As for my mind, it way past the boggled stage. I honestly do not see any signs that things will ever be any different. I am willing to bet that, in 10 years time, Word will still have the same bugs and the same flaws, and will still be just as slow on tomorrow’s hardware as it is on today’s hardware. I simply do not think that the MacBU developers have the expertise and motivation to do anything about it. And I seriously doubt that this will ever change. I also cannot help but notice that this allegedly top team of Mac developers is not really known for anything but their work for MS. If MS is indeed able to attract top Mac developers, how come we never heard of them on the Mac web before they joined MS? Where are the outstanding shareware or freeware products that they developed for the Mac platform before they joined MS?

Doesn’t it just boggle your mind how the largest Mac developer team outside of Apple also makes some of the worst Mac software? Even with everything Rick Schaut told me about their process and what they were planning for the future at Macworld, it still doesn’t excuse them from all the inequities you find between Office and the rest of the system. There are times when it’s a good thing to roll your own technique, and times when it’s a bad one… MacBU doesn’t seem to care which is which.

Add to this the fact that Microsoft Word is one of the few Mac OS X applications that crashes on a regular basis (in my experience) and you have, well, a very frustrating work experience on most days.

There are problems that remain after cleaning a document as I described, but usually I can fix them by quickly glancing over the document and then doing global searches and replaces to fix them after I’ve cleaned the document.

The problem is that the “writer” doesn’t know how to write his own language and is not trained in the word processor, Microsoft Word compounds the problem by encouraging stupid-user tricks and accommodating linguistic abominations, and we’re left to clean up the mess.

In truth, whenever I do not have to blindly follow the formatting of the original Word document I have to work on, I simply start a new blank document with my own style sheet, either in Word or in Pages, and rebuild everything from scratch. I find that, even after “cleaning up” existing Word documents using procedures such as the ones you describe, often times there are still problems.

It’s just so sad that it has come to this. And it really is sickening to hear Microsoft executives blab about how great their products are and how they have a fantastic team of Mac developers, etc.

Even the web arose out of a fallacy. The original idea for hyperlinks was that a person could follow the links about a topic and effectively create and read a virtual document about a topic that was not the main topic of any of the documents they jumped through. The idea behind collaborative writing tools is that writers are interchangeable. In my case, the result bounces back from the client and they give it to me to rewrite.

Microsoft is dumming down Word, as you’ve noticed; each version accommodates more stupid-user tricks than the one befor. It won’t be long before it ceases to be a professional writing tool. A long-standing example is the bullet button on the tool bar, which applies a bullet to the paragraph instead of applying the List Bullet style, making it impossible to enforce consistency on the formatting of bulleted paragraphs, which can be a serious headache in a large document with several contributors. Word has tons of bugs and stupid inconsistencies, but this time it is the untrained user’s fault.

The way I remedy this is to fix the document before editing it or cutting and pasting from it. I merge in my Normal style sheet, do global searches and replaces to remove manual page breaks and white space before line breaks, paragraph marks, and tabs, remove all empty paragraphs, and reduce double spaces to single spaces. Then I do CMD-OPT-Q and CTRL-SPACE to remove all idiosyncratic formatting. This takes less time to do than to describe, and it removes the “writer’s” inconsistencies from the formatting. Then I begin rewriting the document.

Then the cut and paste works fine.

Its simple interface remind me the old time ClarisWorks.
And it works surprizingly well.