How long have we been having this conversation? The years roll by, the complaints are unchanged, because the product is the same. MS adjusts the UI –which is quite separate from the rest of the program– and sells yet another “innovative” version of Word that’s fundamentally unchanged. We’re certainly talking years here. Are we starting to count decades that his has been going on? Bleah.

One thing is for sure: MS marketing is certainly brilliant, having made this program the absolute standard in so many environments. No practical alternative.

Internally, we’ve speculated, no one wants to touch a line of Word internals because it’s largely spaghetti code. We’ve also guessed that MS has an internal rule “do nothing unless absolutely necessary, then delay as long as possible.”

The only explanation that makes sense to me to explain the lack of clamor for real improvements from users is that vanishingly few people write more than about two pages using Word. People use zero or maybe one “special feature” in that span, and the problems we’ve been discussing don’t show up. Add a few pages, use some more features, try to do professional amounts of work… and you-know-what happens.

As an American, I am not proud of our overall low level of writing literacy, and maybe that explains some of why people don’t write more in Word: they wouldn’t write more in any environment. I wonder how many people are discouraged from writing because the tools they are forced to use are so rotten.

While I’m being cynical, I’ll speculate that most people, maybe the overwhelming majority, have never used a sophisticated application that IS reliable and consistent.

…OK, OK, I’ve said much the same before on this forum, nothing new, the same old riffs, sorry to say… This is as tedious to me as it is to you.

Henry

Alan: Yes, the situation with styles is simply pathetic. I too have a set of styles that hasn’t changed in years and works great for me, but I never, ever get a Word document authored by someone else that uses any kind of coherent style sheet. Most of them use manual formatting exclusively (i.e. no styles at all) and, in those documents that use styles, it’s usually a complete mess that seems to indicate that the person tried to use styles but got completely confused and simply gave up on it. (I am not even mentioning character styles here, only paragraph styles.)

Trying out LaTeX is one of my long-term projects, but I simply can’t seem to get around to it. Then again, my needs are obviously not as complex as yours, and Pages works fine for me in most situations. If you use paragraph and character styles in Pages, they get converted into Word styles when exporting the document as a Word document, so it works out quite well.

Ultimately, the ideal tool would be something that is both simple and feature-rich. Pages is surprisingly feature-rich, but I agree that it needs more “smart document” features. And it badly needs keyboard shortcuts for styles!

The bottom-line here, however, is that, whenever I have to work on an existing Word document like the one described above, I have no choice but to use Word. And that is always a profoundly discouraging experience.

I have been experimenting with LaTeX recently, trying to decide whether it’s worth using on a trial basis for a few projects, since really all I need in a word processing UI is a straightforward way to assign styles to text, and just have the software get out of my way beyond that. (Underneath the hood I need heavy features like cross-referencing and legal citations, but LaTeX does that well and seemingly more reliably than Word. Pages does not have a rich enough feature set here to meet my needs.) I still haven’t made any final decisions. It took me a weekend to convert my personal Word styles over to LaTeX equivalents. One interesting thing I noticed is that in Word, it’s the power features that are harder to figure out how to use (cross-referencing, etc.) while formatting is basically point and click easy, whereas with LaTeX it’s the actual formatting part that’s harder to learn. (Btw, if anyone cares, BibDesk, one of those OS X gems for working with LaTeX, is truly fantastic for keeping track of legal and academic citations.) I’ll admit though, I’d prefer a UI to edit LaTeX where the actual style tags were removed from the text. That bugs me. I’ve tried LyX, but it’s neither here nor there.