Word, with all it's features, benefits, and menus does not cater to the world of digital text swapping and collaboration. Compared to a plain text editor, the print document focus in Word means that users need to make several annoying modifications to every document they work with, and if you're publishing stuff online you'll work with many documents. And to top it all, a Microsoft Office application will be by far the slowest app on an Apple computer, regardless of the specs of the machine. (it'll start faster than photoshop, but slower in terms of responsiveness.)

To understand this perspective, you have to understand the program the author compares Word to, TextEdit, is the notepad.exe of the Apple world.

It sounds like you want the "Web Layout" (or possibly "Draft" view).

His rant is partly centered around the fact that word's default settings are poorly chosen for someone in the digital publishing world.

As far as saving to plain text and copying plain text, those are two different things. Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. I've never had that happen to me though, so maybe he's doing something wrong.

I find Word very frustrating to use. I don't feel like I'm using it, I feel like I'm tricking it and at any moment my text will simply change fonts or tab depth or something weird.

That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

I always past and then again copy text into the address bar of my browser or notepad for longer text. Not ideal, but it works.

If you find you always desire to paste without formatting, you can remap CMD+V in OS X:

  * Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts
  * Click the + under the right-hand list to add a shortcut
  * Application: All; Menu Title: Paste and Match Style; Keyboard Shortcut: type CMD+V

uh that's the worst precedent for an "open" file format to ever be published as a standard, and this has been disseminated lots of times already. OOXML is a sham standard.

It's unfortunate that the case where you wouldn't really need to attach a Word document and should just paste in the contents into email (just some plain text) is the case where Google Docs works just fine, and the case where you really need a Word document (complex table layout & floating pictures) is the case where Google Docs just doesn't work that well.

Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!

Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.

Have you used Office 2010? There are multiple options to pasting: Keep source formatting, merge formatting, and keep text only. The options in Excel are even greater.

And web browsers, for example, don't generally have a "Paste as Plain Text" option inside of text fields.

(And btw, I do use Office 2010 every day of my cursed life...)

Clippy is still very symbolic of Microsoft's overall UI approach, "helping you help yourself", and very appropriate here, since it continues to pervade the new ribbon, wizards, etc.

> He complains about the XML markup when you want to publish something to the Web through copy-paste. Has the author ever saved a Word document prior to publishing before?

He's not talking about saving, he's talking about copy-paste. This has been a huge headache for me as well when dealing with web-based CMS's -- 90% of our editors' bugs came from pasting simple text into our CMS. No matter how much we taught them to paste into Notepad first, then re-copy and re-paste into the CMS, they never always remembered. I HATE Word for this.

> The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack...

That's the whole point. It's kind of a huge pain for users to keep track of compatibility packs and whatnot. It's as annoying as it would be if there were multiple PDF formats.

I suppose its a testament to the faith I had in Word that I didn't try printing it before I sent it out to employers. Others may view it as a lack of testing on my part, which is somewhat embarrassing for a programmer.

[1] http://jamiebriant.tumblr.com/post/20967362687/1-what-ms-wor...