A word against Word

[PennLady]

Actually it's a whole column. Found this at Slate.com this morning and found myself agreeing on many counts, although I don't think I'm ready to switch to something else. Plus I don't have all those nifty mobile devices.

http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...nt_and_obsolete_it_s_time_for_it_to_die_.html

 

[autoplot]

I loathe Word and haven't used it for the better part of a decade. Good riddance.

Some word processors aid the process, some just get the job done, and some are an active impediment to writing. For me, Word falls in the last category.

 

[TxRad]

I loathe Word and haven't used it for the better part of a decade. Good riddance.

Some word processors aid the process, some just get the job done, and some are an active impediment to writing. For me, Word falls in the last category.

So, what are you using?

Word to me is the lesser of several evils I've tried, even though it is gear to business letters instead of fiction, it does help somewhat.

 

[Cruel2BKind]

I have a mac, so I use 'Pages'.

You can change all of the fonts you need, it looks better on a computer screen, and nothing automatically corrects. Things are still underlined if the computer thinks that they are spelled wrong or grammatically incorrect (it still misses most of the grammar mistakes and underlines things that are fine, but oh well) but it never automatically 'fixes' a word that I meant to be capitalized, or spelled wrong, or spelled right.

On the other hand, I downloaded Word because I can never-ever print 'Pages' on anything but a mac-friendly printer. I can never email a 'Pages' document to anything but a mac. It's a great program, but it isn't compatible with anything else.

However, it it's great for lit. I type all of my lit stories on pages and then copy-paste them into the story-box.

Mac rules!

 

[Ironiclaconic]

While the printed word is becoming obsolete, PDFs are frikkin' everywhere, and they emulate printed word format. So the need to format to an 8 1/2" x 11" page is not at all obsolete.

Word is certainly lame but I havent discovered a better alternative. Open Office has its own problems. One of my documents has a black horizontal line in the middle of it that resists all efforts at deletion, and its spellchecker sucks.

 

[autoplot]

So, what are you using?

Word to me is the lesser of several evils I've tried, even though it is gear to business letters instead of fiction, it does help somewhat.

Generally FocusWriter. Occasionally, Write or Die.

I fire up LibreOffice when I need to lay out the text, but I don't write raw prose in it.

 

[PennLady]

See, I think this is the problem. Word has its flaws, but I've been using it for so long and have turned off most of the features that present problems, and I need it for the work I do for my office in VA, that switching to something else is more hassle than I want to go through. I'm used to it.

I worked for a newsletter publisher for a long time. We tried for a while to use Open Office, but we had various issues and eventually they went back to a Windows network and Word.

 

[autoplot]

See, I think this is the problem. Word has its flaws, but I've been using it for so long and have turned off most of the features that present problems, and I need it for the work I do for my office in VA, that switching to something else is more hassle than I want to go through. I'm used to it.

I worked for a newsletter publisher for a long time. We tried for a while to use Open Office, but we had various issues and eventually they went back to a Windows network and Word.

I'm not sure that's really much of a problem. It works for you, you're used to it, you don't want to switch... kind of case closed.

No software is perfect.

 

[lance gt]

I use OpenOffice to write, but I agree it has it's own foibles. I turned off everything and use the basic format when writing and use the Spellcheck as few times as possible. I found re-reading out loud made all the difference and it catches every error, instead of just reading through and adding in words mentally I think should be there. Printing mistakes are easier to catch that way too.

 

[oggbashan]

I used to use WordStar 2000+ on my MS-DOS based machines. I was used to it and the files created were very small compared to Word.

I originally used WordStar 1512 on an IBM XT. The basic WordStar 1512 could be run from a 5.25 inch 360k floppy. All my stories could be saved by WordStar 1512 on a couple of 360k floppies. My 20mb hard drive seemed enormous and would hold thousands of stories as .txt (or .ascii) files.

But many of the communications I received from official bodies came in Word which they updated regularly. I couldn't read the latest Word files, nor could I convert them to WordStar 2000+ without a complicated process which sometimes corrupted the text.

I would like to use WordStar 2000+ for writing now - but I can't. It isn't compatible with Windows after 3.1.

I'm not a very fast typist but I can type faster than my current version of Word can cope with. I didn't have that problem with any WordStar version, nor did anyone I knew who used WordStar.

I have to use Word for my political and voluntary work so by default I use it for all my writing. I have converted all my earlier incomplete draft stories from WordStar via .txt to Word, but the files have grown from a few K each to several hundred K without adding a word to the stories.

