Another comment on Word
Keith Ray weighs in on the issues with Word that I mentioned yesterday. I particularly like this comment:
People aren't good at mind-reading (another term for mind-reading is "making stuff up" -- see any comedy of errors for examples). Software is even worse at mind-reading. The worst features in Microsoft Word are those that attempt to do mind-reading... auto-formatting, auto-capitalization, auto-correction, etc.
Can we get an editor that follows the simple minded do what I tell you to dictum, or is that just asking too much? Like Keith, I recall older versions of Word as useful - and newer versions as being truly, truly irritating
Comments
[isomer] January 13, 2005 12:27:39.176
LaTeX + emacs is a great combo, especially if you're a programmer.
Type of user?
[Thierry Thelliez] January 13, 2005 14:15:03.729
Most of the audience of this blog is probably fairly technical. We like full control and get irritated with auto-* features, even when typing regular text (as opposite to code). I wonder about the non-technical crowd. It does not seem to be such an issue to my wife (non-techie).
On a related issue, I never had the need for auto-formatting in Smalltalk coding, but I could not survive without the auto-formatting tools in the Java world. Probably because it is so much more verbose...
[Vincent Foley] January 14, 2005 10:00:20.800
Thierry: I'm a computer technician in a public school system in the province of Quebec in Canada. I look after 10 different schools, and I can tell you that from secretaries to teachers to directors to students, they all would be much better off with a system where the user just has to worry about the content of his/her work, not the layout.
The secretaries, the people who work the most with Microsoft Office, always complain about it. When Word auto indents for them, they don't understand why their cursor is not at the left margin and they almost never remember how to bring it back. Usually it ends up with them messing up their document pretty bad and depending on whether I'm around or not, they either scrap the document and start it over again with less layout stuff or they ask me how to fix their document, I show them and they forget.
Most also complain that they miss their old WordPerfect Suite 6.1 (or earlier even!) The reason they most often invoke is that "it worked like we expected it to." Now, this could be due to the fact that they recieved training in WordPerfect and that they wrapped their minds around it and that they can't make the mental switch to Microsoft Office. But I think the reason is simpler: old WordPerfect versions did not try to guess whether you are writing a letter, a resume, a form or whatever, it just let you write, didn't auto indent for you, didn't captialize (or uncapitalize) words for you. It just did what you asked of it and I think that's what most of them miss: a word processor that they did not need to fight to get their work done.
I believe there is potential for a tool like LyX (a graphical LaTeX editor) that's user friendly, with many templates. It's highly likely, in my opinion, that this would be a friendlier tool to secretaries and many people. You want to write a formal letter? Just select the appropriate template, fill in the blanks and there you go! No need to worry about why if you indented the first line of your paragraphs all other lines are indented too (or why they aren't), why when you tried to write UNIX it changed it to Unix or other Word annoyances.