The Last Word on Word

Stooge or Scourge?

You know, if Bill Gates had used an Apple II billions and billions of mental meltdown moments could have been saved, and the United States' current return to full productivity and employment advanced by at least 18 months. Several months ago a friend, ancient and wise in the ways of the computer (My "go-to guy" when I just can't take one more crash.), advised me to switch from Mac Classic to OS X. Being a fan of the eternal computing adage, "That which does not actually reformat my hard drive unbidden makes me stronger." I delayed and equivocated. I was used to the pain of Mac Classic and Microsoft Office and, besides, I was too cheap to buy Office all over again.

In the end, however, I divorced Mac Classic and married OS X. After a small period of adjustment, I find I am happier than I ever thought I could be. The new system can be left up for days on end and, best of all, when a program does auger into the ground from a high altitude, the rest of the system just chuggles along merrily down the bit stream.

There was only one leetle drawback -- Microsoft Office. Now Office is always a drawback even if you only use Microsoft Word since, over time, all your files tend to be in Word format and Word is the Doggie Diner of formats. It isn't the snappy interface that hooks you into Word ( The interface seems, upon close examination to be akin to something seen in passing in a bank of instruments in some Intensive Care Unit), no, it is the format of the documents themselves. Once you've piled up a couple of hundred or several thousand, you are cooked since the idea of converting all of them fills the user with inertia.

Indeed, no writer has yet summed up the nature of Word better than Louis Menand in this week's New Yorker: The End Matter -- The Nightmare of Citation

First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you're not ready to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool by a chip.

When, in the old days, you hit the wrong key on your typewriter, you got one wrong character. Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?). And you have no idea how you got there; you can spend the rest of the night trying to get out. In the end, you stop the random clicking and dragging and pulling-down and have recourse to the solution of every computer moron: with a sob of relief, you press Ctrl/Alt/Del. (What do Control and Alt mean, by the way? Does anyone still know?) A message appears: "You will lose any unsaved information in all programs that are running" O.K.? Cancel? End task? End life? The whole reason for rebooting was that you didn't have access to your information, so how can you save it? You can always pull the plug out of the wall. That usually ends your "session" (a term borrowed -- no accident -- from psychoanalysis)....

Never, btw (which, unlike "poststructuralism" is a word in Word spellcheck), ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

"A stooge for management..." Well, when it comes to Microsoft Word, aren't we all?

I despaired over Microsoft Office. I wanted to end my years of servitude to Microsoft. When I married OS X I thought I had at last made a clean break with the past, but "Just when you think you're OUT, they pull you back in." Using Word from Classic required me to boot Classic on a daily basis and, just as it had in the past, Word would crash in Classic at least once a day for no reason at all other than Word's deep inner perversity. It was like getting a daily harassing phone call and hang up from an old girl friend in the midst of a happy second marriage -- you're not happy, your new OS is not happy, the only happy thing is some deeply antisocial nerd in the Microsoft basement who wrote the deepest code inside of Word that instructed it to leave you high and dry with no warning if you hadn't purchased any Microsoft products within the last 14 days.

Yes, it began to look as if the only recourse was to drop a whopping $399 (Hey, at least it's not $400! ) for a version of Microsoft Office for OS X. But that would be like importing an old issue into my new marriage. No good could come of it. Besides it would make me a stooge for Microsoft management for the rest of my days. (Just when did we accept the idea that the entire world has to pay to be beta-testers for Microsoft?) No, I decided to just tough it out.

But then I was saved.

Saved by my go-to guy for advanced computing fret and foo. A telephone call to him saved me forever.

"Did you switch to OS X?"

"Yes, and my joy knows no bounds ... except.... except...."

"Except for what?"

"I'm so... so... so ashamed."

"You can tell me. What happens here stays here."

"I've been unfaithful to OS X when it comes to Microsoft Office. I.... I ... boot Classic in order to run Word ... I'm too cheap.... I'm too weak... I just don't know what to do and I'm sure OS X knows."

"There ... there .... no shame.... Millions of Office users are suffering the same regret, the same shame ... when there's no need ."

"No need? But I hate Word. I hate it. There's no escape. It wants a payoff and I'm going to have to fork it over."

"Not if you know the not-so-secret, dare I say it?, "word."

"And that is?"

" Open Office. Open Office is the answer to your suffering. Go there. Go there my son, and sin no more."

"But will it read Word documents? And what does it cost? And will it automate the typing of hyperlinks on my blog?'

"Yes. Free. Who cares. Now, I've really got to go. I've got a problem with my web project promising a new reality to millions who can't stand this one."

And I went to Open Office. With any luck at all, this will be my last word dot doc.

I'll keep you .... posted.

Posted by Van der Leun at September 30, 2003 9:14 AM