Re Word/Weird

[HALL Bill <bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com>]

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 -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com