Word: Jenga
After a document is put into "styles" by a word processing operator with the equivalent of a graduate degree in applied Word, nothing in that document will ever be the same again. Things that were independent of one another are yoked together and the whole document takes on qualities of that game Jenga. By the way, Jenga was actually invented by my brother and me and was originally played with pieces of furniture. He has the scar to prove it.
In skilled hands, naturally, "styles" can work wonders and be so much faster and better than the intuitive way of formatting documents. But it's a bit like taking my iPod in for repairs, then coming back and being handed a Stradivarius. Sure, it's great, but what the hell am I supposed to do with it?
This a big reason I still use manual cameras. I don't need to remember some sequence in order to get things set as I wish. I can put a manual camera aside for a year, then pick it up and begin taking photos at once. Try doing that with an automated camera, unless you just have it in full-auto mode. There is a reason why home blenders have 10 or 20 power levels ("maim," "grind," "frappe," discombobulate," "liquefy," etc.) but professional blenders have at most two. Do you suppose Iron Chef Morimoto has time to worry about a bunch of different blender settings during Conger Eel Battle? I think not.
Many designers of technology don't have much respect for the user interface, or they think that designing a usable interface for the seven thousand features in a product is the same as good design. It is not. We can only keep so many things straight at one time, and we can internalize fewer still. There is no good user interface if there are way too many features. Word is a great example of a product that is far too complicated to be fully exploited by its genuine end users, businesspeople at their desks. Which is fine, so long as you generate your own documents from scratch and no word processing operator ever gets hold of them. How realistic is that? I think Word needs a mode that will convert any document in to a document formatted in the simplest possible way (recognizing that some advanced formatting may be lost). I also think that Word should have a mode where it emulates WordPerfect for DOS, circa 1995. What a joy that would be from time to time: using a program that does what you tell it, shows the formatting codes and doesn't have separate formatting for every single paragraph.
posted at 4:44 PM
2 Comments:
I was just thinking of Word Perfect and how much I miss it.
I am "write" there with you on this one.
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