“Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages,” Tom Scocca writes for Slate.
“Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the resulting electronic file for nonsense and typos,” Scocca writes. “If the scanner wasn’t in the mood, we would prop up the hard copy beside a computer and retype the whole thing. Technology was changing fast, and some people were a few steps slow. You couldn’t blame them, really, but for those of us who were fully in the computer age, those dead-tree sheets meant tedious extra work.”
Scocca writes, “Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Amen!
And people who are still emailing .doc attachments should be shot. 😉
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MDN sez: And people who are still emailing .doc attachments should be shot.
And people who email you .docx attachments should be boiled alive in a vat of their own urine! 😉 BWAHAHA!
What about Nisus Pro?
Works (sic) in most ways like Word but much easier to handle.
I use Pages full-time for graduate school but all professors still use Word. Until that changes, I still have to export as Word .DOC files because that’s all they will accept.