The Fall of Microsoft Office

The Motley Fool ^ | May 27, 2008 | Anders Bylund

[Golden Eagle]

Thanks, Apple’s resurgence really got rolling when they switched to Intel processors. Parallels and VMware software that allows virtualizing the Windows O/S on Macs are both in the top 20 selling apps for Macs as well.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software/ref=sv_sw_0/002-9669292-9433664

[jmc813]

Being that you’re the biggest MS shill on Earth, can you take a moment to explain to me why a retarded 5 year old could produce cleaner HTML than Word’s “Save as HTML”?

[Golden Eagle]

Not to someone with such a foul mouth and bad attitude. FYI your lot in life isn’t based on the rich man putting you down.

[jmc813]

Not to someone with such a foul mouth and bad attitude.

I apologize for calling you a "shill". Please understand that I've spent an extremely stressful morning thanks to Word, and this is my way of taking out my aggravation in a non-violent way. That said, I'd be genuinely interested in ANY sort of explanation for the utter horrendousness of the HTML I'm forced to scrub on a regular basis.

FYI your lot in life isn’t based on the rich man putting you down.

If you're implying that I'm jealous of Bill Gates, I ain't. My girlfriend is a lot hotter than Melinda, and I have a lot more free time than him. I wouldn't want to switch places.

[ModelBreaker]

Interesting article about the potential breaking of the MS Office lock-in.

Maybe as a long term trend. But the Open Office word processor has a LONG way to go before it comes close to matching Word for preparation of complex business documents. If I need more power than Word (and it tends to choke with long documents with lots of graphics), I use Framemaker.

My biggest beef with Open Office is that it has twice destroyed the very careful formatting of Word Documents that I tried to import into and edit in Open Office. I mean destroyed as in start the document over because it cannot be fixed.

So Open Office is still a toy I use on my portable for the bits of word processing I encounter on the road. I guess that is even a little victory of Open Office as that is one license MS did not sell.

[shorty_harris]

I was using WordPerfect in 1987 and WordStar before that. I never used Microsoft Word until I was 'gifted' a copy with my first home PC in 1981.

Heh...I remember using a Wang word processor before I started using WordStar. At some point I'm sure I used MS Word at work, but at home, I used a copy of Word 97 that I bought on Ebay for a couple of years, before tossing it in favor of OpenOffice a few years ago.

[stainlessbanner]

In the past I’ve used the “clean MS HTML” feature in Dreamweaver with fairly good results.

[boogerbear]

WordPerfect was king of the hill a long time ago, but that was a long time ago. These days WP is in the “is that still around” pile along with most of the surviving hair metal bands.

[ex-snook]

"Upstarts? WordPerfect? Is this guy just out of high school? "

LOL Microsoft did it's share of 'free loading' software to it's computer sale. Also a trailer on spreadsheets and browsers.

[Gaffer]

Apparently so. I was sorely disappointed when Word Perfect fell to the MS miasma of Word dominance. WP was/is so technically superior (especially for writing technical documents) that it isn’t funny. I get so pi$$ed when using different portions of the MS suite when coming to find that their cross compatibility sucks in more than I’d care to mention instances. Word is really an inferior product made for the average masses.......

[Jeff Chandler]

Word is not an HTML editor, and HTML is a constantly evolving markup language. “Save as HTML” is limited, at best.

Assuming that the HTML is intended for a web page, I would suggest embedding an editable area in the web page so that the employee can edit it directly online, bypassing Word altogether. There are many good “editable area” scripts around, for free or very little money, which have interfaces which mimic Word and are therefore familiar to the user (no training necessary).

Personally, I don’t have a problem with clients asking me to convert Word documents into HTML, because they pay me to do so.

[Jeff Chandler]

Oh, one more thing: if it is absolutely necessary to preserve the formatting of a word document with charts, graphs, etc., I recommend printing it out as a PDF file and linking to it.

[jmc813]

Word is not an HTML editor, and HTML is a constantly evolving markup language. “Save as HTML” is limited, at best.

Understandable point. I certainly don't expect perfection. However, it should be functional enough to realize that if I'd like an unformatted paragraph, it should output "<p>My Text</p>" rather than "<p class=MsoBodyText align=left style='text-align:left'><span style='mso-bookmark: _Toc137009781'>My Text</span></p>" for EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH!!!!

Assuming that the HTML is intended for a web page, I would suggest embedding an editable area in the web page so that the employee can edit it directly online, bypassing Word altogether.

That would be great, but unfortunately my client base is the corporate travel industry, which is highly comprised of below-average-intelligence, middle-aged women. There is no possibility they will abandon Word. I've been trying to talk them into Google docs for a while now, to no avail.

[jmc813]

In the past I’ve used the “clean MS HTML” feature in Dreamweaver with fairly good results.

That's a regular tool in my arsenal as well, but in my experience, it's like treating a gunshot wound with gauze.

[jmc813]

This wasn;t written by me, buut it could have been. This pretty much sums up the levels of intelligence I deal with.

[Ghengis]

I was using WordPerfect in 1987 and WordStar before that. I never used Microsoft Word until I was 'gifted' a copy with my first home PC in 1981.

Heh...I remember using a Wang word processor before I started using WordStar. At some point I'm sure I used MS Word at work, but at home, I used a copy of Word 97 that I bought on Ebay for a couple of years, before tossing it in favor of OpenOffice a few years ago.

We had one of those Wang word processors before WordStar (on a non-networked shared PC) as well. But it was only at the office secratary's desk. In the beginning, she'd type work for me. Then she turned nazi on all but the Director and made me type my own work on the Wang when she wasn't at her desk.

Then I got my Novell networked 8088 XT PC with a monochrome monitor! WordPerfect 4.something and Pegasus department email.

All was well with the world!! That is until I talked the boss into budgeting for PROFS emulator boards and we all got on the company email!!!!!!!!!

On the sly I talked the IT guy into dropping an extra data line in my office so I could log onto early 1990s vintage AOL with a 2400 baud modem.

Did I mention that cool Ricoh dot matrix printer that we had? ;-)

[Jeff Chandler]

When I convert Word documents to HTML, I “clean” them of their formatting by copying/pasting them into a plain text program (Notepad) first. Then I usually paste the cleaned text into Dreamweaver.

[Poser]

“a retarded 5 year old could produce cleaner HTML than Word’s “Save as HTML”?”

You’ve got that right. It has an advantage for me. I teach a beginning XHTML class. Students find it very hard to cheat. I can spot the Word code really easily.