Time to Kill Microsoft Word? 1017
Allnighterking writes "Apparently the frustration with another Windows Product is starting to reach increasingly visible users. John Dvorak over at ABC News is starting to question if it's time to kill Word With Viable options like Open Office.org available for Windows as well as AbiWord and others. Since they are both using XML as a way to create the documents. Or perhaps dropping a separate application altogether and going with something like X Forms to create a browser based office suite."
Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:5, Informative)
I imagine if there was a "reveal hidden codes" feature in Word, it might be a lot easier to use
Re:Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:5, Informative)
Format->Reveal Formatting
Not exactly the same as reveal codes, but quite helpful.
Itanium (Score:5, Informative)
staroffice (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What alternatives? (Score:5, Informative)
Not by a long shot. Both Lotus WordPro and WordPerfect have features, stability and ease of use on their side. Both have superior layout control. Both are better at complex text flow. Both are better at generating indexes and the like. Unfortunately, Word is bundled with Excel and Access, two products that are very, very good. Access less so than excel, which offers several features that kick the teeth of the competition in like PivotTables and Solver.
Re:That's what notepad is for. (Score:3, Informative)
Notepad has a serious size limit. It's ok for a couple pages, but falls flat when doing a full document. There is just too much stuff that notepad can't open because it's too large. I quickly move on to other text based editors.
Archive migration is already on the way. (Score:5, Informative)
Most companies are already archiving those as Portable Document Format (pdf) files. This preserves print format much better than Word ever did. IBM would be happy to show you how and yes, you can search the text.
If your company was dumb enough to archive things in Word format and is not looking for reliable methods to get the information out, you might as well throw the things away. New Word itself has a hard time opening older Word documents, especially "complicated" ones with OLE from visio and other programs that your company might not have anymore.
Hopefully, people will learn and use reasonable text editors and type setters for future work.
Re:That's what notepad is for. (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit. Stop using Win9x. Notepad on NT has always been able to handle large files. Notepad on win3.x had something like a 64K limit. Win95's notepad had the same problem, and so I would assume win98 and winme did as well (don't have any of those hanging around to check, though I wouldn't be surprised if that was changed in later versions of win9x). It's never had that limitation on an NT-based OS.
Notepad does suffer for lack of features, but it does what it's supposed to do -- it's a simple, lightweight text editor. If you need more power in your text editing, install Vim, emacs, EditPad, TextPad, or one of the many other more fully-featured free and not-so-free text editors available for the win32 platform.
Re:John C. Dvorak (Score:5, Informative)
So I feel I can relate to Dvorak here. I'm sure that one can deal with Word if they make a career out of it after thoroughly digesting some book like O'Reilly's "Word 97 Annoyances", and learning all the work-arounds. But for the (effectively) novice user like me who will use another program after initial frustrations get too high, Word is just way too buggy to use.
problems with word (Score:3, Informative)
surviving in a word world:
Re:Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:4, Informative)
Here you go [mvps.org]. The short reason why there is no "Reveal Codes" option is because Word doesn't work that way.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MSWORD SUCKS (Score:1, Informative)
MS Word is mandated by management--back in the day we used Pagemaker.
It's almost impossible to search or scroll through our word docs. I watched one of our support people search for a keyword and then struggle on the phone for several minutes trying to get work to move a few pages ahead or behind the search result page. It was awful. I whispered to her to get the customer's info and we would call back in 15 minutes. We ran to the hardcopies in our library and looked up the info by hand.
There is something wrong in America, and it's getting worse, when management mandates inferior tools made by criminal organizations.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If by employed you mean . . . (Score:5, Informative)
As another helpdesk slave, I must say that we can stand to lose MS Offie. Windows XP and IE are all the job security we need.
Re:Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:5, Informative)
Slackware is a Linux distro for Linux people, like Gentoo is a Linux distro for people who like fine tuning and fucking around with configs (like me).
Don't want to compile or recompile a kernel? Use Suse, Fedora or Mandrake.
On a different note, you seem really, really angry for no reason other than people saying they don't like Word. Calm down.
Re:John C. Dvorak (Score:1, Informative)
I feel slowed down by any editor that forces me to move my fingers away from the main block of keys (note that I use ctrl-[ rather than the esc key), especially for something as simple as moving the cursor.
Also, modern versions of vi are far from crippled. Vim is very feature-rich, and it supports syntax highlighting for a huge amount of programming languages out-of-the-box (do your "real" editors have syntax highlighting for things like OCaml and Python, which I use frequently?).
Re:Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.levitjames.com/crosseyes/CrossEyes.h
Re:Lacking important End-User Features (Score:2, Informative)
But having said that, you are right. Word file format compatibility is the #1 problem.
Re:Lacking important End-User Features (Score:3, Informative)
It's flat out wrong sometimes.
take "Its" vs "It's" for instance - I've had it tell me many times that my use of "it's" in the sense of a contraction of "It is" was wrong, and that I should use "its" instead.
