I formatted an entire book in Word once. Even though this was early in my career and something I may have wanted on my CV, I never spoke of it again. Never again.
Windows Write and Windows Paint were included as part of an introductory special offer? Wonder if that makes their modern incarnations, WordPad and Paint, the longest running special introductory offers ever?
At any rate, on very interesting part of the document was that it emphasized that it was created on Windows Write. Often I open promotional PDFs for Office 2010, iWork, and more just to look at the properties, and usually they're created in Adobe InDesign, not the program they're promoting. Would make more sense to show you're "eating your own dog food" and make your promotional materials in your own program as they did here.
> Send a Word attachment to _anyone_ to collaborate. They can open, read and edit the file
If they hate themselves. Because no other app renders Word documents quite correctly, you end up with pagination problems, missing fonts, etc. PDF would be a better choice, or Rich Text if they have to edit it. I pretty much refuse Word documents because of how awful they are to work with if you're not running Word on Windows.
I'm annoyed by the author's lack of acknowledgement (and perhaps knowledge) that Word was not a Microsoft product originally. The pre-Microsoft version of Word worked quite differently: it separated meaning and form much better, like good HTML/CSS formatting today does. Although the WYSIWYG MS Word version was nice, I've always missed the clear separation that the non-MS DOS Word had.
Microsoft Word has a shedload of features that journalists can't be bothered learn and/or use, and that even the author appears not to know about, judging by his reference to "replacing simple text processors like Microsoft Word".
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