And to continue whining…
I’m an academic. I use MS Word every single day. A huge percentage of my life has been spent with this one program. And yet I loathe it in just about the deepest way possible. I find it completely untrustworthy and unnecessarily difficult, all under a smug veneer of being user-friendly.
It’s not just a case of using it a lot. I also use Photoshop, Inkscape, and InDesign a lot. I think they are all great. Occasionally I wish they’d do things a little better (come on, Inkscape, when are you going to have a Select by Fill and Stroke feature? get with it! don’t make me have to grok XML to do something simple and powerful like that!), but on the whole they allow me to do what I want to do with a minimum of struggle. They actually improve my overall productivity — their user paradigms and features are actually intuitive, useful, and accelerate my ability to put what is in my head into a digital form.
Word does not. I find myself fighting with the program more than even using it. In many ways it makes more difficult the simple transcription of ideas, much less more complicated things. (I use a lot of figures in documents. Word is so sub-par with in-line figures that I recommend my students to just not bother. They waste hours on it and it comes out looking lousy anyway.)
Why do I put up with it? Because I haven’t found an alternative yet that didn’t make me re-learn another whole system that didn’t seem to provide something identical (same cluttered interface, same mouse-driven GUI, same misguided ideas that they should try to make my document creator also serve as an HTML editor, same poor lack of figure support, etc.). Because compatibility of file formats matters. Because everything I have is written in MS Word. Because I keep hoping, against all evidence, that someday, SOMEDAY Microsoft will bother making Word robust and with useful features.
But then again, I haven’t spent much time looking around at others, either. Because that requires investment too. OO.org Writer seems bloated, slow, and just an attempt at an open-source equivalent of a broken product (Word). Abiword looks cartoonish and unprofessional, and had compatibility problems with my old files last time I tried to use it. I’m not against paying for a word processor but I can’t sink hundreds of dollars into something I don’t know is going to do the job. I know Word can do the job, only because I’ve learned how to suppress all of its bad habits. Do I want to relearn all of that? No.
I wish I could quit you, Word. You beat up on me all day long and I, like an abused spouse, keep telling myself that maybe you’ll get better, maybe you’ll change. Someday you’ll go too far! sigh.
