POSTS
Review by Brian M. Murphree
Microsoft Word 2010 builds on an idea that Microsoft is famous for, which is to refine the dashboard of the car, not the engine or performance of the car, building on an already successful overload of bloated and reckless programming. I can’t 100% vouch for this, because I don’t work for Microsoft, but this program is yet another example of where Microsoft completely depends on the fact that many businesses and end users are ONLY familiar with Word, and little else. Had this not been the case, Microsoft Word would be an incredibly awful piece of over-priced, bloated, buggy software.
Still chock full of inconsistencies and performance/reliability issues, it’s possible that much of the talent behind this program is fresh meat or Microsoft didn’t seem to put much effort into Design Verification testing. Other similar Word Processors seems to be less crash-prone in Windows than Microsoft’s very own Word Processor. I will defend Word here, that the Auto-Save/recovery technology is pretty good….and necessary.
Now, the more frustrating thing I find that this program does NOT do well, is to give the end user a way to move objects, pictures, boxes, and charts around the page without utterly and completely destroying certain aspects of page formatting. There are some facets that Word can handle well, such as the realization that the end user wants each new line to continue with a number, bullet, Bold, etc. but outside of that, Word is pretty, well….dumb. It also seems Microsoft, as usual just makes it more complex and frustrating by changing where things are like a department store. This simply DOESN’T work for end users. Ever complain that your local grocer re-arranged the store, and now you have to spend twice as long re-orienting yourself with the layout, and having to ask for help twice as often? Even the help isn’t very intelligent or useful? Sound familiar? It is here.
I will still use Word, because like I said, it’s what I’m very familiar with, but I still curse at it often. I actually found it more enjoyable to take a week to learn Adobe’s InDesign to accomplish much of what Word never could dream of doing on a page. Like some very prominent authors state they use Word for writing, they certainly don’t use it for any type of finished product. Not that Word is expected to be a full-on publishing application, but with the price Microsoft puts on Word it should at least try and compete beyond the limits of freeware.
Conclusion: If you’re only familiar with Word, and you are required to use it, or have many people you send/receive documents from that use Word, stick with it and you’ll survive life. If not, give some other programs like OpenOffice a good whirl until Microsoft can at least work out their own internal incompatibilities and inconsistencies, while hopefully taking better control of their own pricing.