Word sucks
Word sucks. Let’s just put that out there. I could spend hundreds of pages writing about how it can’t handle anything more complicated than a letter without puking. I could complain about how it can’t manage footnotes to save it’s life, or a bibliography either. What really cheeses me off about Word, though, is the sheer bloat of useless crap that has accumulated in it over the years, and drags it down to something that is simply unacceptable to use.
Steven Poole shares this hatred and distrust for Word, and express it better than I could. Like Steve, I use WriteRoom quite a bit, and find it to be amazingly productive when I simply want to get some thoughts down “on paper.” In fact, I write most of my blog entries in it.
This entry was posted at 1:02 pm on 2 September 2007 and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Here’s the thing. Word sucks at formatting too. Let’s talk about a few of the finer points:
- Ligatures don’t exist
- Small caps are a joke and insultingly bad
- Hyphenation is bad
- Justification creates enormous “rivers of white”
- Creating intelligent running headers/footers is nearly impossible
- Kerning is bad
- Managing folios for double-sided printing makes my head hurt in Word
- Building large tables sucks
- Cross-referencing is neigh on impossible to get “right,” much less change based on style requirements
- “Styles” breed like horny tribbles
That’s just a few things. It’s not like this has never been solved, whether it be in LaTeX, FrameMaker or InDesign. Even Apple’s “consumer” tool, Pages has better typographic control. The reality is that, like PowerPoint, Word is a mediocre tool for mediocre minds that allows untalented hacks to spew for gigantic wastes of paper with little redeeming value. It’s not that it’s impossible to create quality in either, it’s simply painfully complicated and includes spending hours of time fighting against the epic mediocrity of the tool.
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Well, duh – Word isn’t intended for plain text writing. I use Notepad2 for text that doesn’t need to be nicely formatted, but for documents that do, Word is way more stable and less frustrating than the OpenOffice alternative.
Use the right tool for the job. Obviously Word is not the choice for simple plain text, but for nicely formatted documents, I think it does its job pretty well.