March 27, 2009

Word Has Its Limits

Filed under: Main — Tags: — admin @ 12:01 am

Microsoft Word is a heck of a word processor. It does a lot: text, graphics, images, table of contents, references — all the features they could cram into the thing. Most people never use that stuff. And the people who do use it, shouldn’t.

Word is a victim of the word processor wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before then, word processors pretty much resembled the text editors of today, with a modicum of paragraph formatting thrown in. Heck, I used word processors for years before they came with an integrated spell-checker.

In the early 1990s, WordPerfect was the dominant PC word processor. It was fast and powerful, but limited in its formatting abilities; you could format paragraphs and pages, but only apply bold, underline, or italics to the text. The font was dependent on the printer, not the computer.

Microsoft wanted people to use Word instead of WordPerfect, but Word ran best under Windows and in the early 1990s Windows was a DOS shell, not its own operating system. Despite that, Word had more formatting power than WordPerfect, plus the ability to do graphics.

Then, suddenly, a new release of WordPerfect offered graphics, even in its text-only interface. The battle was on!

Feature after feature, both word processors tried to outdo each other. Eventually Word won, not because of its boatload of features, but because the WordPerfect people got lazy and came out with the Windows version of WordPerfect far too late.

The feature wars increased Word’s abilities well beyond the needs of the typical user. I often write in my Word For Dummies books that you pay for 90 percent of the program you don’t use.

While it’s nice to have features like a table of contents, and graphics blocks, and pictures, and lists, and on and on, the truth is Word just can’t handle them. A word processor should only do so much. Beyond that, what you really need is a desktop publishing (DTP) program.

I get a lot of e-mail from frustrated Word users who would really like to use Word to create a little booklet or brochure, but can’t. That’s because too much of that fluffy stuff causes Word to sputter and stall, making editing a frustrating experience.

The solution is to use a second program for desktop publishing, something like Microsoft Publisher (which I don’t use) or Adobe InDesign (which I do use). It works like this:

  1. You write your text. Format it. Make it look pretty. Use Styles and so on.
  2. Create your graphics and other artwork.
  3. Use the DTP program to pour in the text, then place the artwork.
  4. Mess with the DTP program to format the pages, create the Table of Contents, Index, and other final document features.
  5. Publish your work.

Those people who heed my advice find my DTP solution works very, very well. It’s what I do. That’s because I recognize the limitations on Word: Despite all those features and fancy doodah they put into the program, Word is just not a desktop publishing application. It never should have been.

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