 

[TxRad]

See, I think this is the problem. Word has its flaws, but I've been using it for so long and have turned off most of the features that present problems, and I need it for the work I do for my office in VA, that switching to something else is more hassle than I want to go through. I'm used to it.

I worked for a newsletter publisher for a long time. We tried for a while to use Open Office, but we had various issues and eventually they went back to a Windows network and Word.

I don't see a lot of the problems spoken about in the article. Maybe it's the fact that I'm still using Office 2000.

I use Open office a lot and there are several different versions out there. The one I use is the one from Sun and then I've modified it myself. An outsource spell checker helps a lot. It is basically the same one used by Firefox. Now, if I could just find a sensible grammar checker.

 

[soflabbwlvr]

In my profession Wordperfect was the standard from the moment PCs proliferated into every office around the world. There were some offices that used Wordstar, but most of them abandoned it by the late 90s. Over the last ten or twelve years, nearly every office I've visited has switched over to Word. I'm one of the last hold-outs using Wordperfect, which I still find to be a superior program. I use it for my stories, as well, which I convert to Word before uploading.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

It's really sad when brilliant people don't know what they are talking about...the article was describing, and the excepts were of, the .docx type of word documents. This type of document uses xml to relate and store all the information, even the unneeded information, about a word document.

The .docx type documents were introduced in Word 2007 after a series of court battles which Microsoft lost. The .docx type documents are much more bulky than the simple .doc type as any and all options are stored within the xml structure even though you may not use them.

I find word easy to use when setup properly...first thing is to get rid of the paperclip guy.

 

[mynameisben]

Slate's article hits the nail on the head. Microsoft Word has groan (yeah, I spelled it g-r-o-a-n. Fuck you, auto-correct!) into cumbersome bloatware that almost makes me pine for the days of Smith Corona and White-Out. Every bell has a whistle, every whistle has a bell. The only way to figure out how to disable all the annoyance features before the next "upgrade" is to pay a hefty fee and take a 2-week course offered by, who else?, Microsoft.

I despise auto-correct, auto-indent, auto-format, or auto-anything. Hell, I even cast a withering eye at the CapsLock key every time I see it. The first time I saw Clippy the MS Word Assistant pop up on my screen, I fought hard with myself not to pull my desktop out of the wall by the roots and hurl it through the second-floor window. I don't want to watch jackass cartoons when I want to get work done. And it really pisses me off when I write "Show me your boobs and cunt!" and my editor emails to ask me why, oh why, in a bedroom scene I would ever write, "Show me you are Bob''s accountant."

Like their beloved operating system, Microsoft's obsession for Features has turned Word into a tyrannosaur. Every new upgrade sends chills down my spine when I think about the steep learning curve I must climb just to recapture the 1% functionalityI know I'll need to use Word productively. Microsoft should have put the lid on that product a decade ago and moved on. But no. All those programmers with cushy jobs have to justify their paychecks somehow. What if our Government worked this way? Can you imagine what a nightmare things would be if the IRS added needless complexity to the U.S. Tax Code year after year after year?

Still, at it's core, MS Word is good stuff. I still use it. It gives me something to bitch about, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

 

[PennLady]

I agree with pretty much all of that, Ben. But let's not go insulting the dinosaurs.

I don't like auto formatting and such, although there are a few auto spelling corrections I like. I don't mess with that too much although I have gone in to put it or take out common things I type.

I'm still on 2003, so I can't use .docx, but I never use word for HTML. It puts in too much crappy, unnecessary code.

 

[TxRad]

I agree with pretty much all of that, Ben. But let's not go insulting the dinosaurs.

I don't like auto formatting and such, although there are a few auto spelling corrections I like. I don't mess with that too much although I have gone in to put it or take out common things I type.

I'm still on 2003, so I can't use .docx, but I never use word for HTML. It puts in too much crappy, unnecessary code.

Now you know where Vista came from.

 

[Ldy_Sea]

Can you imagine what a nightmare things would be if the IRS added needless complexity to the U.S. Tax Code year after year after year?

Umm They don't?

 

[Darkniciad]

My editor got me on Wordperfect because that's what he uses, and it made the process easier. I've come to prefer it over Word, though I still use Word as my first spell/grammar check, followed up by Wordperfect's. They seem to catch and highlight different things, which has saved me from stupid errors many times, and saved Roust a lot of time proofing me.

