In the Oct. 6 issue .
Italics theirs.
It’s in a review of the new Chicago Manual of Style. Quoted section is about halfway through.
Ah, the guy should stop whining and RTFM. A number of his complaints have nothing to do with Word, and most of the rest are simple options and preferences that he can change if he would just RTFM.
Agree with ** JohnT **–I happen to like Word, but it might be b/c I’ve taken some time to learn it. Regardless, after using non-Windows WordPerfect all throughout college, Word is comparably fantastic.
I think the article has a point. Why should a word processor be so complex that it requires you to read the manual to write a simple letter? What the article describes is a typical beginner’s experience of trying to use Word. At the very least, they should’t make the various automatied features to be opt-out (i.e. enabled by default) options.
I agree with scr4. Word topped out in 1994. Everything since has been bloat.
For example - tried using stylesheets and outlines recently? Holy shit, what on earth is going on there? If you copy and paste anything in from another doc, it imports the entire goddman stlyesheet. Put the content into outline view, and the styles and formatting jump around like a jumping bean on a hot tin roof in an earthquake. Sometimes page margins change with no way of changing them back, short of copying and pasting into notepad, deleting the original Word content, and pasting it back in and reformatting. Try closing off a table with a page-break, or inserting a row under the current content. Paste a picture in, and watch everything go pear-shaped depending on the “layout” option.
It didn’t used to be like this.
(Should this be in the Pit?)
I have discovered the in the world of software, “Powerful” is a synonym for “Tough to Learn.”
Word takes time, but when you master its dark powers rewards you greatly. Don’t be afraid; join us!
I generally feel that if you think Word is bloated then you shouldn’t be using it. A smaller, less complicated word processor would probably suit you better. MS Works, for example, seemed to be quite reasonable the few times I tried it.
I spent five years working in a law firm, which is basically a big high-pressure document factory at the IT level. Pretty much every capability of Word was being used by multiple hundreds of secretaries. We also had a development team of between two and five programmers working full time writing extensions for it because we needed even more out of it.
Word is supposed to be the ultimate, top-of-the-line, capable-of-anything document processor. It’s necessarily complex because there are people who want all these features (often all at once, at 3am, when I’m on call).
Louis Menand (the New Yorker journalist who wrote the article linked in the OP) is largely indulging in disingenuous hyperbole. He makes it sound as if Word is purposely lying in wait for him, poised to lose his work out of sheer spite. In the end his work went missing because Word did exactly what he told it to do. Software doesn’t read the user’s mind - mashing your palm on the keyboard while thinking happy, happy thoughts won’t make your document format properly. It might, however, reproduce that article.
The problem is that Word has become a standard. Microsoft tries to sell it to everyone. Computer manufacturers often bundle it with their systems. And in many (most?) professions you will be required to submit documents in Word format and expected to be able to read Word documents mailed to them. There are ways to use other software to do this, but it’s even harder than just using Word.
Perhaps, but he is describing a typical beginner’s experience. His work went missing because the software is difficult to use for a beginner. Maybe it’s just a marketing problem which led to the wrong people trying to use it, but in any case it’s unfair to blame it on the users.
Louis Menand is a fascinating writer with interesting takes on many subjects.
But he thinks he’s an expert on every single thing in the entire world.
He’s not. And he has an unfortunate tendency to blame the thing instead of himself when he doesn’t understand it.
See his book American Studies for examples of both.
At $250+ a copy, no less. And people wonder why Bill Gates is so rich… 
Amen to that. If this Menand guy thinks that MS Word is frustrating, he should try using WordPerfect. The frickin’ program had a seemingly infinite number of key combinations that you had to remember. Or rather, try to remember. When Word arrived at my college, it was like a gift from God.