A recent article on Ars Technica gave me some food for thought. Writer Jeremy Reimer discusses how he really doesn’t need to use Microsoft Word any more, and how very few people actually need to use it.
I’ve been pretty good about keeping up with the latest versions of MS Office, but truth be told I make modest use only of Word, and never touch Excel, Outlook, or PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is a good idea but in an absolutely horrid implementation; I moved over to Keynote—also part of iWork—and I have never looked back. The problem with PowerPoint: it’s unreliable. That, to my mind, is death on wheels in presentation software. If I am onstage at Davies Symphony Hall, using presentation software to control the order of the audio samples I play (as well as displaying my lecture notes onscreen), I require software that will not blow up during the lecture. PowerPoint has proven far too many times in the past that it cannot be trusted. Keynote, on the other hand, has been the Rock of Gibraltar.
I’m a Mac guy and thus Outlook isn’t part of my outlook, shall we say. Entourage, the program included with MS Office for Mac, reduplicates the excellent integrated Address Book, Calendar, and Mail programs provided gratis with OS X. And the Mac programs are linked in with MobileMe so everything gets updated—my laptop, my online MobileMe calendars, my iPhone.
I don’t do desktop publishing, and I use Dreamweaver for my web development, so I don’t need any of the other flotsam and jetsam of the Office package.
That leaves Word. I have some minor need for it given that I work with editors; the Markup features are handy. I don’t absolutely have to use Word for that—Pages (in iWork) at least shows me editorial comments and the like. But, when it comes to working collaboratively with an editor, Word remains the program of choice.
I’m a bit shocked to discover that Word for Mac 2008 actually runs a bit sluggishly on my home computer—an eight-core Mac Pro with 10 GB of memory and a super-fast graphics card. But that’s Word for you—still the bloat champ, still monstrous and overwhelmed with features and weird old programming.
Tidbit: Word 2007 for Windows includes a feature that allows you to write and post your articles to your blog. Nice touch. But it doesn’t work with LiveJournal, and it isn’t available in the Mac version. Classic Microsoft.
I write my blog postings using MacJournal, an excellent program that runs solidly and quickly. No point in firing up Word and waiting for it to lurch into action for something like blogging.
I do most my everyday writing using Pages, which is overall much lighter on its feet than Word. If I need to send something in Word format, Pages can do that—and I don’t have to remind myself to use the .doc format instead of the newer .docx, which not everybody has.
Unlike Mr. Reimer, I still need Word. I guess. But I sure don’t need the rest of Office. What with online systems like Google Docs, I’m wondering how many people really do need it anymore for reasons other than corporate fiat.