Word Fails Me - Why doesn’t Microsoft’s writing tool actually help writers? | Hacker News Reader

Word Fails Me - Why doesn’t Microsoft’s writing tool actually help writers?

thebigmoney.com

53 pointschwolfe51 comments

I basically live in Word, both at work and at home, and have done so since elementary school (well, word processors, at least) -- as a result, I probably know how to use Word better (or I should say, more powerfully) than 98% of users, if not more. That means I do know all the obscure features and formatting, how to fix and manipulate them, and most importantly, I have a good sense of when something's possible within Word and when it's not. I've also grown up with Word as an integral part of my writing process, and it's influenced how I compose documents and communicate in general, so I'm totally at home within it.

I'll admit most people aren't like this -- yet. I had a good teacher (my dad, not my school), and I grew up with the software, rather than having to learn it after my thinking and writing processes were already formed. But going forward, more and more people will be like me. There is a lot of room for improvement in Word, yes -- it could be more transparent, more flexible, with more overt features -- but several of the things he was complaining about have never been a problem for me, and I could probably figure out solutions to them in a few minutes. (For example, why was he creating section breaks to reorder a novel? Section breaks are more for style/formatting than for content. Why not go for the easy solution and just copy and paste, either within the current doc or putting it together in a new one? It may not be as flashy but it would get the job done easily.)

If he has to use Word as much as he says he does, and he's not suggesting any alternatives, it might be worth it to learn the program better.

Basically, he says the "word processor" is not geared to help the workflow of writing. I agree.

When I was a journalist, I would take notes in one or more files. When I was ready to write the story, I'd put the notes in one window and the story in the another and go back and forth. Only my filename conventions told me which notes went with which stories.

I imagine lots of people do similar things - students researching for papers, etc. It would be nice to have a file format that encapsulates notes and finished story/paper, and a program that easily lets you tab between notes and work things into the finished product as you go. If you needed to share the file, you could export just the finished thing.

In other ways, like making side notes and sharing and collaboratively editing, Google Docs really is doing novel things with "word processing." Which is one reason why it's putting some pressure on MS Office.

Something like Scrivener, perhaps? http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

The author should look into Microsoft OneNote. It's a great tool for laying out and reorganizing documents. Tags, pictures, screen captures, internal and external hyperlinks can easily be incorporated as well. Once the basic structure of the document is finished, it can easily be copied and pasted into Word. If you have a tablet PC, you can even scribble on the document using pen input.

Yup... Onenote is basically the new version of Word for me and the 2010 version is slicker than the last one.

Also, you should have a look at Canvas for Onenote if you like a higher level view of your notebooks. http://www.officelabs.com/projects/canvasforonenote/Pages/de...

It's telling that the article doesn't recommend any alternatives. Building an easy-to-use yet flexible WYSIWYG word processor is a huge challenge, and no one has nailed it yet. I like Apple's Pages, but it's less powerful than Word and still has a steep learning curve. What else is there? Is anyone going to seriously suggest that OpenOffice has a way better UI than Word? Or Google Docs, or Zoho?

It's true that Microsoft isn't innovating in the word processor market. Neither is anyone else.

I dropped "word processors" long ago, in favour of emacs and latex.

Word processors are the slalom of writing.

'No results found for "slalom of writing".'

Excellent!

Actually, the article mentions that there is a "mini-industry of Word alternatives for novelists", and it links to an example: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

Presumably this is the kind of program the author is thinking of when he says that Word lacks features that assist composition.

Emacs/LaTeX for me as well, but some non-technical friends of mine have had success with Nisus Writer.

There is a small market for actually-good word processing systems out there, it's just that Word is (a) usually already there on people's machines and (b) superficially sufficient.

It's really not superficially sufficient which is the problem. It only seems that way because there's nothing else. IE actually is superficially sufficient, but people still go and get firefox/chrome/whatever. No one gets a word alternative because there aren't any (and I mean alternative in the functional sense, not the free vs proprietary OpenOffice sense).

The problem is that WYSIWYG is a concept that has almost nothing to do with writing. It's more about typesetting and layout. It's easy to write in a text editor or even this little box on HN. Now try to just write in Word. Wait until you're happy with what you've written before you change the way it looks. Then try to do some editing. Then send it to someone for collaboration. In no time at all, it turns into a big clusterfk. You get people who do things like PUT ALL THEIR CHANGES IN RED BOLD UPPERCASE SO THEY STAND OUT. Gee, thanks a lot. Now I have to completely retype the section in my original font and/or color to get it to look normal again. To make matters worse, there's still an invisible space that's in RED BOLD UPPERCASE, waiting for your cursor like a landmine. Typesetting should be one of the last steps of document preparation, and the majority of writers shouldn't even be involved in that process.

