Not Just Annoying

Warning: Extended Rant Follows

A story on BBC online this morning highlighted the security risks of using Microsoft Word. Especially in documents that are edited by more than one person, a perceptible trail of who did what is apparent to anyone with the knowledge to go in and look for it. This is the case with the plagiarized document which is embarrassing Tony Blair’s government—the document which supposedly “sexed up” the reasons to go to war with Iraq.

I don’t work in a field that’s very sensitive in this way, and I don’t share Word documents very often. They get sent to me as attachments all the time, so I have to have it on my computer at work. But I almost never write straight into Word any more: a text editor is fine for my needs, and if it needs to be designed, I use Adobe InDesign.

I am sure that hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted each year by hapless office workers trying (and failing) to disable the default automatic formatting features in Word. I share an office with someone who practically bursts into tears wrestling with this horrible software on a regular basis. I offer my copy of the O’Reilly Word 97 Annoyances (now apparently out of print).

Word used to be not too bad when it didn’t try to do everything for executives. (Word Perfect was better, back in the mid-80s, and I’m sure it still is.) It’s just that Word is now so powerful, so bloated, so full of features that most people never use, that it’s simply too cumbersome for ordinary office use, which is where it gets installed by systems administrators following orders from executives.

(You know, the people who love Power Point.)

Then there’s the infantile phallic paper clip helper who seems to be trying to establish a relationship with me. Yes. I know how to type a letter. I even know how to type a memo. There used to be a way of strangling Mr. Clippy by sticking him in a folder named “Dead Actors”; Microsoft has capitulated to demand and made it somewhat simple to turn the feature off.

But why should we have to? Why should we have to buy books to figure out a way simply to do our jobs without having the *?!* software get in our way? Why does Microsoft continue to churn out software that ignores the abilities and needs of most of its users?

And now, like the rest of its products, it turns out that Word is full of security loopholes too. I’m investigating Open Source alternatives to Office. My Mac runs Jaguar; it’s about time I became more familiar with Unix.