Fourteen Years of Pain

I’m busily editing a fairly complex tech spec written in Microsoft Word. (Word generally sucks for tech specs except for this one is being team-edited with little infrastructure, so we needed the revision-marking feature.) When I first ever used Word it was in 1989 on a Macintosh; this first brush with competent WYSIWYG changed my thinking about interfaces and documents. There was a problem: back then the handling of numbered lists in Word was buggy and fragile. Today, fourteen years later in a recent rev of Office, numbered lists are still buggy and fragile. Innocuous changes—simple cut/paste, joining paragraphs, applying the formatting palette—intermittently send Word into psychotic spasms, in one case renumbering the list starting at 65, in another mysteriously removing the colour-coding from all the text in the doc, in another re-indenting dozens of apparently randomly-selected paragraphs. I suppose if it hasn’t gotten fixed in a decade and a half my grandchildren will probably be stuck with it. But I have hopes that the world will learn the valuable lessons Word taught us all about the interfaces between humans and texts, and for God’s sake move on to something better.