[MarcScott]

I really don't understand how Word remains so popular. It was created at a time when few people had internet access, and was designed to produce printed documents. It was the perfect tool to write newsletters, flyers, articles, academic papers and manuscripts. The world has moved on though, and I fail to see Word's relevance today, other than the sheer number of people that are familiar with it.

Word is expensive, proprietary and the XML it generates is unfathomable. There are so many better FOSS tools and systems that we could be using. If you're collaborating on a document then markdown or LaTeX has you covered. You get version control though git and multiple people can contribute. If you're writing a book or article, then the graphic designers and typesetters are going to make the design decisions, not the author, so why bother messing around with fonts and colours and the infuriating placement of images and tables.

I authored a kid's book on coding, and the process was a nightmare. I authored in markdown, used pandoc to convert and then further edited in libreoffice, to be able to send stuff through in docx format. Then revisions were sent back in docx and I had to reverse the whole process, so I could maintain my plain-text version of the book. Then the proofs were sent through as PDFs, which I then had to markup for corrections. Many of the mistakes were due to the crappy way Word places images. In the end I just bought a copy of Word, and submitted to the way my publisher wanted me to work, which disrupted the authorial process.

It's time we ditched Word, in the same way we ditched VHS and DVD. It's an outdated technology that remains dominant just because everyone uses it at school, and then refuses to move on. If schools insisted that all homework was submitted in something like markdown, we'd see a dramatic change in a very short period of time. (BTW when I was teaching CS, my kids authored in markdown and submitted on GitHub)

Right, rant over - but I've been talking about this for years -http://coding2learn.org/blog/2014/04/14/please-stop-sending-...

[viraptor]

> If you're collaborating on a document then markdown or LaTeX has you covered.

These are not WYSIWYG solutions which answers 99% of your question "why". When people want to write a document they want to write things and have the things appear on a page, possibly in different formatting. Injecting ideas like source files, rendering pipeline, etc. will just result in confused people.

That's why online solutions like Google docs are popular. No special app, things look like expected, you can collaborate, and few people actually need any fancy features.

[PaulHoule]

TeX is a 1970s system. I thought it was cool in the 1990s, but in 2020 it makes the typesetter in me want to hurl.

[andi999]

Whats wrong with the tex typesetting?

[quietbritishjim]

The worst part is the default font, Computer Modern, which is absolutely deplorable. I'm not a big fan of the general style of "modern" fonts (a name coined at the end of the 19th centry when they still were actually modern). But, worse than that, Computer Modern is horrifically slim and spindly. I've read repeated rumours over the years that it was deliberately this way because the printers of the time used ink that would run a bit so the font was like that to compensate, but I don't know if it's true.

That's not such a big deal since you can obviously change the font. For a long time there were lots of text fonts but very few math fonts, and those math fonts that did exist would either have some symbols from Computer Modern or wouldn't have a suitably similar text font. But now there are a fair number of choices. Personally I like mathpazo (with Palatino for text) but I've found people used to Computer Modern can find this a bit much of a radical departure. (Edit: I've found a more conservative choice is Times for text and Utopia (MathDesign) for math.)

TeX does have a few small typesetting niggles. For example, if you set f(x)g(y) with normal small brackets around the x but large brackets around the y (because it's really a displayed fraction) then you'll find g is miles away from its argument but right next to f's argument. (I'll avoid opening the can of worms about what the root cause is here, but it's very clearly wrong in this case.) This is actually not that big a deal either - there are lots of problems like this but they're all fairly minor and small in number compared to the huge number of things typeset correctly. The only problem comes when people refuse to correct things because they assume that if TeX typesets it that way then that must be correct by definition.

[rleigh]

Have you tried XeTeX with the TeX Gyre fonts? It made a big difference for me. (I previously used pslatex and then pdflatex with Palatino/mathpazo as well.)

[PaulHoule]

I can't stand the fonts, don't like how it applies space, etc.

TeX is like a programmable pocket calculator from the 1970s, way ahead of it's time but today it's something that conspires with Word, Google Docs, and other dull tools to suck out the oxygen for sharp tools.

[andi999]

So which programm does it better?

[MarcScott]

I think my argument is that WYSIWYG needs to die. For the vast majority of people they want nothing more than:

> text

> image

> more text

> table

> more text

There are any number of applications that allow you to write markdown and view the generated HTML in whatever formatting you want. Your recipient then gets to choose their own fonts, colours etc, which from an accessibility point of view, is much better.

Unless you're printing a hardcopy or creating a PDF, what is the point of Word?

[viraptor]

I don't believe you'd be able to convince anyone not in tech that writing "" is in any way better than clicking "insert image" if you just want to send someone a report. Never mind explaining that paths need to be relative and resources included in the attachments.

Even I, happily maintaining some pages in reST, wouldn't want to inflict that on people.

[WoodenChair]

> I think my argument is that WYSIWYG needs to die.

