Ditching Microsoft Word
Via MoneyLaw you can see this post compiling a list of "MS Word rant" sites. On the way to making some other points, MoneyLaw notes that "Bill Gates's word processor probably delivers more anger in our verbally intense profession than any other computer application."
I've been thinking about this a bit lately. I've switched back and forth between Word and Word Perfect. Early in my career I worked at places that (like most others) embraced Word, along with all of its flaws. But then I spent a few years in an environment that used Word Perfect. And I noticed something: Word Perfect documents are consistently better formatted. If you bother to educate yourself a bit on Word Perfect formatting tweaks you could truly take document formatting to the next level. (It didn't really matter that the few places which used Word had word processing departments - Word simply does not have comparable formatting horsepower.)
Fast forward to a couple of years ago to the start of my current situation. It took me a while to get Word Perfect on my computer (between a combination of laziness and procrastination) so I lapsed into a habit of using Word. And I'm still not out of this habit. But looking back at something in the MoneyLaw post got me thinking:
Microsoft Word, for all its horrors, prevails
throughout the world of computing solely by virtue of its ubiquity. We
use it because everyone else does. And even though it's bad, we keep
using it because it would cost us too much to switch to smarter
software, both in terms of having to buy the new stuff and in terms of
losing touch with the people who stuck with Word.
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