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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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