WYSIWYG is a big part of what made the GUI revolution so successful. The computer for the rest of us, wouldn't be for the rest of us, if we had to worry about Git and how to render our file format.

I've had the same frustrations dealing with publishers and Word templates as you had. Your mistake is that you are conflating our experience writing a technical book with the vast majority of users who are not writing technical literature. A writing system for the masses should be as easy to use (for the basics at least) as paper and pencil. Git and learning even a simple markup language does not meet this standard.

[beagle3]

WYSIWYG for professional word processing is like training wheels - it lets you start being productive on day one, but if you don't spend the effort to learn how to work without them, they get in the way and make you slower -- although you wouldn't know that unless you've seen someone who can do the job without them.

I have not used Word for ~10 years, but not in the last ~20 or so years, after I realized how much time and effort it cost me -- nearly missed an important deadline because of a Word 2 vs Word 6 incompatibility that manifested in a very inopportune moment.

It's been around for almost 30 years. I'm constantly receiving documents from people who've used it for >25years. And there is never use of styles, often spaces instead of tabs, many "new lines" instead of a page break, and a host of other things like that. References are not dynamic (just typed out) meaning that an item inserted in the middle of a list makes many of them wrong.

The vast majority of people who have used it for decades use it mostly as a smart typewriter, because the "pro" features like styles require a lot of discipline and the "let's just press the bold button" is too easy and enticing.

WYSIWYG needs to die whenever anything professional is needed.

[xnyan]

You're speaking absolute crazy talk man.

>Write markdown

You have now lost almost all people who currently write documents. Nobody who is not a developer wants to write in markdown. The mass market wants point and click, buttons, and WYSIWYG.

[PaulHoule]

What gets me is that there's something basically wrong with the "Microsoft Word" text editing model.

Basically, when you try to set the properties of text (e.g. bold, fonts, ...) there are always anomalous behaviors involving:

* if you just start typing what font it is in

* selections (why is that the selection region seems to actively avoid the exact selection you want?)

There is something fundamentally wrong with the data model behind it that makes it impossible to implement in a way that makes sense 100%.

[quietbritishjim]

I think you can turn off that smart selection thing. There is corresponding "smart" behaviour when you drag a selection to a different place so you don't end up with missing or duplicated spaces, so the precise boundary of the selection isn't as important as you think unless you want to select mid-word. I think for most people this behaviour that you find annoying is actually useful - remember that Microsoft is one of the few companies that actually does real user testing.

For your other objection (and maybe what you were also really getting at with your selection objection), maybe you'd like WordPerfect 5.1's "reveal codes"? :-) We can all agree that Microsoft wouldn't have hesitated to steal that feature if it would have benefitted them. The fact that they didn't is proof that formatting markup is something that was historically tried (or considered) and rejected, rather than something waiting to happen in the future.

In any case, for a program as huge as Microsoft Word, I think this is all quite minor. How much of your day is really ruined if you start typing after some bold text, find that the new text is bold when you didn't want it to be, and have to manually turn it off again? It's a fundamental problem with the model, like you said, but has surprisingly tiny impact on usability. If this is your biggest objection, it's almost proof that the program is pretty good. (But I can sympathise with minor objections: I hate copy and paste works differently in Excel then any other program!)

[Jasper_]

I wouldn't consider myself an advanced Word user and all of my documents have needed more functionality than that.

[ghego1]

I deeply and honestly would love to agree with you but unfortunately I can't based on my experience.

I write a lot of stuff in the legal area (articles, books, contracts, court documents, etc) and there's nothing that comes close to Word.

For some time I had tried to switch to LibreOffice. My goal was to quit Word, which is the only software that still binds me to Windows/Mac (not interested in Wine). I hoped to finally be able to switch to Linux without any hiccups.

Unfortunately LibreOffice is not quite as good as Word. I use many of the advanced features of Word, and the more you use these in LibreOffice, the more you encounter bugs. At one point I had a .odt file with tons of cross-references in footnotes pointing to other footnotes. When I was ready to ship the document I found out that all cross-references were messed up and I had to redo them all.

Now it's true that LibreOffice has a huge and active community that works hard to improve the product, but as word processors are my main and most important tool for work, I need the most reliable software I can get. Unfortunately that is still Word...

On top of that I must add that I do need to properly format documents 99% of the times, and also on this I find Word slightly superior, even if admittedly on this is quite comparable to FOSS solutions. The only quite big problem at this regard is interoperability. Since I know that most, if not all, my colleagues/counterparts use Word, whenever I send a document I need to send something that "will just work" for them, which is a docx. This means that using anything other than Word might give some problems in relation to formatting, which in same cases is pretty important.

[CJefferson]

I agree that word is bad, but I don't think we have a great replacement yet.

Markdown -- standard markdown isn't expressive enough (no tables for example), there are lots of extensions but none which are "standard".

LaTeX -- doesn't produce accessible documents, so is a non-starter in lots of areas (seriously, the PDFs it generates are some of the worst around when it comes to accessibility. Word's are amazing).

