[nradov]

I think to actually operation Word efficiently you have to learn the object model which underlies documents. You don't necessary have to be able to program in it, but if you understand how the various objects are contained and composed together then the UI makes a lot more sense and it's usually easy to figure out how to get the desired effect on the page.

Of course it may not be practical for casual users to learn the object model.

While Word is still widely used today, I expect it to gradually fade away as people produce fewer documents for the printed page. Per-capital paper consumption in the USA has been slowly declining since 2008.

[salicideblock]

The thing is, learning that model is often made more difficult by the wysiwig because it is hiding the model.

[type0]

Word is significantly harder to use efficiently than lets say Atom+Asciidoctor. Also Word version control is a living hell, in contrast with format like asciidoc one could use standalone tools like Mercurial and that is both powerful and easy to use.

[ido]

Have you tried teaching version control to non-programmers?

I have, and I think you highly overestimated how easy to use mercurial or these other tools are.

[type0]

> Have you tried teaching version control to non-programmers?

I had with various success, in the end it all comes down to how open minded those people are. I wish version control would be more prevalent in academia and research where it's really needed for transparency reasons, I wish more groups would also use csv, tsv ,JSON files + Python data wrangling tools instead of Excel.

[adrianmsmith]

I have various non-programmers (project managers, CEOs) checking files in and out of Subversion using TortoiseSVN on Windows and that works acceptably. About once a month they get stuck and need help but they use TortoiseSVN daily so that's still acceptable.

[nradov]

Microsoft SharePoint does basic version control and is fairly well integrated with Word. It's limited in that it basically just tracks revisions and doesn't support branching, but it's simple enough that most casual users can learn it easily.

[anexprogrammer]

It still makes creating a ToC and index slow, painful and somewhat unpredictable. 20 years ago it was straightforward and utterly reliable in Wordperfect.

[cobalt]

as long as you use headers, it has a button that does it in one click? (The only part is you have to make sure to keep it up to date manually)

[ptaipale]

I think the per-capita paper consumption declines due to decline of newspapers and paper advertising, not due to decline of documents prepared with word processors and printed on paper (even though I do see that "paperless office" is more of a reality now than it was before when there was a lot of talk about it).