General / Off-Topic British SciFi author Charles Stross: Die, MS Word, DIE!

Majere

Majere
Must. Resist.
If I start to join in the rant I will be here all day. Suffice to say that Microsoft Word is quite possible the worst piece of software I have ever encountered in my entire life and it's ubiquity causes unending troughs of pain and suffering.

Don't even get me started on people who distribute documents in Word 'format'

I need a lie down.
 

jabokai

jabokai
Never had a problem with Word... perhaps it's because I work in IT and my awesome skillz simply nullify the complexities and/or inadequacies that non-IT people come up against. ;)

I did get Office Pro for £8.95 through work though - I would never have paid full price for it.
 

Cathy

Cathy
jabokai said:
Never had a problem with Word... perhaps it's because I work in IT and my awesome skillz simply nullify the complexities and/or inadequacies that non-IT people come up against. ;)
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:mad::mad::eek::mad::mad::eek::mad::mad:!!!

I did get Office Pro for £8.95 through work though - I would never have paid full price for it.
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Oh ok you're forgiven :p:)
 

DraQ

D
...
No.

I'm not joining this rant either.

I don't think the amount of profanity it would require would be welcome on this forum.

jabokai said:
Never had a problem with Word... perhaps it's because I work in IT and my awesome skillz simply nullify the complexities and/or inadequacies that non-IT people come up against. ;)

I did get Office Pro for £8.95 through work though - I would never have paid full price for it.
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So, as an IT person you have no problems with that:
The .doc file format was also obfuscated, deliberately or intentionally: rather than a parseable document containing formatting and macro metadata, it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures used by word, with pointers to the subroutines that provided formatting or macro support. And "fast save" made the picture worse, by appending a journal of changes to the application's in-memory state. To parse a .doc file you virtually have to write a mini-implementation of Microsoft Word. This isn't a data file format: it's a nightmare!
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:S
 
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Cody

Cody
Nothing wrong with MS Word - been using it happily for nearly twenty years now.
(I don't include the spelling/grammar checker in that - I never use them.)
 

Nagual

Nagual
For the average user, Word does what they need it to. The main reason I don't use it, is that OpenOffice works just as well, and it's free.
 

Ashley Barley

A
This article seems a little bit overkill to me. MS Word is absolutely fine, dare I say it...good even! I use it everyday and have no major gripes at all. The spell & grammar checker can be a bit buggy sometimes, but other than that I think sometimes people just try to find faults in things where few exist.
 

Slawkenbergius

Slawkenbergius
I haven't used Word in years, except for helping out relatives when they get stuck with something. It used to be quite painful trying to put an image in a document, and then having it move to the wrong place, and seemingly not be able to undo it. Also, I think it was if you typed '---' and pressed return, you got a line which was nigh-on impossible to get rid of. That was quite a fun prank to play...
 

Susimetsa

Susimetsa
Ashley Barley said:
This article seems a little bit overkill to me. MS Word is absolutely fine, dare I say it...good even! I use it everyday and have no major gripes at all. The spell & grammar checker can be a bit buggy sometimes, but other than that I think sometimes people just try to find faults in things where few exist.
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The Word file formats do cause grey hairs even to Word users - or at least the quick save .doc format caused a lot of trouble back in the day when our students were sending in their essays and our teachers could not open them, even though they were using basically the same program.

It's mostly in the past now, but still a bad, bad memory.
 

Susimetsa

Susimetsa
Philip Coutts said:
I use word everyday and it's fine. Does what it needs to do, can't see the point in getting wound up about it.
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I think the point for an author is that publishers and editors always ask them to submit their text in .doc format and then return their comments in the same format. This is painful for someone who uses some other word processor.
 

Oss133

Oss133
I do find it slightly odd and irritating that, having convinced most of the world that you must use MS Office, they have introduced new file formats with later releases. I have been caught out using .docx instead of .doc and .xlsx instead of .xls before.
 

Nagual

Nagual
But if they don't make new Stuff™ then no one will buy it.


Look! New things that don't really make much of a difference! Shiny things!
 

Magma

Magma
What I dislike about Microsoft Word (and the whole Office suite) is the price. It's always been very expensive, which is fine for large companies who can buy volume licences but for the individual home user who may have several computers it becomes cost-prohibitive.

They did remedy this quite well a few years back with their home user packages, that allowed for 3 installations to be tied to a single licence with the more business-oriented software removed, for a fraction of the price.

But now that same package for the latest version of MS Office is more expensive, and permits only one installation per licence. Also the software is now non-transferrable, so if you get a new PC you'll have to buy it all over again.

Of course, this all seems to be because they're pushing their new software rental system, Office 365. It can install on 5 PCs with the same licence, but after a year you have to pay them all over again.

Compared to Libre Office's allowance for infinite licences at zero money, I find it surprising that Microsoft are removing flexibility from their product rather than adding it.

Alhough, this guy was in charge when they made Windows 8, Office 365 and Xbox One. Possibly not so surprising after all.
 
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DraQ

D
@those who claim that word is 'fine':

Even if you don't have problems with program's usability, there is still the issue of file format being opaque, non-portable, bloated mess.
 
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