Why I Dislike Microsoft Word (et al)
Reasons for My Stance
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Word documents are not very portable. They really
prefer to run on Windows 95/98/NT and (a distant second)
Macintosh MacOS systems, and while there are Word systems for
my system of choice, Unix (e.g. StarOffice), there is not much
consistency. It is also difficult to extract the information
content from a word document into alternative formats (see
below). I've even had trouble reading Word documents produced
on the same platform, but from different versions of Word --
no backwards compatability!
-
Word documents are in a proprietary format. Because
only Word uses the .doc to save documents, no other software can
be used to maintain them. There are some systems that do attempt
to handle them by the use of reverse engineering, but these
quickly become obsolete as Microsoft releases new versions. The
rtf is more open, but it too suffers from lack of third party
software.
-
Lack of interoperability. People often ask me why
I am so anti-Microsoft. I'm not. I'm
anti-non-interoperability. One of the most fundamental
lessons learnt from the early days of computing is the
importance of portability (see above). Interoperability is
akin to this, and lack of it greatly restricts the development
of computing. But -- there are signs that Microsoft is hearing
the message, see
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/
-
Word documents are not backwards compatible. Each new
release of Word locks the user into an upgrade path, because
once a document has been updated by a later version, it cannot
be read by an earlier version. Or worse, it can, but generates
incorrect results.
- Another comment in similar vein:
Hi all. Whilst I loathe Microsoft's methods as much as
anyone, there is no way we can drop IE. We get stacks of
calls to our help desk from users at home (students mostly)
and they all seem to have IE installed by default and only
know how to use that. Plus there's so many sites out there
now that won't work with anything except IE. We had to use
one recently that wouldn't work with IE 5.00 and had to be
IE 5.01 or above.
- And again, this time from a colleague who is a Word devotee:
( I couldn't open the .docx file you sent
<other colleague> ).
(added 20090512:172344)
-
Word documents are bloatware. The size of word
documents is out of proportion to their contents. A good
(bad?) example I had was of a document sent to me which had
just 4 lines of text, but consumed 22KB of disk space as a
Word file!!
-
Word does a shonky job of converting to other formats.
For example, I frequently find myself dealing with Word documents
that other people have sent to me as HTML (because they know of
my feelings on this matter
), and if I want to publish
them on the Web, HTMLTidy has a fit! Mismatched closing tags,
inappropriate use of embedded style tags, all the things that
are
deprecated in W3C HTML specifications are there!
-
Word is unreliable. I now use Microsoft Office
under MacOS/X. It works, but guess what? It is the
one program under Mac OS that crashes, and it does that
regularly, particularly when trying to read files sent to me
from other systems. Under Mac OS9, it would take down the
entire system, but now, thankfully, under Mac OS/X, it only
kills itself. How come other people can write software that
works reliably, but Microsoft cannot??
-
What You See Is Not What You Get.
Here's a classical example! (From a student assignment)
(added 20090512:155627)
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Word (well, MS software in general) encourages
inappropriate use of the internet. Here's an example from
my own institution:
I have just received an message requesting me to forward
on to "interested members of my department" an email which
had attached some 41 pages of documentation. As I have not
yet install MS-Clairvoyance I was unable to determine who
the "interested members" were, hence, the message (but NOT
the attachments, which were place on a file server) was
forwarded to all members of the department. The message
was originally sent to another member of the department
who would have forwarded it on to ALL members of this
department but for the fact that a combination of them
still insisting on using POP mail and a Mac combined to
prevent them from forwarding the message.
The problem I had with this was that the original message
came from the [University Group] and was sent to a number
of recipients for forwarding to "interested members" ,
and, as one could imagine, this has the potential for
creating a huge volume of mail traffic. Surely a link to a
web page would be a much more efficient way of
distributing large amounts of documentation around this
organization.
Is there a policy covering this situation ? and if not
why not ? If there is a policy covering this perhaps it is
time for an All-Monash message pointing this out. Let's
face it even the most robust of mail systems could be
brought to its knees with distributions of information as
mentioned above.
- Microsoft has what I regard as an unethical approach to
selling its software.
This link explains it better than I can. A more
recent posting identifying a similar position can be found
on this
ZDNet blog page.
What to Do about Microsoft
I've written a procmail script that filters out Word documents
arriving in my mailbox, and sends a politely worded response to
the originator. If people wish to waste my time by using
non-standard, non-portable document formats, I'm not averse to
reflecting the inconvenience upon them!
Yes, well that was before. Pressure was placed upon me to remove
that device ... it was "unprofessional". Rather ironic, given
that my stance was in response to behaviour that I considered to
be far more "unprofessional", don't you think?
I think people (particularly professional computing people)
should take more of a stand against Microsoft, and tell them
that they just don't cut the mustard. Visit the link above, and
better still, add it to your pages, so that as many people as
possible can understand the issues.
Use
Open Office (added 20070228:101458)
