Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

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Word certainly is, at least on OS X. Within an hour of my first time using it in a decade last week, I caused it to beachball for five minutes straight by clicking a single button (select all text of a given style). It then took me over an hour to figure out why my TOC entries had no spacing between their numbers and titles (hint: it wasn't the spacing setting), and another hour to figure out why, after I "fixed" the spacing issue, why my chapter numbering was all messed up (the "solution" was to reformat each chapter heading with the same format it already had).

It has terrible default orphan/widow control, and editing anything graphical is a royal pain in the ass: the slightest wrong touch can throw your diagram into disarray. Those that "know" how to use it I've noticed seem to have near-infinite patience and knowledge of where all of Word's "land mines" are and how to avoid them.

People use it because it bundles in every obscure feature under the sun, so it's effectively the lowest common denominator when it comes to meeting an organizations' needs. And for those who already know how to use it, I suspect the sunk cost fallacy keeps them there.

I wouldn't call Word's features obscure. They may not be relevant to you, but it is an extremely powerful publishing tool.

"Obscure" does not mean "useless". I wager that most of Word's features are not used by the majority of its users, and are difficult to find in menus if you don't know what you're looking for. They are then, by definition, obscure.

Publishing? Are you sure? I know people who do book layouts, and they're all using InDesign, which is a completely different tool.

For real publishing, I think TeX is still the state-of-the-art. It still produces the best-looking documents put on paper (granted, one needs to give it a decent font to do so…).

Pity that it's so difficult to do, say, bilingual books with one language on one side and the other on the other, with page elements lined up neatly. For that, Word is probably the easiest — but it looks terrible.

In defense of Word: The vast majority of people don't realize just how massive Word is in terms of it's feature set and it's complexity, Word is a fully furnished publishing program and most people treat it like a rich text editor.

I still have and use it irregularly for a few things, but if you just need to edit text with formatting, use TextEdit. Using Word to type up a memo is like using a jet engine to cook a TV dinner.

It may be incredibly powerful (for what use case?) and everything. But it's an incredibly bad rich text editor.

Word can't keep a list straight.

That's akin to saying "this screwdriver sucks as a hammer." You're using it wrong.

When you go to the hardware store and ask for something to pound nails, they give it to you. When you ask people what they use to pound nails, they say they use this. When you're hired to pound nails, they often insist that you pound nails with this. 99.9% of the people who use this on a regular basis use it exclusively to pound nails.

Given that context, it makes little sense to say, that's unfair, it's really a screwdriver.

If 99% of the contractors on the planet were using screwdrivers as hammers, the 1% are the ones using the proper tool for their job.

Consensus =/= Fact in every scenario.

My point is that not only do roughly all the users use it that way, but the make agrees with that usage.

At some point you just have to say, this hammer, while apparently designed as a screwdriver, is clearly labeled, sold, purchased, and used as a hammer and is not very good at it.

So would you say that your description and expectation of how people use Word matches Microsoft's marketing materials for it?

Who cares? I thought we were talking about the quality of the tool and not the marketing.

Nope, read all the comments above to understand why you're drawing a false distinction and missing the point here.

> Word is a fully furnished publishing program and most people treat it like a rich text editor.

"Oh, I need to change the format of headings? Well, I guess I'll have to go through all 1536 instances!"

-- someone with very good Office skills

Very good? Hm. That doesn't sound anything like the very good answer of "Styles & Formatting > Heading 2 > Modify > Update All.

To stay with wacky imagery, using Word to do high-quality publishing work is like carving wood with a spoon. It's kinda possible, but takes unnecessarily long, you'll break your tool a few times and the end result doesn't look all that great.

(It's actually used in many publishing workflows, but for the early stages, where all you want is a rich text editor with the ability to do diffs. Typography and layout is done later with different tools)

I've seen numerous examples to the contrary, I'm willing to grant it isn't the best publishing tool out there (far from it) but if you get someone who's properly trained, you can get some very good looking documents out of it.

Also very useful for smaller mass mailers and the like, where you don't have the budget for a full feature publishing suite (or the need).

You are right, I was thinking more in a direction of books, magazines and other more complex works. "high-quality" should probably read "high-complexity" or something

I completely agree. Word is like the Emacs of natural language documents.

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