We maintain technical documentation and have to manually track page changes, which ultimately results in physical pages being printed and replaced in physical binders in many facilities. Use of Microsoft Word for this purpose is sketchy as f--- because when Word decides to "go nuts" and slightly reformat the next 100 pages (or worse, even previous pages) because of a minor edit, it turns a single page change into a hundreds-of-pages change apocalypse.
Of course we don't really let that outcome stand; what actually happens is an engineer (with occasional consultation of a documentation specialist) spends half a day tentatively prodding and undoing changes in an increasingly broken document trying to find a way through the maze that doesn't trigger either a formatting booby trap or Word's over-helpful malevolent AI.
The key point here is without the ability to "show codes" and edit the real underlying structure of the document not the WYSIWYG view, the entropy just increases over time.
We all agree that Word is not the appropriate software for what we're doing. Unfortunately the people with the power to fix this situation are the furthest removed from understanding our pain, and we have decades' worth of Word docs. And since Microsoft Office is the default, even when Word breaks compatibility we don't take advantage of that opportunity to move to a real document management system, they just keep buying the next version of Office.
Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really easy to use casually for making resumes/letters/etc. Excel is excellent for making lists of things and basic accounting/graphing.
Aside; the original Microsoft Office formats (e.g. doc) were formulated in C header files (i.e. a serialized array of C data types). They were garbage. Current Microsoft Office formats (ending in "x" e.g. docx) are night-and-day better (they're standard zip files with boring XML files within). People should go unzip a docx file and check it out, very not-intiminating.
The point where Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect was when Microsoft released Windows 95, which somehow broke WordPerfect, and refused to give Corel any access to it in advance of the release. By the time Corel had figured out how to make WordPerfect run 6 months later, it was too late, Microsoft Word was more widely used.
Incidentally the original formats were literally a dump of in memory data structures. Which means that compatibility became a huge headache every time Microsoft tried to change its internal data structures. That's WHY they migrated to the docx format.
that's the container format. But the actual document data is still a big mess. Although that's probably unavoidable if you keep a file format for a long time. PDF and Photoshop files are also a mess.
Office was probably feature complete in its second or third iteration. The only substantive changes 99% of users notice are in interface overhauls.
I feel like that's what Google does with chromebooks and their editor suite
(This is to be compared with e.g. OOXML spreadsheets, which go as far as to store the sheets of cells and the strings inside those cells in two completely different entries of the ZIP container.)
Everything that a Word document is maps 1:1 to a relatively straightforward string-of-bytes RTF. (With, again, the exception of OLE, which is why WordPad can write stuff that it assigns a .DOC suffix but is in fact an RTF stuffed into structured storage.) In fact, there was a piece of Microsoft software called the WinWord Converter SDK (Q111716) that used RTF as an intermediate format and had a bunch of DLLs that could read and write other formats; a compatible set of DLLs shipped with Windows and supported WordPad, and a larger one shipped with Word proper and contained all of its foreign format support.
However, if you look at that perfectly innocent, easily parseable RTF, you’ll find that it is still a nightmare. Not only because Word generated horrible unoptimized RTFs and only used Unicode text if it couldn’t avoid it, but also exactly because it can represent everything that a Word document is, and that is an unfathomable amount of stuff to be able to represent, even for Word 97. (None of which the alleged RTF spec tells you how to render or lay out.)
My personal answer to the question “why can’t one replace Word?”, or rather “why are all replacements for Word either failures or not particularly better?” is that Word can do (and thus supporting its format requires you to implement) so much that being compatible with Word is effectively equivalent to just being Word. To be fair, OpenOffice Writer is a pretty decent Word and I do use it when I need one, but it’s very uninteresting as a contribution to the field of handling formatted text on computers.
The other alternatives are not better. A couple of weeks ago I needed to create a catalog of products that is just a few pages long. Calligra couldn't even show the image I added; there was bounding box which could be moved around but no images were shown. Abiword got glacially slow when adding a ~4MB image.
Yeah I really miss the source screen of WordPerfect. That was an amazing feature and if they added that to Word it would actually be worth it to upgrade for once.
This has been an issue with Word from its inception. This is because Word is broken at its core. The formatting is neither style based nor paragraph based. It's a weird mix. You can apply a style and then override it ad hoc creating a mess of a structure under the covers no doubt. I also heard horror stories about the native Word file format (at least in the days of Word6/Word97).
The Office won out purely on the sheer marketing muscle of Microsoft and their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems. Without that I doubt they'd be where they are now in terms of market penetration.