[GordonS]

> I agree that word is bad

If we put aside the Word file format, and maybe the ribbon, is Word bad though?

I've been using it for decades, and have tried OpenOffice and LibreOffice too over the years - nothing comes close to Word.

Markdown is not suitable for "normal" users, but as a developer, I've come to prefer markdown for technical documentation and such (especially where I want a history, diffs etc), but I still use Word for a lot of other things.

Word is incredibly fully-featured - I use a lot of functionality, but am likely still only using a fraction of what it has. It really does have all your document editing needs covered.

Aside from the file format, I think Word is a fantastic piece of software. I have a few annoyances with it now and then, but it's been very dependable and kept me in good stead over the years.

[coffeeling]

> > I agree that word is bad

> If we put aside the Word file format, and maybe the ribbon, is Word bad though?

Is the ribbon bad, though, or are we just living through 2003 era UI shock for 13 years now?

I lambasted the ribbon as was fashionable back then, but actually using it in 2020?

It's good. Like, legit amazing UI design. Makes it easy to peck through menus and find what you want. Structures chords for power users, and importantly makes those chords visually discoverable. I've found a pile of good keyboard shortcuts just by starting to slowly press a chord on the ribbon.

It's great for mouse users. It's great for noobs just learning the ropes. It's great for keyboard users who already know their stuff. It's amazing at facilitating the learning process into knowing your stuff

It's been great for 17 years. Do we still have to pretend it sucks because we were used to a different way of doing things?

[GordonS]

I said that because I know the ribbon is still contraversial, and some people still don't like - personally, I've come to like it, if not love it as you have.

[Timpy]

In my opinion the issue is path dependency. Everybody in my generation grew up with Microsoft Office free on every installation of Windows, and teaching everyone new efficiency software is costly. It looks like Google is trying to win the next generation and Chromebooks are taking over the classroom. When today's youth grow up I wouldn't be surprised to Google Docs as the new standard.

[tatersolid]

> Microsoft Office free on every installation of Windows

Microsoft Office is quite useful, and probably good value for money. But it has never ever been free, and I’ve been buying it for work and home since Office 4.x on Windows 3.1 was the new hotness.

[quadrifoliate]

My theory is that the answer lies along a different axis than the other commenters. I think Word is a consequence of the the fact that modern office work is optimized to extract the maximum short-term resources out of people, or at least put up the appearance of doing so.

Consider someone dealing with inter-departmental collaboration on documents at a company in the 70s or 80s. They could potentially invent their own system, make paper copies mandatory, go full computer, or any number of solutions in between. Technology was considered hard and looked recognizably so, and management was less likely to question technical views and opinions about this. People were way less likely to get fired and generally visualized staying there for a while, so they were comfortable sticking to their viewpoints.

Today, your boss and their boss are all concerned with how to get the maximum amount of work out of you in the time you're at the company. So if you propose retraining everyone on Open Office or Markdown, because it has high potential for a better way of tracking changes or something, you'll get pushback from a) management, because the CEO is going to say “but I use Word all the time, why can't you just use that?” and b) the workers, because they know they will be forced to learn it on their own time rather than being given a proper amount of time to train and learn. [1]

I think modern society and modern work are slowly defaulting to the idea of quickly throwing in the towel and just using whatever technology is approved by the milieu. This is true even in our industry, consider this article [2] by Latacora [3] for instance: it's full of statements which approximately say “Just use CloudTrail”, “Just Use Jamf”, “Just Use Okta SSO” etc. If our industry is doing things like this to optimize extraction (even the article acknowledges that SOC2 is purely documentation optimized for selling to big companies), why would we be so surprised that publishing departments and such are optimized to Just Use Microsoft Word rather than a technically better system?

-------

[1] Think back: when was the last time you had a proper training about how to use a certain piece of software by people from the company building it, or at least certified trainers? These were way more common back in the day.

[2] https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html

[3] A very respectable security company focused on startups.

[earthboundkid]

Word is not the best anything. It's not the best for layout (InDesign) or best for tracking changes/collaborating (Git) or the best for visual archiving (PDF) or responsive layout (HTML) or…

Basically, it's a "good enough" WYSIWYG, and a number of industries have standardized on it, in spite of the fact they should actually use an open standard + tool that actually fits their needs. I think screenwriting might be the one industry to escape Word, since they use Final Draft as I understand it.

[asciimov]

> I really don't understand how Word remains so popular.

Because Office/Word has become the hammer of the document writing world.

It isn't an issue that it's a bad product and better products our out there (and there are).

It is that everyone is expected to know how to use word at a basic level. From Secretaries to VPs and CEOs, almost universally these people can open a word document, edit it, and save it.

Because of this expectation, it is easier to throw money at Microsoft and have the tool you can expect everyone to use.

[booleandilemma]

I really don't understand how Word remains so popular.

Non-technical folks do not want to reach for CSS to apply formatting to a text document. Heck, neither do I.