Microsoft Word is Bollocks Redux
We?ve had threads like this before, I know, and I apologise, but I have to state, publicly and authoritatively that
MICROSOFT
WORD
IS
A
BAD
APP.
I use it every day. A lot. I have no choice. I need the feature set. My editor needs to be able to open my documents.
But oh, I hate it. And not just because it?s an obese, huffing-and-puffing piece of wifebeating bloatware threaded with all the sophistication of Hansel and Gretel?s escape from the forest.
No. I?ve made a list of all the quality-control failures that make we want to stab people the most. Here it is. Maybe you?d like to add yours.
When you get towards the bottom of a large document, the scrolling-gel thingies don?t work any more and you have to scroll down at an inexplicably slow speed by moving the cursor with the arrow keys instead!
Every now and then the cursor disappears when you click near the very the bottom of a page - and you can?t see what you?ve highlighted!
When you use the simplest graphics in a document of any size, they take about two minutes to appear when you scroll to the page they?re on! And if you click on them while they?re brewing, Word will quit! And that?s a guarantee!
Sometimes when you copy and paste a lot of formatted text, the formatting will re-arrange itself randomly! It?s fun to see your italics vanish, or turn into bold, or to see the app forget the text alignment you?ve chosen! (Word likes to do your graphic design for you, too! ?Heading 3?-style text in a font you never use looks much better than the format you chose yourself for your chapter headings!)
Sometimes your highlights get stuck! Neither the computer nor the app are frozen, but just you try replacing your highlighted text with anything. No, you?ll just have to click on a random point in your document and then re-do your highlight. (This one?s particularly irritating.)
Sometimes, on the other hand, it does let you replace it - the app?s just having one of its naps, so you discover a raft-load of gibberish where you?ve been banging away to make it work because you don?t know if it?s playing silly buggers or not and you want to send hatemail to the sloppy-arsed bastards who let this shite onto the market half-baked and haven?t released a patch or an update for it since they got round to enabling quartz text-smoothing in the summer of 2002.
I can?t wait for a heavyweight text processing iApp. Chez Word, the UI?s shit, the code?s shit and oh it?s all shit.
Although it looks nice with all the toolbars, help ?wizards? and whatnot laboriously turned off, I hate Word.
That is all.
MICROSOFT
WORD
IS
A
BAD
APP.
I use it every day. A lot. I have no choice. I need the feature set. My editor needs to be able to open my documents.
But oh, I hate it. And not just because it?s an obese, huffing-and-puffing piece of wifebeating bloatware threaded with all the sophistication of Hansel and Gretel?s escape from the forest.
No. I?ve made a list of all the quality-control failures that make we want to stab people the most. Here it is. Maybe you?d like to add yours.
When you get towards the bottom of a large document, the scrolling-gel thingies don?t work any more and you have to scroll down at an inexplicably slow speed by moving the cursor with the arrow keys instead!
Every now and then the cursor disappears when you click near the very the bottom of a page - and you can?t see what you?ve highlighted!
When you use the simplest graphics in a document of any size, they take about two minutes to appear when you scroll to the page they?re on! And if you click on them while they?re brewing, Word will quit! And that?s a guarantee!
Sometimes when you copy and paste a lot of formatted text, the formatting will re-arrange itself randomly! It?s fun to see your italics vanish, or turn into bold, or to see the app forget the text alignment you?ve chosen! (Word likes to do your graphic design for you, too! ?Heading 3?-style text in a font you never use looks much better than the format you chose yourself for your chapter headings!)
Sometimes your highlights get stuck! Neither the computer nor the app are frozen, but just you try replacing your highlighted text with anything. No, you?ll just have to click on a random point in your document and then re-do your highlight. (This one?s particularly irritating.)
Sometimes, on the other hand, it does let you replace it - the app?s just having one of its naps, so you discover a raft-load of gibberish where you?ve been banging away to make it work because you don?t know if it?s playing silly buggers or not and you want to send hatemail to the sloppy-arsed bastards who let this shite onto the market half-baked and haven?t released a patch or an update for it since they got round to enabling quartz text-smoothing in the summer of 2002.
I can?t wait for a heavyweight text processing iApp. Chez Word, the UI?s shit, the code?s shit and oh it?s all shit.
Although it looks nice with all the toolbars, help ?wizards? and whatnot laboriously turned off, I hate Word.
That is all.
Comments
Are you sure you can't avoid using it? What's holding you back?
Of course, TextEdit may not be suitable for big businesses that have to do *everything* in Word. In my opoinion, though, it is a perfect app for home users, small business, and students (especially since some idiot professors only accept files in .doc format
Originally posted by Brad
As long as you aren't doing things with tables and other embedded content, TextEdit in Panther works very well. I've opened all my papers that are in .doc format with it and they've all displayed and saved beautifully. TextEdit is really shaping up to be a fantastic barebones replacement for MS Word.
Of course, TextEdit may not be suitable for big businesses that have to do *everything* in Word. In my opoinion, though, it is a perfect app for home users, small business, and students (especially since some idiot professors only accept files in .doc format
I replaced the AppleWorks icon in my dock with TextEdit. Of course, some would argue that AW is worse than Word.
I can't wait to get Panther.
Originally posted by Brad
As long as you aren't doing things with tables and other embedded content, TextEdit in Panther works very well. I've opened all my papers that are in .doc format with it and they've all displayed and saved beautifully. TextEdit is really shaping up to be a fantastic barebones replacement for MS Word.
Exactly...for simple word processing, TextEdit beats all.