Word still has its uses -- although I am using an old version pre-docx and won't upgrade it unless the version I have becomes incompatible somehow.

 

[sr71plt]

Every publisher I've worked with or submitted work to has specified Word--and 97-2003, at that (for the last decade and a half--before that some used WordPerfect--and I preferred both writing and editing in WordPerfect), so I don't really see there being a choice. I just adjust. Besides, in publishing, no one wants files from auhors with fancy formatting and styles. They want it as basic as possible, and Word works fine for that.

Where I haven't been able to transition is in storage. I'm still on floppy disk (as are some of the publishers I work with). Both in writing and editing, I create so many different versions, that writing over storage on floppies just is still working out better than working with CDs.

 

[Darkniciad]

And -- Lit specific -- the text processor seems to heavily favor Word over everything else.

The standard em dash used by Word processes correctly, while the one used by Wordperfect processes as two hypens, for example.

Something to consider when submitting stories here.

 

[mynameisben]

Where I haven't been able to transition is in storage. I'm still on floppy disk (as are some of the publishers I work with). Both in writing and editing, I create so many different versions, that writing over storage on floppies just is still working out better than working with CDs.

Go over to Wal*Mart and get yourself a USB drive. Ten bucks gets you 8 GB (that's a gazillion floppies worth of storage), and it won't demagnetize itself if you look at it funny. Buy yourself a new computer if yours does not support USB devices. It's worth the expense of a new computer for that convenience alone.

 

[sr71plt]

Go over to Wal*Mart and get yourself a USB drive. Ten bucks gets you 8 GB (that's a gazillion floppies worth of storage), and it won't demagnetize itself if you look at it funny. Buy yourself a new computer if yours does not support USB devices. It's worth the expense of a new computer for that convenience alone.

It may be a case of "I'm comfortable with what's worked for years and too close to the end to care," but I don't want all of the versions around. I want to overwrite, so when I go to retrieve I know it's not an earlier version. It may just be a book editing processes issue, though.

 

[Derroreaper]

Go over to Wal*Mart and get yourself a USB drive. Ten bucks gets you 8 GB (that's a gazillion floppies worth of storage), and it won't demagnetize itself if you look at it funny. Buy yourself a new computer if yours does not support USB devices. It's worth the expense of a new computer for that convenience alone.

I run a raid1 (mirror) setup with two WD 2 terabyte hard drives, and I keep a pair of 8 gig flash drives plugged into the back of my PC. Data loss has bit me in the past, but I'm better protected now.

I use MS Word 07 for almost everything, but I have everything turned off for the most part. I forgot about good old Clippy the helper

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Go over to Wal*Mart and get yourself a USB drive. Ten bucks gets you 8 GB (that's a gazillion floppies worth of storage), and it won't demagnetize itself if you look at it funny. Buy yourself a new computer if yours does not support USB devices. It's worth the expense of a new computer for that convenience alone.

That won't do...SR71's don't have USB ports, only floppy drives.

 

[Handley_Page]

I have used a Word Processor for the last 40 odd years (my first was on a tape running into a Dragon32 computer). Eventually, I wound up with a PC (Apple positioned themselves as strictly for accountants and professionals over here; think of a price then triple it so I've been with a PC for many years).

I've used Word Perfect ('horribly quirky, particularly on a VAX), which stayed quirky until v5 for MSDOS.

Like Ogg, I loved WordStar (took me three weeks to get used to v4 and v6 was brilliant), but all thing have to pass, sometimes), and when I went to one firm, I was given Word97. It worked very well (apart from splitting a .DOC file which made reading my old Wordstar files somewhat tricky). If I needed to do a proper layout, I put the text into Ventura or Pagemaker.
A Desk-Top Publisher, Word ain't.

For obscure reasons associated with a new machine or three, new hard drives and a plethora of bloody Microsoft junk, I wound up with Office 2003, which took a bit of getting used to but which I use daily for all manner of things (I'm still on paper-based stuff; none of this cloudy nonsense). The 'book' is a heap of junk, even if you can get one and does not feature much by way of the deeper stuff.

I was given a net-book thing with Word2007. It's horrible and unwieldy, so after trying this or that, I dumped it and installed Word97 (thank you, E-Bay).

My advice is, if you are stuck with Word 2007 (or later?), save the file as a .TXT, .ASC or .RTF file.