Using Microsoft Word with Git
I really don&#x27;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&#x27;s relevance today, other than the sheer number of people that are familiar with it.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>I authored a kid&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s time we ditched Word, in the same way we ditched VHS and DVD. It&#x27;s an outdated technology that remains dominant just because everyone uses it at school, and then refuses to move on.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&#x27;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)<p>Right, rant over - but I&#x27;ve been talking about this for years -<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;coding2learn.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;14&#x2F;please-stop-sending-me-your-shitty-word-documents&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;coding2learn.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;14&#x2F;please-stop-sending-...</a>