An easier solution (Score:5, Informative)
After an undesired auto format occurs in your document just hit back space, it will only undo the undesired auto format without touching what you typed. It works with your example of a line, with the asterisks who change into a doted line, with emoticons after you type
Now do some one know what do I have to do or to deactivate if I want to paste some text that I just copied from the internet to my word document without having word wanting to connect to the internet and then applying some lame undesired formating. I just want to past clean text that's all. Right now what I do is pasting my stuff in notepad and then I copy it again in word but the process is a pain in the ass.
Sorry (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Lacking important End-User Features (Score:4, Informative)
2002's grammar checker is considerably smarter and less invasive. When it says something, there's probably something wrong. It can help avoid those little mistakes that you probably know about but made anyway. Just like spell check.
Re:Lacking important End-User Features (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An easier solution (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, if you don't use it, it may not show up in the menu for a few seconds.
Re:One more important missing feature (Score:2, Informative)
GTK+ has been capable of doing this since v2.0. It gives similar results to what you would expect on XP but I found the Vera fonts render better without it (this is very subjective of course)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One more important missing feature (Score:3, Informative)
You are confusing subpixel hinting and antialiasing. Since it is unlikely that the absence of hinting caused your friend so much trouble, I presume you are referring to antialiasing.
Yes, OpenOffice.org is capable of antialiasing. There have been problems in the past (you had to do some tweaking in the font dialog, and I recall the Debian package didn't do it by default).
Re:Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm gonna completely disagree with you there - the keyboard shortcuts are there (OK, not easy to find sometimes), and you can fully customise them too.
Here's a couple of very useful links (first and third highly recommended):
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/C
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/UsingOLVie
I rarely use the mouse at all, though it's quite difficult to break the habit and I imagine for the average Mum/Dad home user it's more of a pain to learn all the keyboard commands. BUT - and this is the caveat - word wants to be used in a certain way and wants you to work with it. If you work the way word wants you to it's fantastic, but work another way and it will struggle with you all the way. Word wants you to spend time setting up the whole document and laying it out, then just enter all the text and finally edit it.
I think this is one of the problems for power users of other word processors - you're continually fighting with word because you're used to doing things a certain way (a good eg is the wordperfect "reveal codes" - use word "properly" and you don't need it, but try and use word like wordperfect and it will make your life a misery).
"Mac" is not an acronym (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Word HTML (Score:2, Informative)
< html>
< head>
< meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
< meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10 (filtered)">
< title>Hello Word</title>
< style>
< !--
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0cm;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:21.0cm 842.0pt;
margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
<
<
< body lang=EN-US>
< div class=Section1>
< p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-IE>Hello Word</span></p>
<
<
<
Envelopes (Score:3, Informative)
There's also lots of other little annoyances. For example, Open Office did not properly display inline graphics properly in my
I really would like a free alternative to Office. Unfortunately, the main alternative doesn't fit my needs so I am stuck with Word for now.
My view,
Re:Yes (Score:3, Informative)
As an aside to this comic relief, if you haven't discovered LaTeX, and you write even a fair amount of complex documents, it is worth checking out. I got hooked 4 or 5 years ago and haven't looked back.
Re:Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's the non-printing characters (which you can display or hide using the Tools|Options|View dialog page, or the Ctrl+Shift+8 shortcut, on most recent versions of Word).
What the original poster is talking about is a feature available via Format|Reveal Formatting...; IIRC this first appeared in Word 2002. That feature does indeed do something similar to WordPerfect's Reveal codes command, displaying the exact formatting of a particular piece of text.
Please consider yourself modded (-1, Just Plain Wrong)... :-)
Why does everything have to be browser-based? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:You can pry Word from my cold, dead fingers (Score:3, Informative)
Good by what measure? Obviously your workstyle is well matched to word, but there are vast numbers of people for whom the fundamental design of a Word document, a sequence of paragraphs with no inherent structure other than a paragraph or table. Everything else... nested lists, chapters, headings, and so on... are simulated by the program gluing paragraphs and tables together, and synthesising them anew when loading the document!
Someone who needs a structured document is better off editing raw HTML in Notepad. For us, "just works" is baloney. At one point I was forced to embed Word documents inside Visio documents and re-embed them in Word again to keep it from trying to forcibly "flow" parts of a quoted passage in with the surrounding text.
Alas, I haven't seen any sign that the "replacements" for word are anything more than slavish imitations of the original Word, which started out as a "cheap imitation" of real text processors in the same way that a pen-knife is a "cheap imitation" of a workshop. Today's Word might be the greatest pen-knife you can buy, a veritable leatherman tool of pen-knives, but it's no substitute for a properly equipped workshop.
Re:Yes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Argh, the hidden codes! (Score:2, Informative)
That was a very simple example, but in a long document that has been touched by many hands there could be any number of small formatting discrepancies that would never be caught until the print run of 20,000 copies came back from the print shop looking like crap.
Compare the screenshot of Reveal Formatting [arstechnica.com] to the screenshot of Reveal codes [dummies.com].
Even CrossEyes doesn't give you the ability to directly edit the codes in Word, instead popping up [levitjames.com] a formatting dialog. Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't this make it much clumsier to just move or delete an existing formatting element?