I guess I’m the only person in America who still routinely uses WordPerfect, though I still have to suck it up and conform with the robots at work and use Word.
I loooove WordPerfect for its paired coding. And it is wonderfully obedient. My font stays the same until I tell it to change. When I type in the number 1 and press enter, it never, ever decides to start a list for me. I can type “O3/04 Marketing Plan” and WP doesn’t try to be helpful by converting it to the “.75 Marketing Plan.”
I’d never ship anything as a .doc. That would leave it open for the person receiving it to fiddle around with the layout.
I realize that many people think that the layout options in Word are good enough, if you just want to do a flyer, or post something on the message board in the cafeteria. OTOH, most of that kinda work sucks big time, anyway. It wouldn’t help to give these people some proper software, which just supports my theory that we’re heading down a layout abyss, with all the amateur fumbling around, trying to do DTP without having any clues. Check out you local convenience store next time you’re there to see all the awful signs that are up there.
Me, I want to use Photoshop, Pagemaker, Illustrator or Acrobat, depending on what work I want to do. Obviously YMMV.
So Microsoft comes out with Word and its heinous helpful tips, along with horrid selection functions, making it undeniable King of Iafnab*, yet people don’t want to use Macs because “they’re made for people who don’t know how to use computers.”
I should mention that many of the same problems appear throughout Microsoft’s software, not just in Word. Like the completely unneccessary extra keystokes and clicks I had to do before I could properly edit the quote in this post.