[LINK] ArsT: 'Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009'

[Jan Whitaker]

At 07:33 AM 4/08/2009, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>How else would a novelist write anything? (Declaration 1: as much as I
>loathe Word, I have in the past written a 65,000-word book with the
>infernal software. Declaration 2: you'd have to drag me screaming and
>kicking to use it for most purposes, but I am yet to find an
>alternative that would work as well for the same number of words - as
>much as I have tried).

I'll expose that I've written four novels using Word, and two of them 
were collaborative projects. The first one, which was 135,000 words 
in its final first draft, involved four people at one point, each 
writing our own chapters which were then compiled by a single person 
into a master document. That person would be master for a while, then 
pass it along to one of the others to do. One of the extremely 
important features we used was track changes. It enabled use to keep 
track of what had gone before, to critique each others' chapters, and 
see the changes or hide them by the click of a button. I'm not aware 
that this feature is available in a wiki. Yes, you can see the 
history of changes, but not as I've seen displayed in the same document.

The other advantage was the embedded knowledge of our group. We 
didn't need to learn an online tool that was unfamiliar to us. That 
26 years of embedded knowledge in word processing made Word a natural 
choice. In another group that does collaborative papers, we tried a 
wiki and gave up. We didn't gravitate to spending time on a new tool 
and rather spent time on the research and writing in the time we had 
available, which wasn't much.

I have shifted to Open Office for some things, but I'm finding that 
it doesn't play well with Word if formatting is involved. It's fine 
for slabs of text, but flyers and brochures seem to get muddled 
between the two formats. So when I send to others who only use Word 
and I've created in OO, the receiver is confused by what they get.

As for wiki as a suite of information presentation functions, if 
those are part of say wikipedia and the other services using that 
version of the program, it is a good online tool for those extra 
features. But there's nothing to say that wiki must be the place 
where the text is originally created. In fact, I would more likely 
create on my computer offline and then put into an online community. 
We advise students to do that, too, because there is no control over 
dropped connections of the remote site. It happens all too frequently 
where one is in the middle of creating a piece online and the system 
'breaks' in some way, losing all that work.

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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