Re: Re Word/Weird

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Hall wins the award for the most devastatingly dead-on description of
what havoc MS-Word can wreak on a tech pubs operation. His suggestion about
a class action lawsuit against Billygate has merit. The worst think of all
about Word is that, when an outfit like Tenix finally realizes the damage
that Word has wrought, and they consider other options, Microsoft delivers
them the ultimate Gotch: Word is devilishly and deliberately designed to
defeat any attempt to convert legacy documents to other formats with any
acceptable degree of success. The oxymoronish RTF "Standard" is a moving
target for those who try to build filters, and each new version of Word has
its own set of deliberately perverse traps for confounding attempts at
successful conversion to other formats. This has been, for many years,
Micrsoft's method of forcing its huge installed base to stay with this
unwieldy, progressively more buggy, worthless-feature bloated piece of crap.
That, combined with Microsoft's efforts to corrupt the HTML and XML
standards, are the most flagrant evidences of its monopolistic practices.
What other DTP product besides Word could possibly get away with
deliberately making it difficult for its users to convert to other DTP formats?
=============================================================================   
At 09:07 AM 5/3/00 +1000, HALL Bill wrote:
>Why do I hate Word?
>
>I am a skilled MS Word user, and have used it almost exclusively for 7 years
>(after WordPerfect up to 5.2, and after WordStar up to 3.3). Given that I am
>a fast touch typist, I still regard WordStar as the best authoring tool I
>have ever used.
>
>With the exception of our technical documentation group, who are
>FrameMaker+SGML experts, Tenix is an MS Word shop, with something like 500
>users. I have been through all of the FrameMaker training, but because
>essentially all the clients for the documents I produce personally only use
>MS Word, I am still forced to use Word (or eMail) exclusively and have been
>unable to develop my FM skills to any degree. Yes, the FM learning curve is
>steep, but at least things generally work.
>
>More importantly, critical company documents (e.g., tender responses,
>contracts, internal procedures etc.) are all still drafted in MS Word. The
>application is managed by our IS group who in general have no understanding
>of documentation processes or applications. Our Word users are intelligent
>and dedicated engineering and legal type staff, but receive little or no
>training in how to manage the monstrously huge and complex MS Word
>application we give them as a tool for producing documentation that is
>critical to our survival as a company.
>
>The result is catastrophic. Essentially all of our documentation uses legal
>(Harvard) paragraph numbering styles - which have not worked reliably since
>at least 1994. Except for myself and some of our tech doc people, no one in
>the company understands how to create and manage Word styles, and given that
>Word's paragraph numbering functions are quirky and bug ridden, they often
>create difficulties in my own documents. In the hands of intelligent users
>the style functions are lethal - particularly in our environment where
>single documents are often worked on by multiple authors over months or
>years - and each author is able to muck around with styles.
>
>The bottom line is that our critical knowledge authors are spending up to
>50% or more of their time trying to make their writing tool behave rather
>than focussing on the content they must create to make a profit and keep new
>business coming in through the door. And generally, the most critical MS
>Word problems usually arise in the final stages of tender preparation when
>we are trying to assemble everyone's work into a consistent set of response
>documents. When we should be devoting 150% of our effort on polishing
>content, we are probably spending 70-80% of the available resources sorting
>out MS Word formatting and style problems and crashes. 
>
>I have finally gotten a good content management application in through the
>door. This will eventually allow us to remove our critical documentation
>from the MS Word environment and use FM or simple browser-type editors that
>totally separate content authoring from the management of styles. In this
>environment, document structure is controlled by the relevant DTD. We can
>still give the authors WYSIWYG drafting environments, but formats are
>determined by the element structure of the document, not by individual
>authors. However, given the re-education processes required, it will
>probably be at least another two years before we can eliminate Word from all
>of our critical authoring processes.
>
>Even in my own writing - which is essentially a one-person shop, I find Word
>to be a hugely complex and fundamentally flawed tool. Either I live with the
>frequent need to fiddle with style functions and reformat documents when the
>formatting is corrupted by Word's bugs, or spend days at a time I don't have
>to build functions which allow me to avoid the non-functional default
>behaviour. Either way, even as a single user, I still conservatively waste
>10-20% of my time fighting Word problems rather than focussing on the
>content of my documents.
>
>Aside from the productivity issues, to have billygate's smirking doodads
>bouncing all over the place to distract and get in the way, and his auto
>(un)correct and (un)format functions arbitrarily and unhelpfully altering my
>work is the last bloody straw. (And with every new version, it takes weeks
>to find out where he has hidden the traps so they can be turned off.) I have
>to use MS Word as a broken tool virtually every day of my life - is it any
>wonder that I (and apparently many others fighting these application wars)
>hate the product more than anything else in their lives?
>
>Admittedly, Tenix has not managed its authoring environment very well.
>However, MS Word is advertised as a business 'productivity' tool anyone can
>use, yet it is catastrophic in the kind of situations where a company like
>Tenix uses it. I wonder if anyone has ever considered mounting a product
>liability class action to recover the billions of dollars of lost
>productivity the tool has cost business around the world?
>
>Bill Hall
>Documentation Systems Specialist
>Integrated Logistic Support
>Naval Projects and Support
>Tenix Defence Systems Pty Ltd
>Williamstown, Vic. 3016 AUSTRALIA
>Email: bill.hall@tenix.com
>
>
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Sponsored by Weisner Associates Inc., Online Information Services
>Training & consulting for RoboHELP, Dreamweaver, HTML, and HTML-Based Help.
>More info at http://www.weisner.com/train/ or mailto:training@weisner.com.
>
>Sponsored by Rose Hill, Your Business and Career Coach. 
>"Assume Success! Live Your Passion!" Get the gist at 
>www.coachrose.com then call 503.629.4804 for details!
>
>---
>You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: danemory@primenet.com
>To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-35220W@lists.raycomm.com
>Send administrative questions to ejray@raycomm.com. Visit 
>http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
>
>
     ====================
     | Nullius in Verba |
     ====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
---Subscribe to the "Free Framers" list by sending a message to
   majordomo@omsys.com with "subscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.


** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **