The Pink Floyd Years…

First define your variables.

I’ll need some information first Just the basic facts, Can you show me where it hurts?

I am not a “writer”.

I don’t “write” for a living or a hobby.

I do write.

My hobbies and job require me some times to write stuff.

Writing.

Putting characters on a screen/ paper so it can be understood by some one else.

“Writing”.

That creative stuff. “Word” All word processors that are a bit like Microsoft Word.

(don’t @ me these are local defs for this blog, your mileage may vary).

The Point

I can’t explain you would not understand

The other day DT posted about the “Evils” of word processors. I don’t know if he was joking or genuinely believes that said software is evil, its YouTube who knows anything?

There is no pain you are receding

But leaving morality aside, He had a point. Word is a complex and powerful piece of software, and I write shopping lists on it…

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse

When I was at school we were taught to do a rough draft of any work. ( I say taught, I never did it, just scrawled everything onto paper once and handed it in… sorry to my teachers).

Now I’ve got that feeling once again

This is what I’m getting from DT’s piece. Get the words down, shape your thoughts on the screen. Don’t waste time looking for the perfect font.

Windows peeps could do this in notepad. (Honestly use notepad more leave it open so you can cut and paste stuff to it).

Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying

Many people responded with examples of things that they had to use Word for, file compatibility, availability, the need for formatting, etc, I get it. That’s what it’s for. Polishing the finished document. But treat your drafts as plain text.

You are only coming through in waves

One of the things I do as a union rep is put up newsletters on our works intranet, and mirror them (ish), on my blog site,and if they are “official” on the branch website. All three require different formatting and quite often cutting and pasting a Docx causes me extra work.

My ideal work flow for a “Friday Update” would be;

1. Collect notes, on my phone, a real notepad, chuck it all onto google keep.
2. Draft piece on a text editor.
3. Leave it to sit.
4. Edit text.
5. Save as .txt or whatever.
6. Copy and paste into whatever software I need to get the end result. If its a newsletter for email attachment I may well use Word, but for web stuff i can past into whatever editor my platform uses (Guttenberg for WordPress).

This is not how I am

What actually happens.

1. Book mark pages in various browsers, forget about bookmarks Find I cant read any of my hand written notes, (if i did any at all!)
2. PANIC!
3. Chuck some stuff straight into our intranets front end.
4. Accidentality delete it.
5. Do it again kidding myself it better the second time.
6. Copy pasta it into my blog and spend ages fiddling with the formatting.
7. Try not to think about it again.

Okay (okay, okay, okay)

And yes there is nothing stopping you using Word and just saving as .txt. But there is also nothing stopping me from wasting fifteen minuets fiddling with my window manager and wallpapers to get “just the right” setup.

But you may feel a little sick

I’m actually using Ghost writer for this blog as I’m going to tidy it up with some very minimal markdown and export it to html. (Just headings.)

So do I think Word is evil..?

Errr, no more or less than any other non Free and open source software. I’m less concerned than DT that I’m the product and “Evilcorp” is mining my data,as I think “Big Data” is just another bubble and the digital minutiae of my life is worth sweet FA. After all Facebook is spending billions to find out that cute animals, gossip, dog whistle racism, and sex sells. Any journalist/bard from the last two thousand year could tell them that for free.

I do think its a shame that users aren’t more open to trying software that is a bit out side their comfort zone (not Emacs or Vim! “hey mum you find all those buttons in Word confusing why not try this, its called Vim!”) that might suit their needs better.

I have become comfortably numb.