperate attempt to figure out what was going on.
I quite like this old piece on the subject:
The original design of Microsoft Word, in the early 1980s, was a work of clarifying genius, but it had nothing to do with the way writing gets done. The programmers did not think about writing as a sequence of words set down on a page, but instead dreamed up a new idea about what they called a “document.” This was effectively a Platonic idea: the “form” of a document existed as an intangible ideal, and each tangible book, essay, love letter, or laundry list was a partial, imperfect representation of that intangible idea.
Came here to give a shout out to Ami Pro. The insurance company I worked for from 1993 to 2004 used it - at least for part of that time. Once I got used to it (came from a WordPerfect place), I really liked it.
On the Mac it was a puppy, I guess to make one feel guilty about turning it off.
Also, Mac Excel did the math incorrectly, although math is something one might want in a spreadsheet program.
My favorite (on any platform) was adding a page number field in the footer of a 100+ page document. And by “favorite” I mean “favorite way of crashing Word.”
see also bulleting, where it only rarely operates in any sensible way.
( somehow ms actually managed to get bulleting right in the early versions of “one note” - and then broke it when they decided to make bloated cloud versions of everything )
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