Be glad you aren't Dvorak's tech support

I usually enjoy John C Dvorak's columns, but this time I think he whines too much.

The user has to now determine if line breaks are to be added and must choose between 4 different EOL (end of line) options and whether or not to allow character substitutions. Microsoft must have concluded that there is no such thing as a plain-text file; this new option box proves it in some sick way.

[ Yahoo! News - Kill Microsoft Word ]

I personally have never had any of the issues that he mentions in this article. I, however, don't collaborate across office versions and OSes, but I think a properly installed Office won't error or ask for installation disks. In this day and age, when Office is likely his #1 application and his hard drive is likely 60-80 gigs, I would assume that Office is installed “in full” and/or installed from the hard-drive itself, either of these, and certainly both, would alleviate his issues of having to haul the CD around and go looking for it all of the time.

As for the new “plain text” options, any multi-OS shop should greatly welcome those. I don't imagine that the average user would dain to save as plain text, and if so the “Windows (Default)” type of plain text should be good enough for anyone. There is even a handy preview, so you'll know if you are doing something “bad”.

HTML from word? Word is not an HTML editor. This choice is not for making web-pages out of your word documents. Anyone who still thinks that that sort of thing is possible from any word processor or DTP is offending those of us who live and breath on the web. If you want your word docs to be displayed on the web, please hire a consultant to build you a CMS that does it up right.

XML format word is awesome. He clearly hasn't talked to techies who fully understand what Microsoft has done here. In the past if you wished to create an Office document on the fly it was a freakin' pain-in-the-butt. You had to use COM objects and programmaticly build these things and likely use VB, and ick, ick, ick. Now (providing you know and understand the Office DTDs or XML Schema) you can programmaticly make an Office document with anything that can create a file (though preferably with some XML helping goodness).

If Dvorak truly wants to complain about word, how about complaining about the resources it hogs, the load time that's through the roof, the odd way it creates new windows frequently leaving an alt-tab icon that is useless, or the poor handling of spell check with source code in a word document. Those are things I could get behind complaining about. Plus, Mr. Dvorak, which word processor is better?