End Word

[cos]

In Death to Word: It's time to give up on Microsoft's word processor [Slate magazine], the author writes,

"Like the fax machine, Word was designed to put things on paper. It was a tool of the desktop-publishing revolution [...] For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing."

In 2005, 2006, 2007, I used to make a little bit of money on the side by making web sites for political campaigns. Which meant they'd email me the text they wanted for some of the pages. Asking them not to send me Word had a low success rate.

Eventually, I raised my rates by about 10%, and offered a discount of the exact same amount I'd raised my rates by, if they agreed to never send me any Microsoft Word files. That worked, and made my work so much more pleasant!

If only I could've rid the net of Internet Explorer 6 back then, too.

Comments

[drwex]

You must've used this power for something other than good. So I can blame the ongoing malfeasance of IE 6 on you, can I?

[sykotropic.livejournal.com]

LOL. I just was ranting about Word. I really want a WordPerfect capability to see codes and strip crap out that doesn't need to be there, but I hate converting from WordPerfect to Word for the few people (read that as dissertation advisor) who can't mark up pdfs.

[tapuz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing the article, and nice tactic w/the campaigns!

(of course, the next issue becomes dependency on google apps, but that is a different type of concern...)

[goljerp]

I was going to say something tounge in cheek about Word's "Export to HTML" functionality, but the horror kept me from continuing. The only thing worse than word files is the excrement it produces from that functionality. (I haven't checked it recently, so it's possible it's now merely sub-optimal.)