When Word’s web approach “works,” we can copy and paste a hyperlink into the document…a hyperlink that no one would ever open on paper. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing.
Slate’s Tom Scocca argues the point with cutting prose in his recent article, “ Death to Word,” lamenting everything we’ve all come to hate about the product–namely, a dichotomy between desktop publishing and web publishing–and all of the annoying workarounds it necessitates.ĭesktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. That also means the product has ignored the most important two decades in all of computing. That means its core functions are timelessly usable. You never bothered to update because Word hasn’t fundamentally changed in the last 20 years. Why doesn’t Word exist where most people are actually writing?
