Au contraire. We had word back when your screen looked like this:
A:\
… you folks were very fond of your WordPerfect 4.0 (and later, 5.1) and only when you switched to Windows in large masses did you switch to Word. Mac users (god help me) were in love with the stupid thing from the start. It was popular in 1985 when I first sat down to a 512Ke (“fat Mac”) and stuck in System 3 on a floppy disk. I preferred WriteNow and MacWrite (even the primitive one that only let you have one document open at a time) and later FullWrite and MacWrite Pro and the early version of Nisus. Oh, and WordPerfect on the Mac wasn’t half bad once they finally gave us a version.
Umm, I don’t hate it for no good reason. I hate it because…
• Although it can do everything — it was the poster child for bloatware for a long time, I would not have been surprised if there had been a command for “make a cup of coffee” buried in there somewhere —it wasn’t laid out well and logically and you could spend an afternoon trying to do the simplest damn thing like make the bloody paragraphs indent or turn off kerning;
• It’s the epitome of programs that think they know better than you do how you want your document to behave. Hit a couple of returns, a tab, and start typing and damned if it doesn’t decide “Oh, you obviously want a bulleted list, here I’ll do that for you”. Then you spend the next 15 minutes wrestling with the damn thing trying to get what YOU wanted on the screen instead of what WORD wants on the screen;
• When you open a document of moderate size (say, a 300 page novel, i.e., 95,000 words) it takes forever. Sometimes it crashes. It’s more likely to crash if you do something like open each of the chunks of a novel, copy each in turn, and paste into the single Word document that some asshole literary agent wants to receive it in. Spinning beachball- lozenge thing goes spin spin spin spin and maybe 15% of the time it crashes and you have to start over.
• You paste 11 lines of text and then scroll down and you see that you accidentally copied the line you already had as well, so now it’s in there twice. So you delete the redundant copy and now you’ve got neither copy of that line because no, it actually wasn’t in there twice, the line was just displaying twice.
• You click to insert your cursor and nothing happens. Click. Click. Click! OK freaking finally. Agh, no, don’t select the adjacent text!
•You copy raw text out of a raw text editor and paste and the pasted version in Word is neither inheriting the formatting of the previous paragraph nor resembles the default font used by the raw text editor. Then you open a Word document and select and copy a paragraph that already has the formatting you want and paste it into the other Word document and some of the formatting doesn’t carry over. WTF, we’re single spaced over here? And once again, no paragraph indents?
• OK, you’ve finally got your cursor inserted and you start typing. You’re quickly eight characters ahead of what’s showing on screen. The text below where you’re typing is word-wrapping as you insert and as each word rolls over to the next line, MS Word is apparently contemplating the effects that might have on every subsequent character in the whole damn document, or trying to compute pi to the final digit or something. Yeesh. My text editor is so much more nimble on a million-word document. Yes, I really do prefer to compose in a text editor. Word is so awful with… well, words. It can’t handle very many of them without barfing all over itself.
• I realize I need to select the entire stretch from page 109 to page 217 and do something to it. (Most often, reapply the freaking paragraph indent). Click before the beginning of the first sentence on 109. Drag the scrollbar. Somehow it hasn’t paid attention to any pages beyond 134 or so, as dragging way down causes page 120 to appear, a beachball lozenge appears, and the vertical slider thing representing where I am in the document, which I just dragged down midway between kneecap and ankle level in the document, suddenly pops UP to the midway point. I grab and redrag. Repeat. Aha, there’s page 217. Click to insert cursor, with shift key down to cause it to select all in between. Nope, of course not. I have to click and insert the cursor down here and then drag back up and retry planting the damn cursor at the beginning of the desired selection.
• I want a section break, I want the page numbers to continue from the previous section, but the header to start with something different. I have a text document and some screen shots saved to remind me of the incredibly arcane set of procedures necessary to do this, because, well… seriously, does this impress you as a well-designed process for doing something that anyone doing anything with chapters would want to do?
Insert menu –> Break –> Section Break (Next Page)
View menu –> Header and Footer
Insert menu again –> Page Numbers (even though you’ve already got page numbers inserted, mind you) –> Format… button —> click “continue from previous section”
Click “Header and Footer” button bar thingie in the button-widget area of the top portion of the document –> unclick “Link to Previous”
They don’t all use it without issues. A great many of them use it despite issues.
What the hell does its successful invasion of yet more platforms have to do with anything? Kudzu and fire ants are immensely successful at spreading themselves around and thriving but it doesn’t make them good things to have in your own yard.
