Death to MS Word
The author clearly has not spent much time using Word lately, and reading this I was constantly struck by the blatant inaccuracies throughout this piece. Some of his biggest complaints just don't align with modern versions of the software he is criticizing:<p>1) He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple releases.<p>2) 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? There are a variety of choices when saving a file, including the options to save as Plain Text (which removes all formatting), or even as <i>a web page.</i> No idea if the save as web page feature works well for complex documents, but to overlook this when complaining about publishing a Word doc as a web page demonstrates woeful ignorance of the product being criticized. This is especially ridiculous considering he highlights 3rd party programs that convert .docx into .txt. Why not mention that Word does this out of the box?<p>3) "The fundamental unit of Word is the single, proprietary file, anchored to one computer. Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files." As far as I can tell, the author pulled this one out of his ass. The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack released by MSFT allowing earlier versions of Word to open .docx files. The 3rd result is the Wikipedia page for "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format that all Office documents are saved in. (The 1st result is a free online 3rd party .docx to .doc conversion service.)<p>And these were just the things that immediately jumped out at me....<p>There are plenty of valid criticisms of Word and ways in which the software can be improved (apparently feature discovery...), but by not understanding how to use even the most basic features such as "Save to Plain Text," I have difficulty putting much stock in this individuals personal gripes.<p>(Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but not within the Office division. The above is my own personal opinion, etc., etc.)