Microsoft Word is too Wordy
Written: Feb 15 '01 (Updated Feb 16 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: feature rich, easy to use basic features
Cons: too many features, bloated, and advanced features can be complicated
The Bottom Line: If you are going to do business in the US, you almost have to have it. It does some things quite well, but has gotten too big for its britches.
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| amykhar's Full Review: Microsoft Word |
I was raised an Air Force brat. Thus, from an early age, I was quite familiar with one of my father’s favorite philosophies – KISS. KISS, for the unenlightened is an acronym for the phrase “Keep it simple, stupid.”
I wish Bill Gates had been a military brat too.
Microsoft Word really needs a good healthy overhaul by a software designer who understands KISS. Either that, or Microsoft needs to come out with Word Lite, because there is a gap between the capabilities of Microsoft Works and Microsoft Word that sorely needs to be filled.
Most people never need the full feature set that Word provides. People like myself who struggled with Word in college, and still struggle with Word when we are writing software design documents simply do not need the complexity and overhead of this software.
I honestly believe that the word processor reached the pinnacle of perfection with WordPerfect 5.1 for Dos. WordPerfect was powerful, fast, and easy to use. After that, it was all downhill.
Why, you may ask, do I continue to struggle with Word if I dislike it so much? Only because having Word installed is almost a requirement to do business with the outside world anymore. Businesses share documents, and those documents are usually written in Word. Thus, it seems to be an endless cycle. Everyone has Word; so everyone else is forced to buy Word too.
I would have no complaints about Word if it didn’t try to do everything for me. The automatic formatting and correcting can be a wonderful help – or the bane of my existence.
Word has the ability to automatically handle things like ensuring that the first letter of each sentence is capitalized, correcting commonly misspelled words on the fly, and even inserting bullets and numbering as needed.
The problem is, sometimes Word does those things slightly differently than I want them done, or it does them when I don’t want it done at all. Undoing what Word has done and making it do what I want can be tricky.
Auto formatting can be turned off, but sometimes figuring out exactly which type of auto formatting to turn off can be a challenge.
I really should not complain. Word is a feature rich application that is honestly pretty easy to use for most documents. The problems arise when more advanced features are needed.
Things like tables of contents, page numbering, headers and footers work fine one day, and then fail to work properly the next. Word is, by nature, a temperamental beast.
The temperamental nature of the software, I believe, is a direct result of Word trying to do too much. Microsoft has attempted to make Word the Swiss army knife of word processors. Consequently, Word is a goliath of a software application.
WordPerfect 5.1 could do anything that most users could ever want. Yet it was a lean and mean piece of software that I do not remember ever crashing.
Word, by contrast, is a memory hog that can crash if you look at it cross-eyed on a windy day.
Word is now designed to be an email editor, a web browser, an HTML editor, a word processor, and a drawing tool all in one. It has built in interfaces to other software tools, and basically does everything but wash my dishes for me. The problem is, I don’t need all those features.
Quite frankly, I don’t think most people do. This is why I yearn for a Word Lite. Word Lite would be able to read documents produced by its bigger brother, but would have a reduced feature set, and a smaller footprint.
Oh, well. I can dream can’t I?
The next version of Word will probably be bigger, have more features, and a new format that the older versions can’t read. Some silly business will start the upgrade cycle, and then we will all be forced to get on the bandwagon and buy the latest greatest of Word.
Yes, it’s nice that businesses can swap attractive documents, but I wish that some company with enough courage and clout would dump Word and find a format, such as XML, that won’t require us all to tag along.
Of course, when that day happens, Microsoft will simply add that feature to Word, and then modify it slightly so that Word’s version of it won’t work with anybody else’s.
I have Word on every computer I own. I use it almost every day. But, I will dump it in a heartbeat if you all will. Does anyone still have their WordPerfect 5.1 disks?
Recommended:
No
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amykhar
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Member: Amy
Location: USA
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