Re: What are the alternatives? @AJ MacLeod
Thanks for the "random disaster generator". I have some experience with Word disasters, some almost fatal, but newer a better expression for that Word feature.
British science fiction author Charles Stross has published a mighty rant on the subject of Microsoft Word, which he is attempting to will out of existence. Stross has form as a critic of Redmond, having penned a Linux column for another outlet. His complaint on this occasion is not just with Word itself, but rather the fact …
Templates are not HTML type style sheets. If you insert a paragraph and type a few lines, they will follow the default (normal.dot). If you want it to follow the template, overtype the last character of the previous (templated) line, put the full stop, put the line break. THEN it knows you mean your insertion to aslo follow the template.
Test this out for yourself just using bold or different coloured text. You have to continue on from inside the /end or </endstyle> marker or it won't continue the style (whatever that marker internally is).
While I agree with his point that (publisher) expectation of use is a big problem he seems quite a confused bunny to me.
He complains at all the complex features M$ putrs in and then complains that some of those advances features are not advanced enough. He also seems to complain about and obsolete .doc format that Word doesn't want to use (but he/publisher seems to want to!).
Valid rants but somewhat out of date. Could be worse, think of the mess we would be in of open/libre office were to be the norm (ooh, feeling the downvotes already, heresy!)
"Before he reaches the conclusion, Stross complains that Microsoft kept adding features to Word that were once standalone products, thereby putting a few software houses out of business."
I see you offer your works as e-books on Amazon, an outlet that is (apparently) putting bookshops out of business. Do you not see the hypocrisy in this?
As a UX designer and the guy behind AMX Pagemaker on the BBC Micro (yup, way back then!), I ran the company using two outstanding wordprocessors, whose UX (or GUI as we called them back then, not that the Beeb had a GUI until our product!) was superb, namely Computer Concept's Wordwise and Acorn's own wordprocessor, whose name I forget. (It's been a while.)
Wordwise, being embedded in the ROM, was instant (like most BBC Micro software that wasn't on a floppy), had a cursor that remained in the same vertical position - the text scrolled smoothly up and down about the cursor position and so it was a pleasure to use.
MS Word was always unusable and bloated to me and we refused to adopt it in the company, sticking to the aforementioned, and more recently, various Mac based text editors, and now, Google Docs or Google sites, where are content can be shared and is therefore by default cross platform and device. (And no doubt read by the NSA etc - the one downside to the cloud computing paradigm.)
I have always liked Excel, but it didn't really have any competition, although likewise, we have of course now adopted Google Docs Spreadsheet whose collaboration features are excellent!
If one is looking at the other options then may I ask: that given that one of the advantages of Word, particularly, in the corporate world is the abitlty to have scrips, ie VBA running.and what is the alternative?
I use Word all the time simply because I can write all sorts of VBA to gather data from databases, CRM and to load various templates which bring up dialog boxes for me to fill in data.
I can program my Word templates to automatically put data in the header and footers from, for example, the Document Management System. Yes, I know that I may be able to do this in other word processors but if I need this then the list of possible replacements is reduced.
Furthermore, one of the my applications write to Word via COM. So I can automate the writing of reports and then print to PDF all with a click of a button and I don't need to be there as I generate about half a dozen or so 100 page detailed reports daily.
Word is a massive tool and there's not a long with it other than it has the "Made By..." badge on it. Yes there are about hundred million extra features that no-one needs but there's nothing wrong with using Word at all.
And having had the misfortune to read some of Stross' novels I suggest that he doesn't blame the workman's tool.
If one is looking at the other options then may I ask: that given that one of the advantages of Word, particularly, in the corporate world is the abitlty to have scrips, ie VBA running.and what is the alternative?
The alternative is to write scripts, programs, etc., that carry out your data mining tasks outside your word processing tool. It is the job of a Word Processor to be good at word processing, it is not the job of a Word Processor to be a general-purpose programming environment ... we have general-purpose programming environments for that.
