RE: What Are the Main Problems You Have with MS Word?

["Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org>]

Hi Bill

> With unskilled authors working in a group environment lost
> productivity may
> amount to as much as 50%. Again, as described on the MVP site, the big
> problem is that all the formatting instructions are held in
> invisible tables
> in the section breaks and at the end of the file. Cutting and
> pasting across
> different documents or sharing them amongst people who have
> different things
> set up in their styles areas is a recipe for corrupting styles,
> if not total
> disaster.

This points to a curious disconnect within Microsoft's development
priorities. Within the programmability features, we have been advancing into
ever more powerful and complex system, from DOS keyboard macros, through
WordBasic to the current VBA and presumably in some future version of Office
an embedded version of VB.NET. Each change gives you ever more power, but at
the cost of a steeper learning curve as you have to master a more complex
language. The target market is clearly the group and even enterprise
application. Arguably the language complexity has already gone too far for
the purpose of throwing together a quick but of code based on the macro
recorder that will automate some simple repetitive task. WordBasic was
perfectly adequate for that and VBA is alrady overkill.

But in the non-programming features, over the last few versions Word has
been making it ever harder to produce structured documents without
significant input from somebody who knows the ins and outs of the program.
Word 2002 in particular automatically generates new styles almost at will,
and with the Task Pane it is really difficult to restrict users to a limited
style set. In other words, the user interface is aiming at exactly the
opposite market from the programmability features. And the poor corporate
user is left hanging in the middle. That's fine for me, I can make money out
of helping people set up robust templates, but it's not good for the
customers as a whole.

I'm coming to the view that Word needs two versions of the user interface,
the "Home" and "Corporate" interface, where Home is configured to have all
the pretty automatic features that let a computer novice produce a
decent-looking but unstructured letter, and where Corporate uses more in the
way of styles & structure, and the auto features such as Click-to-type are
disabled.

Regards
Jonathan West


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