One way to go would be to split the text and layout like html/css.

or TeX

You don't need to do that. All you need to do is define your styles initially and reapply them as needed.

> You get people who do things like PUT ALL THEIR CHANGES IN RED BOLD UPPERCASE SO THEY STAND OUT.

If you get someone who doesn't know how to use Word, teach them. Say, "Can you please turn on Track Changes and redo your changes, without the red bold uppercase?"

> Typesetting should be one of the last steps of document preparation, and the majority of writers shouldn't even be involved in that process.

You get a better product when the writer is aware and competent at that. Maybe you're saying that that's too much to ask from the majority of writers, or maybe that extra increment of quality isn't worth it for the majority of books.

> Maybe you're saying that that's too much to ask from the majority of writers

It's not "too much to ask," it's something that requires much training and practice and a good sense of visual aesthetics, and writers shouldn't waste 10x the time to get half as good a result as someone who does it professionally. Of course, you should be aware of how the way in which you do your job affects how others do theirs (i.e. it'sveryhardtotypesetthisline,evenifit'sthewaysomeonesoundedwhentheyspoke), but you shouldn't do [an amateur version of] their job for them.

Even when the writer does the typesetting or formatting himself, it should still be the last thing done, AFTER all the writing is done. Trying to do the formatting while writing messes with both.

It's funny. He bitches that MS Word has not improved since 1997. The 1997, hell, the 1990 version, had all the features he is asking for. The features were not hard to learn, and the thing has always come with a manual that is not hard to follow. All they've done lately is mess with the interface and make it so it doesn't freak out on large documents.

creating documents with several sections that can easily be moved around

Outline. Learn styles.

just wants to type most stuff with single or double spacing and a comfortable serif font

Default template. Again, styles.

Does Word, say, have a scratchpad where you can save sections of writing to use later?

How about a second document?

mark where certain thoughts or paragraphs come from that will not turn your text into an unreadable jumble of pink “comments”?

Toggle View Markup to hide the comments.

What bothers most people is the behavior Word exhibits when you use it as a WYSIWYG word processor. It is based on a stylesheet and if you learn to use it that way it will not surprise you.

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05182004

"Thank you Microsoft Word for continuing to be a good program."

Granted, my print layout needs are modest, but these days I do nearly all my writing in Markdown in a text box on a web form, and save my documents to a database with version control.

I use python-markdown2 to convert it to HTML, and I wrote a simple library that generates a table of contents with anchors for whatever heading levels I want to capture.

I get spell check for free when I use Firefox, I can drop into HTML when I need more structure than Markdown provides, and if absolutely necessary, I can copy the formatted output and paste it into OpenOffice Writer if someone really needs it in .doc or .docx format.

What kind of writing do you do?

Mostly essays.

I think everyone's stabbing at strawmen here; the author's main conclusion was "But when it comes to the main thing—figuring out what you’re going to say and the order in which you’ll say it—it’s still only marginally better than the back of the envelope or the notepad."

His complaint isn't about "structure", or how hard Word is to use for advanced typesetting, or anything like that; it was simply that Word—a tool, supposedly, specialized to "writing"—has no solutions to problems occurring not on the page, but in the creative process.

Neither does a web browser's text editing control, of course—and neither does any other computer program that suggests it targets "writers." The closest I've found is Ommwriter, because it aids in removing distractions and makes little typing noises that basically turn pumping out words into a variable-schedule reward, like a mouse in a skinner box—but it's still not really a tool for writing, so much as it is a tool for transliterating the writing already done in your head onto a page.

I imagine a tool for writing to be able to "interpret" works with a Prolog-like knowledge engine and check for contradictions; to be able to show a timeline of the events portrayed both by chronology and narrative order; to be able to take a directed graph of events (i.e. a flowchart), compile them together using downloadable "styles" (a bit like a synthesized voice, but from a text corpus instead of an audio one) and spit out a very boring but accurate version of what you plan to write, that you can then set about making interesting; and to hold together all your "this is a cool idea" notes and suggest using them (this character could have that trait, this event could be described using that turn of phrase, etc.)

There are so many ways in which computers could be helping us write, but instead we treat them like pieces of paper that we have to transmit full, linearized sentences into using the keyboard before they'll deign to "process" our words. In many roles, we accept that computers can replace people, even performing their previous jobs so much more quickly and systematically that we can move to new heights (e.g. punch cards vs. a REPL). Why not have the computer replace (or more likely, augment) your alpha-readers/publishing editor/reviewers/writing group, except right there watching you type, instead of with a days-long feedback cycle?

