IME, word processors (such as Word) are the main impediment to the paperless office. The general problems are: they're based on the 8.5 x 11" paper paradigm, they contain unstructured data, and they're too difficult to share, search, and otherwise organize electronically. I use MS-Word at work, so my examples/complaints will be specific to Word. The issues I have with Word in how it impedes a paperless office are:
- My monitor isn't 8.5 x 11 in size. This is especially problematic on a 22" monitor, especially when monitors nowadays are much wider than they are tall.
- Scrolling through a document is painful. It unexpectedly jumps to the next page in page view mode. If you view the document in draft mode, which scrolls smoothly, picture objects aren't displayed.
- Margins in Word docs are painfully contrived. They artificially limit how much text can appear on each line. Margins are based on an 8.5" wide page, which leaves even more of my 22" monitor's real estate unused. By comparison, an html based doc (aka web sites) will easily expand/contract to match your browser's window size.
- Word docs are not Web pages. In our situation, any word doc available on a web server cannot be displayed in a web browser. Instead, you have to download the doc and then open it in Word. Needless to say this is extremely clumsy, slow, and bookmark unfriendly. Instead of being able to create a fast loading bookmark, folks tend to print out a paper copy of the document for convenience. Since folks rely on downloaded or printed copies, updates to the source document on the website are very slow to propagate (meaning that folks continue to use the out of date copy.)
- Word docs are slow and clumsy to version control and to diff.
- It's easier to email a document around than it is to peer review a Word document using the built in change tracking or to use peer review software. End result is several copies of a document floating around, and no good way to reconcile the copies.
- Word docs are databases. Unfortunately, the data in a Word doc is too unstructured and very difficult, if not impossible, to reliably enforce order on the data contained therein. This also makes it difficult to search across documents. This especially impacts engineering, requirements, and policy documents. That kind of data would be better off in a real database and not "managed" in Word docs.
- Word is bloated and slow to load. A website page can load in a couple of seconds. Word is slow to load to the point that it's often faster just to pick up the printout and read it instead.
IMO, the paperless office isn't going to happen until Someone(tm) manages to replace the word processor with a database that looks and acts like a word processor. Kind of like how everyone can use a fax machine (which acts like a telephone and copier) but those same folks balk at using a computer scanner and email over tcp/ip even though the fax machine is simply a low quality scanner that uses an inflexible, low speed modem instead of a tcp/ip network connection.
