Hacker News Reader

I understand what you're saying and in some ways your right, but after spending a year supporting a 250 person editorial department in a web company that publishes a lot of copy, the author is "more right"

Word, with all it's features, benefits, and menus does not cater to the world of digital text swapping and collaboration. Compared to a plain text editor, the print document focus in Word means that users need to make several annoying modifications to every document they work with, and if you're publishing stuff online you'll work with many documents. And to top it all, a Microsoft Office application will be by far the slowest app on an Apple computer, regardless of the specs of the machine. (it'll start faster than photoshop, but slower in terms of responsiveness.)

To understand this perspective, you have to understand the program the author compares Word to, TextEdit, is the notepad.exe of the Apple world.

Word defaults to a print document focus, but it also has others and they are easy to switch between. There are five prominent views: "Print Layout", "Full Screen Reading", "Web Layout", "Outline" and "Draft".

It sounds like you want the "Web Layout" (or possibly "Draft" view).

Keep in mind that the author is also talking as a consumer of word documents that someone else wrote. I would wager that he knows about these various options but that doesn't mean that the people whose documents he is consuming know about them.

His rant is partly centered around the fact that word's default settings are poorly chosen for someone in the digital publishing world.

The one thing that he got completely right though, is that Word is for putting text to paper. Most people's writing never sees paper anymore, and I think that's why the tool isn't working for them.

As far as saving to plain text and copying plain text, those are two different things. Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. I've never had that happen to me though, so maybe he's doing something wrong.

I find Word very frustrating to use. I don't feel like I'm using it, I feel like I'm tricking it and at any moment my text will simply change fonts or tab depth or something weird.

> Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another > application just to paste the text is just plain terrible.

That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

Just as much a feature. Right click ->paste-as-plain-text is available in chrome, notepad++, Word (don't know if it is available during a right click though) and many many others.

word 2010 (actually, all of office 2010) is better than right-click: you paste normally, tap ctrl and then t.

Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible.

I always past and then again copy text into the address bar of my browser or notepad for longer text. Not ideal, but it works.

I hit CMD+space, CMD+V, CMD+A, then CMD+X all the time to use OS X' Spotlight text field to stip formatting from text I've copied from the web and other applications. It's far from an elegant solution, but it does work!

For OS X, you might also consider Shift+Option+CMD+V, which pastes using the formatting of the target document. I have found this does not work for all target applications, however. (PowerPoint is one. Lame.)

If you find you always desire to paste without formatting, you can remap CMD+V in OS X:

  * Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts
  * Click the + under the right-hand list to add a shortcut
  * Application: All; Menu Title: Paste and Match Style; Keyboard Shortcut: type CMD+V

Ask MetaFilter's discussion of above: http://ask.metafilter.com/187733/OSX-How-to-copy-plaintext-a...

> "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format

uh that's the worst precedent for an "open" file format to ever be published as a standard, and this has been disseminated lots of times already. OOXML is a sham standard.

Not only that, but last I heard MS Office does not currently implement the standard entirely correctly...

I know there are problems with it, but at least OOo and Google Docs etc. can usually interpret my documents OK. That's not exactly a glowing review but it's enough for me and most people to get work done.

They can interpret the old .doc ones too, often better.

I wish - I've had attachments that I've tried to open in Google Docs that appear mangled on my iPhone (which is not fun when you don't have a PC anywhere nearby).

It's unfortunate that the case where you wouldn't really need to attach a Word document and should just paste in the contents into email (just some plain text) is the case where Google Docs works just fine, and the case where you really need a Word document (complex table layout & floating pictures) is the case where Google Docs just doesn't work that well.

I didn't say it's perfect. Neither .doc or .docx are read perfectly by any software, Word included.

I agree with the Clippy thing, but... I do believe that, whenever somebody responds to software criticism with "he's doing it wrong!", it means the software failed to interface with its human masters in a good way. I thought this was the main lesson "Saint Steve" taught us: the software should be designed to minimize the incidence of "user wrongness", while still allowing for high productivity.

Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!

Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.

"right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!"

Have you used Office 2010? There are multiple options to pasting: Keep source formatting, merge formatting, and keep text only. The options in Excel are even greater.

The issue isn't pasting into Word, it's copying from Word.

And web browsers, for example, don't generally have a "Paste as Plain Text" option inside of text fields.

As crazygringo said, the problem is copying from Office into textboxes. Any developer who's ever worked on a web-based CMS will tell you how painful it is to have to deal with people pasting walls of text from Word.

(And btw, I do use Office 2010 every day of my cursed life...)

> He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple releases.

Clippy is still very symbolic of Microsoft's overall UI approach, "helping you help yourself", and very appropriate here, since it continues to pervade the new ribbon, wizards, etc.

> He complains about the XML markup when you want to publish something to the Web through copy-paste. Has the author ever saved a Word document prior to publishing before?

He's not talking about saving, he's talking about copy-paste. This has been a huge headache for me as well when dealing with web-based CMS's -- 90% of our editors' bugs came from pasting simple text into our CMS. No matter how much we taught them to paste into Notepad first, then re-copy and re-paste into the CMS, they never always remembered. I HATE Word for this.

> The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack...

That's the whole point. It's kind of a huge pain for users to keep track of compatibility packs and whatnot. It's as annoying as it would be if there were multiple PDF formats.

On the other hand, here's an article [1] I wrote today, about MS Word 2010. I managed to send out some resumes that look fine, but break when printed. It's no longer a WYSIWYG editor apparently.

I suppose its a testament to the faith I had in Word that I didn't try printing it before I sent it out to employers. Others may view it as a lack of testing on my part, which is somewhat embarrassing for a programmer.

[1] http://jamiebriant.tumblr.com/post/20967362687/1-what-ms-wor...

It's a testament to your faith that you didn't send out the resume in PDF. You don't know which fonts they have, which default template or crazy macro they have, or any of the other umpteen ways Word can break your carefully-crafted layout when opening the file on a different pc...

Its all Arial for that very reason. And I thought PDFs would work. When I first started this process I'd send a link to linkedin but got push-back. So then I tried PDF. Push-back on that too. "Have you got it in Word?"