I understand what you're saying. My point is that I don't even use Word for the things Word is supposed to be good at, let alone the features that Word doesn't even try to provide.

My favorite way to write is with Emacs running on one of the virtual terminals under Linux. A fullscreened Putty session sshd into a Unix box will also do in a pinch.

My co-workers, by contrast, even paste code into Word documents.

I also like my Emacs in fullscreen. But I just use XMonad for that purpose. I also get rid of the scroll-bar and the menu-bar.

Non-"print now" link: http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2010/05/17/w...

Does anyone who writes words (or code) for a living know anyone who would ever consider using such a tool in the first place?!

Please. The best writing tools are a good text editor, a simple meta/mark-up ontology, and a focused mind.

Yes, lots of professional writers (of books, especially) use Microsoft Word for their writing. In many cases their editors require them to do so.

If you're writing a 100,000 word novel, a single text file in a text editor isn't really the optimal solution (although yes it's probably still better than using Word).

If you're writing a 100 000-page novel, it doesn't matter what you do, you're not going to succeed. :)

I'm guessing you mean 100 000 words? What do you think is the optimal solution? I'd think a text file in Emacs outline-mode would be about right, although of course Word seems to work pretty well too.

You can use e.g. LaTeX and its `include' or `input' commands to organize your document into different files.

That really doesn't address the need the article is speaking to -- the need for a writing program for the average writer that addresses writing concerns rather than formatting concerns.

Yes, that's true. Though some Emacs mode could go a long way to help you with writing concerns (and may or may not employ LaTeX somewhere).

I don't know what kind of books you're writing, but 100,000 pages is too many pages. Did you mean 100,000 words?

I've only ever written 50,000 word NaNoWriMo stuff, but I've had a lot of success with text files, simply marked-up, in emacs. One text file per chapter. A short Python script converts them into LaTeX and a makefile builds a PDF. All the notes are handled with org-mode. It's a really sweet setup.

typo - fixed :)

as for LateX/python stuff - the article is addressing the needs of the average writer, of which those who know anything resembling python are a small small subset.

> a single text file in a text editor isn't really the optimal solution

Why not? And if not, a folder with one file per chapter along with unix tools to work on them sounds ideal to me.

Exactly why I prefer to start with feature sparse apps like TextEdit. Even for the small volume of writing I do I find it much easier to focus on the substance before worrying too much about the exact layout or formatting of the document. This usually includes multiple TextEdit windows. In the final stages I will use Pages or Word to play with the final structure and formatting. I would imagine for a larger document this workflow would work well also. It almost requires multiple monitors or enough screen space in general to display a few windows at once side-by-side. I think the author of this article is probably looking for something like Scrivener on the Mac which I've never tried but lots of people seem to adore it.

These posts are always interesting, but usually not all that informative. For every one of these posts there are probably 100 writers who are fine with Word.

There are some minor things I'd like out of Word, but the main thing is probably to start up faster. Takes about 3s on my computer. I'd love to see sub 1s startup.

With that said, OneNote is always running so I use that for a lot of the type of writing that this author refers to.

Running Word 2010 off a SSD, I found startup to be near instantaneous. I was impressed with how responsive it was for an application with such a huge feature set.

Ditto here. I just tabbed back into Windows (had been doing some programming in VMWared ubuntu) and fired up MS Word. Less than a second to where I could start typing.

If there is anyone here who doesn't own a SSD yet, buy one this week. It is the single biggest performance improvement I've ever seen on a computer. Apps start fast, VMs start fast, browsers load fast, your interpreted language running in a VM that needs to load 400 files of libraries doesn't care because its fast, etc.

This is why http://thebookpatch.com just launched: To specifically address the writing needs of (book) authors with tools and features dedicated to, for example, character development. (IE users only. Not my product, though I did some contract work for them.)

They just launched, in 2010, and it's IE only? Plus a link to a pdf of the DMCA in the bottom corner for no apparent reason. Wow, just wow.

IE has the biggest installed base by far.

Depends where you go. I have a (fairly) general interest site that gets about 100,000 unique visitors per month, and only about 55% of them use IE. Cutting out 45% of your potential market is quite a cost for a bit of lazy programming.

What web site? Or, at least, how general-interest?

Perhaps it's a German site?

http://flood.firetree.net/usage/

Sounds like it's an ActiveX control -- I thought you could only get away with that in South Korea.

Has anyone taken a look at Tinderbox? http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

He is complaining that a business word processing program is not ideal for use by a professional writer writing books/articles. That is a bit like complaining that a minivan is not a sports car.

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