Microsoft Word Rant

I began academic life as an MS Word snob. Word was the devil’s program, used by eejits who didn’t know better and by lazy hacks. Word produced ugly looking copy, and, worst of all, Word forced you to upgrade with it, rendering your older documents unreadable.

Word didn’t help you back up or save, its formatting of tables and graphs was utterly shit, and it couldn’t handle references, equations, or wab-based content. Section and equation numbering was a joke. Working with large documents would take you a year closer to your first stroke. Word crashed 10 minutes before the deadline without fail. Word was almost guaranteed to let you down.

So, I switched to LaTeX and BibDesk. I wrote a fair few papers, 2 PhDs, and 1 book using it.

These days however I spend most of my time writing in Word. It’s just struck me today that I do this, because I went looking through one of my files for an old version of a paper, only to find everything pre-2009 was in LaTeX, and everything afterwards was either in Apple Pages, or Word. Since 2009 I’ve written hundreds of blog posts in Word, loads of lecture notes, 20+ papers, 2 books, and presentations, handouts, etc., etc.

What changed from 2009 to 2010? Why the shift?

I definitely didn’t consciously shift out of writing with LaTeX. But I started working with co-authors more and more. Prior to that, I mostly wrote on my own. PhDs don’t really call for that much collaboration. Once it had to be the case that someone else needed to read my stuff other than a journal editor, I more or less unconsciously shifted to Word. The new 2011 version for Mac is really quite good, though still shit with table formatting. Formatting is also someone else’s job now, most of the time. WordPress does it on this site, Book and Journal typesetters look after it when you get something published. They don’t really care what format it’s in. It’s very likely the reader will never see the formatted text you, the author, hand in to the publisher.

Apple’s Pages is great, and I use that for some handouts. Text files are great, but everyone wants Word files. UL transacts its business in Word files. Book and Journal editors are happy with Word files, and newspaper people, this blog, and most of my co-authors use it. I’ve never sent a LaTeX file to a newspaper editor, though I might for the laugh).

I think what happened was that in 2009 I was very, very busy with work and small children. So LaTeX imposed too much of a cost to me in terms of time and effort communicating. Once it became tiresome to switch back and forth between versions, Word became the default.

I’m not saying Word is perfect. It isn’t. At all. But it’s good enough for the thing I do all day, which is put words on a screen. So I’ll keep with Word, unless we all shift back to text files or another open standard. Life’s too short to arse around with formatting and formats.

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