<story><title>Office 2000 is good to go</title><url>https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/055-office-2000-is-good-to-go</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abraxas</author><text>&amp;gt; When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time&lt;p&gt;This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It&amp;#x27;s a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6&amp;#x2F;Word97).&lt;p&gt;The Office won out purely on the sheer marketing muscle of Microsoft and their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems. Without that I doubt they&amp;#x27;d be where they are now in terms of market penetration.</text></item><item><author>spaetzleesser</author><text>I believe some  around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done.&lt;p&gt;Since then it seems they crammed more and more &amp;quot;intelligent&amp;quot;  functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don&amp;#x27;t know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn&amp;#x27;t. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess. When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time. Saving things to our disk is also an ordeal because they are pushing OneDrive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phaedrus</author><text>I was explaining to one of my coworkers how back in the day with WordPerfect you could click &amp;quot;Show Codes&amp;quot; (or whatever the menu option was called) and view all the embedded formatting tags as text rather than WYSIWYG.  This made it incredibly easy to fix formatting issues and see what was wrong with an unintended interaction of styles.  As people who had only ever used (read: fought with) Microsoft Word, they were mind-blown that such a thing once existed.&lt;p&gt;We maintain technical documentation and have to manually track page changes, which ultimately results in physical pages being printed and replaced in physical binders in many facilities.  Use of Microsoft Word for this purpose is sketchy as f--- because when Word decides to &amp;quot;go nuts&amp;quot; and slightly reformat the next 100 pages (or worse, even previous pages) because of a minor edit, it turns a single page change into a hundreds-of-pages change apocalypse.&lt;p&gt;Of course we don&amp;#x27;t really let that outcome stand; what actually happens is an engineer (with occasional consultation of a documentation specialist) spends half a day tentatively prodding and undoing changes in an increasingly broken document trying to find a way through the maze that doesn&amp;#x27;t trigger either a formatting booby trap or Word&amp;#x27;s over-helpful malevolent AI.&lt;p&gt;The key point here is without the ability to &amp;quot;show codes&amp;quot; and edit the real underlying structure of the document not the WYSIWYG view, the entropy just increases over time.&lt;p&gt;We all agree that &lt;i&gt;Word is not the appropriate software for what we&amp;#x27;re doing&lt;/i&gt;.  Unfortunately the people with the power to fix this situation are the furthest removed from understanding our pain, and we have decades&amp;#x27; worth of Word docs.  And since Microsoft Office is the default, even when Word breaks compatibility we don&amp;#x27;t take advantage of that opportunity to move to a real document management system, they just keep buying the next version of Office.</text></comment>
<story><title>Office 2000 is good to go</title><url>https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/055-office-2000-is-good-to-go</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abraxas</author><text>&amp;gt; When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time&lt;p&gt;This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It&amp;#x27;s a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6&amp;#x2F;Word97).&lt;p&gt;The Office won out purely on the sheer marketing muscle of Microsoft and their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems. Without that I doubt they&amp;#x27;d be where they are now in terms of market penetration.</text></item><item><author>spaetzleesser</author><text>I believe some  around 2000 Office and Windows reached their peaks of usability. They seemed to designed to get stuff done.&lt;p&gt;Since then it seems they crammed more and more &amp;quot;intelligent&amp;quot;  functions into the software that made them less predictable. I still don&amp;#x27;t know under what circumstances Windows Search finds things sometimes and sometimes it doesn&amp;#x27;t. Lately Outlook search feels random. Teams search is a complete mess. When I write stuff in Word, Word seems very opinionated and messes up formatting all the time. Saving things to our disk is also an ordeal because they are pushing OneDrive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Someone1234</author><text>I agree with you, playing devil&amp;#x27;s advocate though I would argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual usages even if it meant hurting professional ones. Then give it away to schools for $0 (in the 1990s) so they&amp;#x27;d get a mass of beginner&amp;#x2F;casual users that brought it with them into professional settings.&lt;p&gt;Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really easy to use casually for making resumes&amp;#x2F;letters&amp;#x2F;etc. Excel is excellent for making lists of things and basic accounting&amp;#x2F;graphing.&lt;p&gt;Aside; the original Microsoft Office formats (e.g. doc) were formulated in C header files (i.e. a serialized array of C data types). They were garbage. Current Microsoft Office formats (ending in &amp;quot;x&amp;quot; e.g. docx) are night-and-day better (they&amp;#x27;re standard zip files with boring XML files within). People should go unzip a docx file and check it out, very not-intiminating.</text></comment>