In short: Let the Word Processor be a good wordprocessor and don't spoil it with functions that have nothing to do with Word Processing ... leave those tasks to other software, which can excel at them and need not also be a second-rate Word Processor.
Beer: Because if people got simple things like this right thge first time we could all spend more time down the pub.
Software developers generally don't use Word to write code. Other than rare cases.
Word has grown in complexity to such an extent that even the save format (.docx) requires more than 7000 pages to specify its form and behaviour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#ISO.2FIEC_29500:2008). 99.9% of all users would be happy with something much less complex, such as HTML. HTML 4.01 requires less than 400 pages of specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/). And 99% would probably be happy with much less than even HTML.
HTML has the advantage of being readable and editable by humans without using a WYSIWYG editor (though many of these exist), so power users can get the precision and flexibility of editing raw HTML + CSS while most will be happy with selecting a predefined style and editing via a WYSIWYG editor.
HTML is not perfect, but is is a widespread standard having many implementations and is readable by anyone who has a browser (which even telephones have these days). The relatively simple format allows external tools to process documents fairly easily (compared to processing .docx files), so you don't need to have stuff like versioning, bibliography reference support, table-of-content generation and so on built in to the format: Just apply an external tool, similar to how you with LaTeX apply BibTeX and MakeIndex as external tools.
I will still continue to use LaTeX for my own use, but if forced out of it, I would much rather work with HTML-based text processors than with Word or derivatives like Open Office and Libre Office.
I know it won't make me popular, but I really don't see the issue.
If he's such a purist author then he should be writing in Notepad or another simple text editor. They'll do everything he wants AND be compatible with his publisher's demands. Better yet, get out your f*cking typewriter.
It's not exactly rocket-science to turn off the features that people like him complain about. If you don't want the features, you don't have to use them. I always turn off the spelling and grammar checking facilities, for example.
If you bothered read the article, which a quick google would reveal is at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html (dunno why El Reg didn't link it) , you would see he uses a bunch of tools (including Scrivener) to write his books, but the workflow of all the publishers he has used and knows of requires you to submit it as a Word document, which they then annotate with the changes they want, and then make the changes to that Word document. Which is a less then optimal workflow, you must agree.
he should probably update his copy of word, since it hasn't relied on .doc format, or even .docx in quite a while now. Not that I like word, but it's hardly the worst word processor out there.
But then, he clearly has an inconsistent axe to grind, and as such I really couldn't care less. It certainly doesn't paint his fictional work in good light if he can't even write a half decent critique of a word processor.
Publishing houses require double-spaced text, headers and footers and a title page, all with defined contents. ASCII text just isn't capable of providing them what they need, even if it is good enough for 95% of anything any author writes. All of them accept .doc, many accept RTF, some of them accept PDF, very few of them accept anything else. I can understand that, after all, publishers can not be expected to have copies of every authoring tool under the sun, just in case some author decides to use it. There have to be standards, and apart from .doc, there simply aren't any.
Even writing short stories, Word and LibreOffice are incapable. I need a word count, but it mustn't include the title page or the headers/footers. I have to highlight all the text every time. All I need is a word count of the current section, but neither of them have that function.
Then, as a software engineer, I am well aware of the utility of version control. Word's own version control is pitiable. Git, Mercurial etc. see these files as binary, and so can not display changes. Even saving in RTF in Word or LibreOffice creates a file so full of markup that any text changes are overwhelmed. ODT is theoretically an XML files, but it is stored in zip format with other files.
There are applications out there that save in minimalised RTF. But then I need to import that into Word or LibreOffice and add the title page and the headers and footers before I can send it off to a publisher. There's no automated method for doing that.
What I need is an authoring tool that allows me very basic facilities. Most of the time italic is the only feature I use, but let's include bold, underline, subscript, superscript, paragraphing, centering and maybe footnotes. It needs to save in a text format so the version control can track it properly. Then it needs to be able to export to .doc (etc.) in a highly customisable form, maybe using a template of some sort. That template would add the title page and the headers and footers. It would set the style of the paragraphs and the font.
