Escape from Microsoft Word

That's a lot of words just to say:

I know Wordperfect better, and have a hard time switching to Word.

I can't say I like either one, and find Word very nearly unusable since the switch to the "ribbon" interface, but his claims are ridiculous. You can change the tab-stops at any line of a document, and go right back as soon as you want to. Don't know how to set tab stops just how you'd like? You can middle-click anywhere in a document, and start typing. Don't like how some Word feature decides to auto-format your text? You certainly don't have to ever use it again. I am sadly well acquainted with just how deeply buried in obscurity commonly used features are in both of them (eg. header & footers, with first page different from the rest, and including page number, for MLA), but both are still infinitely better than a typewriter, word processor, or similar methods which don't allow you to quickly reformat your entire document from portrait to landscape, or letter to A4, without needing to go through it to manually fix layout and formatting.

....what's perfect for me is still LaTeX.

My first urge was to start ranting how Word is anything but genius, but I calmed myself down and read the article first (that's allowed here, right? ;). I think I understand what the author is saying, although I don't entirely agree with it.

WP had (I haven't used it in decades, so I don't know if it's still true) a much simpel model for storing the document than Word. It was just a bunch of "bold on", "bold off" etc codes, similar to HTML tags. There was a mode in which you could display and edit those markup codes directly. That made it relatively easy to visualize what WP was doing internally.

WP was also terrible in my opinion. It would often get the codes into such a mess that the high-level editing couldn't produce the right result anymore and you were forced to hand-correct the markup tags. Some people liked having that kind of low-level control, but to me it felt like being forced to clean up after the program made a mess.

When I first used Word (Word for Windows 2.0), I really liked it. No more messing around with markup codes. And wysiwyg was great for trying different layouts without having to make a dozen prints. But that changed as both Word and the documents I was editing became more complex. Instead of short letters and greeting cards, I started to write reports with embedded illustrations and formulas, tables of contents and often co-writing them with other students.

In particular having multiple people working on a document caused problems. Track Changes didn't play well with auto-numbering and ToC, marking text inserted automatically by Word as changes. Different authors had different ideas about layout: some used direct formatting and some used styles, but even the ones using styles picked them based on the way they looked and not for their semantic role in the document. And they would use various tricks to get the right visual effect, which would fail when other parts of the document changed, or even when switching to a different printer. (If you want a page break before a new chapter, configure that in the header numbering style instead of attempting to fake it by inserting empty lines until the page wraps, grrr...)

Coming back to the article, WP has a simpler model that the writer can directly see and manipulate. This allows the writer to bend WP to their will with some moderate effort: it is not WP being mediocre but right, it is WP being mediocre and the user making it right. Word has a more complex and less visible model, which is great when it works well, but very hard to diagnose when it fails. And it will fail, both because users are not using it properly and because Word itself has bugs and misfeatures that will mess up the document. Comparing Word to Plato suggests that it isn't possible to do real-world word processing based on an ideal model. It might be true that any tool has to compromise to real-world concerns at some point, but I'm convinced that it is possible to do so with far less kludges than Word.

Word tries to support two approaches at once: direct formatting where you change the properties of the text until it looks good and structured documents where the look of a text fragment is determined by its style. I think a lot of problems could be avoided if each document would use either direct formatting or styles exclusively.

I also think Word encourages bad habits by offering formatting features at every step of the way. It distracts from the writing of the text itself, it often leads to inconsistent layout decisions and it wastes time because effort is put into formatting text that will later be deleted or merged. So the last decade and a half I've been using DocBook, HTML and MarkDown, where I can write focusing on just the text itself and worry about the layout later.

The author is talking about escaping from Word to WP. However, the route most take will be to Libreoffice. This is giving me really mixed feelings:
1. Libreoffice is open source and free. It is good people notice there are alternatives to the highly priced commercial products.
2. However they might get a bad taste of how open source programs are. Libreoffice is extremely unstable. Openoffice had its unstabilities too, but not nearly as many as Libreoffice is having. This is the cost of a speeded up development.

If you copy a picture from the web, you actually copy both the HTML-tag and the picture. Libreoffice decides to use the HTML tag as default. This is causing more hangs and locks than should ever be allowed and it prevents the document from getting opened unless that picture is accessable online at the moment you open the document. Sure, you can go to Edit/Paste Special (Ctrl-Shift-V) and pick Bitmap, but despite how many times you tell a user to do this, they will just right click and paste as they would do with Word.

If you handle a lot of pictures in a document, you almost should expect a crash at some point and you need to remember to all the time press ctrl-s. This is about properly inserted pictures and not pasted HTML.

If you make a presentation with Impact you should save every time before adding an "animation" (even if it is just a simple "appear" because you want something hidden on the slide until later).

If you add a table but forgot to add an empty line under the table, you have big trouble to continue the text.

Sometimes documents get so messed up that there is no other way to correct them than pasting to a plain text editor and then again apply all the styles.

One minor update fixes often some problems but adds serveal other. For example 4.2.5 had problems with animations, 4.26 fixed some problems with animations but added instead some problems with pictures.

OpenOffice always had some problems but not nearly as many and as frequently as LibreOffice. While most people cheerish Libreoffice, I do not do it. I know a fork was necessary as Oracle almost stopped development of OpenOffice but the fork should have continued in a slow and stable pace adding the features and not rushing like now.

Libreoffice works well as a "Word Viewer" (for opening Word documents and printing them), but to actually work with Libreoffice might sometimes really annoy.