It starts off as simple program with little features. But with services and the new text capabilities in Panther, it's pretty powerful. The system-wide spellcheck is decent...not the best, but certainly usable. Add Okit...err, Nisus Thesaurus and you've got a nice little thesaurus to sit next to the spellchecker. Add OmniDictionary and you've got your dictionary. The new Cocoa text stuff includes shadows and font outlines. You can easily save the styles and use the Styles combo menu to easily switch between them.
If someone's not doing anything fancier than writing a paper without any embedded objects, TextEdit is all a person needs.
Now people can easily just write a document in Word at school or work...send it home via e-mail and open it up in TextEdit to continue editing it.
I'm still hoping for a heavy-weight word processor from Apple though...one that'll do lots of fancier stuff and easily import Word documents with tables and other doodads.
Originally posted by Hassan i Sabbah
There aren't really any alternatives.
What about creating docs in other apps and then loading and saving once in Word at the end of the process for sending on to your boss? If you've already paid for the software you're not as stuck as someone who is doing without for monetary reasons as well as those of morality and efficiency.
It all depends on how your business processes are designed but I believe most people can get by without MSFT Word with a bit of cunning and if you've got a paid for copy of Word available as a safety net for when it all goes wrong then all the better.
Originally posted by stupider...likeafox
What about creating docs in other apps and then loading and saving once in Word at the end of the process for sending on to your boss? If you've already paid for the software you're not as stuck as someone who is doing without for monetary reasons as well as those of morality and efficiency.
Fox, which apps?
I?m at the very end of a two-and-a-half year project begun, pre-Office X, with TextEdit. I wrote the whole thing in that app, re-wrote it, and then (oh, black, black day) came the mighty select-all-copy-paste into Word to finish it off, a year ago now at least.
I use a word processor for hours every day. TextEdit is to Word what iMovie is to Final Cut Pro, it?s just that Final Cut works and Word is shit. I use Auto Correct as a shortcut to put in graphics and difficult names, for example, stuff like that. And the Word dictionary, one of the things I hate most about the application, sometimes saves me the bother of getting out my two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The app?s got muscle. It?s just got layers and layers of fat on top of it. And a vest and a tattoo. And a heart condition.
I can?t write in Text Edit because I use graphics and the page breaks and formatting never survive the transition. Besides, I don?t want to have to do this! I don?t want to have to use cunning. I just want to do my work with a tool that works.
And another thing: with all those appalling, counter-intuitive toolbars and the rulers laboriously turned off, with the formatting palette turned on, in page view, my Word document actually looks very good. Almost inviting. If your whole working day is spent in front of a text processing app this really isn?t to be sniffed at: trust me.
But if there were an alternative, believe me, I?d be using it.
I expect I?ll be using Panther?s TextEdit when I get it. I wish that those rumours about Document (the iApp Word-killer) were true, I really do, but the new TextEdit features suggest that that?s where the r and d?s gone.
Originally posted by Stoo
How about OpenOffice? Does anyone here actually use it regularly?
On my Windows box. It's much, much nicer than Word for PCs, although I wish it had a formatting pallet...
Of course, on Macs it runs in X11. So icky-looking.
Barto
Originally posted by Barto
On my Windows box. It's much, much nicer than Word for PCs, although I wish it had a formatting pallet...
Of course, on Macs it runs in X11. So icky-looking.
Barto
I've just the screenshots and it doesn't look tremendous. Actually it looks pretty durn offputting.
What's to stop Apple pulling a Safari and working their gui magic on the source code, though?
Mariner Software - makers of Mariner Write and Calc
the only drawback is that they didn't have a powerpoint contender, but now that keynote is out, i think that the combination of these three apps (keynote, write and calc) would make a pretty powerful team on anyone's desktop, without breaking the bank. small by comparison to most bloatware, and it was os x native before office was (though no one seemed to notice))
p.s. it still annoys me to no end that when macworld did a comparative review of office alternatives, they ignored these apps, but reviewed TEXTEDIT?!?!?! WTF?!?!
http://www.lyx.org
The screenshot below gives you some idea of the kind of documents it's aimed at:
http://www.lyx.org/about/aqua.png
Originally posted by Hassan i Sabbah
I've just the screenshots and it doesn't look tremendous. Actually it looks pretty durn offputting.
What's to stop Apple pulling a Safari and working their gui magic on the source code, though?
Because Safari is based on KHTML, a very tidy bit of code which uses the QT library. It was trivial for Apple to write a QT to Mac OS X (I assume Cocoa) translation library, but OpenOffice would require a huge effort to actually rewrite code for Mac OS X. Also, Safari has a pretty standard, simple Mac OS X interface. OpenOffice, being and office suite, is way more complicated and would require a much bigger interface effort. It would probably be easier for Apple to just roll their own.
In terms of "offputting", you don't have to use Windows much, do you? I don't know of any Windows application which doesn't look like crap. But compared to MS Office it's a dream.
Barto
The hidden dangers of documents
Originally posted by Brad
As long as you aren't doing things with tables and other embedded content,
I actually use InDesign to make our tables .... WAAAAAAAY easier and far more proffesional looking. They can also be exported to a .doc format.
Originally posted by Hassan i Sabbah
The app?s got muscle. It?s just got layers and layers of fat on top of it. And a vest and a tattoo. And a heart condition.
Otherwise, I'd recommend something like Framemaker or one of the other specialized DTP apps.
Word is OK for memos and straight text, but you take your chances when adding graphics to it...