You can do a huge amount of that with HTML and bit of javascript. I wrote some routines for a company (alas they wouldn't let me open source it but it wouldn't be too hard for anyone to repeat) that added titles, page numbers based on calculating the size of page and actual fonts used (so you could print out large print if you needed to with no effort). An index and contents can be automatically generated as well.
If you want version control and diff's you can do that using the software tools available for the job with a small amount of pre-processing of the stored HTML.
Exporting to .doc might require a macro in LibreOffice - but I only use that for importing doc and converting them to HTML as all of our work is done for computers not dead trees and the only things we print are things that need to be signed and we like to check those as only an idiot would send out a PDF for someone to print and sign.
Back in 198? we were introduced to new word processor that was meant to be the future. Every format had to be entered with *code before and after, a bit like using html. And the only people who could actually use it were full time admins. Even they had to keep a list of codes to hand.
WORD for MSDos was a delight by comparison. And so was every version for Windows until after 2003.
By 2007 Microsoft seems to have reached this strange place where it expects users to adapt our behaviour to how they think we *ought* to be using the software. Instead of the other way round. Hence the ribbon, and I guess Windows 8.
Being concerned with the rollout of the 2007 Office suite for an organiseation, I needed to both understand and "sell" its feature to the business... Key to this was the Ribbon interface. The Ribbon was innovative and represented change - change is often resisted, but with some training, videos, explainations and mentoring, people tend to embrace the change rather than resist it.
I feel for those businesses that have IT staff that just swap out the product without providing training. I have enough stories of IT staff coming through and upgrading all staff PC's to the later versions of office without consultation and support. This causes frustration and resistance and has little to do with the end product.
When Microsoft went to market to ask for the features people (businesses and customers) wanted in the 2007 version, over 90% of the featured existed, they just didn't know where to find them. That was what forced the radical redesign. The design worked, features are generally easier to find and not hidden in layers of Menu, Options, Tab, New Window, new tab and option.
I see it as a good thing that Microsoft is trying to be innovative... they are between a rock and a hard place - innovate too much, people complain. Don't innovate enough, people complain. Most of the time, the market leader can rest on their laurels and let the industry try to catch up... in this case and the case with Windows 8, Microsoft had the leading market share and was still innovating.
Mr Stross finds himself in a position where he wants to sell something, in his case, his manuscripts. His potential customers are publishing houses. It's his job to create a product in the form (and format) that his customers demand, which happens to be the industry standard, for better or worse.
So he has the choice of either being a primadonna and whine about it whilst continuing to use Word to produce his manuscripts, or quit his bitching and use a word processor that allows to save as .doc/.docx, for example OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
If I create some software for a customer who demands a Windows executable, I don't winge about them not asking for a Mac binary, I hop to it. Welcome to the real world.
Equally, you could say that the publisher's job is the care and feeding of its stable of writers. Take Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which was famously written longhand on a long spool/scroll of paper. Evidently the publishers saw merit in the manuscript as it was delivered, and did all the work needed to get it into publishable form. Otherwise, we wouldn't have such a great work of modern literature.
Also, as GB Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Stross's "unreasonableness" is the kind I can get behind.
When you are viewing a document on a widescreen monitor, it is natural to display two pages side-by side. Word has a completely incongruous treatment of the cursor where if you press the down arrow on the bottom of page one, it goes not to the top of page two, but to the top of page three. This is incredibly annoying, if, for instance, using the keyboard to highlight part of a paragraph that spans two pages. It has several other annoyances that are counterintuitive, such as trying to highlight to the end of a line by pressing Ctrl-End works, unless you are in a cell in an inline table, in which case it highlights the entire cell. I could go on, but I'm sure you catch my drift...
...once we had to move from a good text editor, preferably vi(1), with roff/troff, tbl and so on. Using these, one could produce, quickly and economically, beautiful documents, using macro packages or writing a couple of simple macros oneself. You could even try out an effect on the screen using a quick command line pipe and filter.
We used to produce lengthy, detailed documents, with diagrams and tables in postscript or pdf or text, quickly. It was very easy to change, say, the margin width, line spacing, fonts throughout the whole document with a quick change to a number. Whole books, with both simple and complex content, were produced, printer ready, e.g. K & R's C, Perl guides and much more.
Later, I worked at places where all was in HTML, composed using vi(1) and knowing the basic HTML structure. This worked rather well too, actually, for text, though not as flexible for diagrams.
With Word, unless one uses some USA-orientated template, producing even a simple letter with correctly laid out addresses and so on can be a time-consuming nightmare. Why should one have to become expert in the eccentricities of a proprietary product that requires specialist knowledge and support by sites ranging from Microsoft's own to user forums, to produce a document that occupies kilobytes just to print "hallo world"? You can make Word produce HTML and PDF. But have you ever compared the sizes of these files to those produced by other means? Looked at the HTML?
Worse, now managers, engineers, salesmen etc. are expected to do all their own secretarial work with these tools: they take far longer to do this, to a far lower standard, than a professional secretary, instead of doing what they are, supposedly, trained and paid to do.
I gave up on MS Word some time ago. LibreOffice does what I want to do better, but it could stand a total re-think on word processing.
The problem with all word processors is that nobody has put much thought into changing the way we think about word processing, so we’re still trying to do what seemed magical decades ago.
MS Word’s biggest failure, as with the rest of Office, is that all of the changes make it harder to use than ever before. What normal users want to do is trapped somewhere between the new features and the new interface.
Yes, it's been over-engineered in the last 7-8 years, in order to sell users on updating. However, its reliable (I haven't had it crash in years) and it's well understood. I could maybe see LibreOffice making a run at it if value becomes a huge decision point in the future, but the fact is that purchasing Word is now outside the realm of IT. It has become one of those business applications that really belong to the users, and if someone in IT pulls the plug, for his own career interests he had better KNOW that whatever he replaces it with is going to be well accepted and easily usable by users and fully compatible with legacy Word format files.
In any industry there are standards that you might not like, but you have to comply with if you want to make any real money. Whatever your product is, it takes several groups of people to get it in the hands of the end user and 99.9% of the time if you don't do what you can to make the jobs of those others as easy as possible you aren't worth dealing with.
Every mature industry has some wonky standards that evolved from the earliest days of the industry and the older the industry the more shrouded in mystery the reasons for them become and the harder they are to dislodge.
Try serving beer in less than a pint glass or making car tires with 13.75" openings or making machine tool blanks that aren't 1/2" square or extension ladders with 7" rung spacing... It won't end well as you're bucking the tradition and diluting the investment made by all the others whose participation you require to get your product to market.
Is Word the best word processor, certainly not, but it is the industry standard. If you've got time to try and command the tides you're not producing enough. Best to accept some things and get back to the things you can control.
No, Word is NOT the industry standard. If it were the industry standard, then MS would be building locomotives, and every time they came out with a new locomotive, it would require a new track standard, and the world would be ripping out the old rails and laying new track. And every other competitor's locomotive and rail cars would be taken to the shop for retrofitting with MS Corp-patented wheels and axles.
At one point, MS bought up the .RTF format, and held it up as a new standard ... and then proceeded to change it with every new revision of .DOC ... thereby assuring that "no other's locomotives shall run on our tracks!"
ODF is the only standard WP format, and MS continues the tradition of "does not play well with others" by dismissing it.
Word's evil sibling, Internet Explorer, is up to Version 11 and yet fails to fully comply with standards. Relying on MS for standards compliance is akin to boinking for chastity.
You don't understand the difference between practice and theory do you? The entire point of the article was that authors have to use Word, even though it isn't the best option.
Every publisher I've ever worked with in the US and Europe required me to use Word documents for every step from concept to final post-edit manuscripts. Obviously the format gets changed when actually going to press, but up to that point authors with any decent size publisher work in Word. That's the way it is, that's the industry standard.