One of the touted features of Office 12 is modern, professional-looking documents. Besides having a great UI, Word now provides default settings that will look great. The ones that I have heard about include sensible margins, better fonts, professional themes, coordinated color palettes, and three-step configuration.

Nevertheless, I am still taking a wait-and-see attitude about whether Word can produce professional-looking documents easily. Jensen Harris refers to a promising new document parts feature in Word 12, and some early Word demos show smarter document-handling.

Back in the 1980s, I used at least two different wordprocessors that provided better control and layout capabilities than recent versions of Word. One was a high-end wordprocessor called FrameMaker, that include page-layout capabilities, master pages, multiple classes of styles, nested tables and so on. Even mainstream wordprocessors like FullWrite (on the Macintosh) had these same features including irregular wrapping around pictures, sidebars, professional-looking outlining, and bibliographies. Some products like TeX support floating tables and figures, which allowed text after a table to flow before it to fill any unattractive white space that may appear if tables were bumped into the next page.

The common theme with these applications were that documents look good by default. Hours are not spent tweaking the document, and the standard templates that shipped with these application are usable and attractive. I don’t think Microsoft even used professional designers to build their Word templates. I have heard of book authors convincing publishers to accept WordPerfect documents, because they wanted precise control over their documents that Word was not able to offer.

I can name a number of issues off the top of my head:

• Some features I mentioned above like nested tables and character styles did not appear until Word 2000+, more than a decade later. I am guessing from the RTF specification, that nested tables was held back by Word’s treatment of tables as a special type of paragraph.
• Word use headers and footers to approximate master pages; this approach is not only crude but also undiscoverable. I think a page layout model is architecturally superior to Word’s current streaming approach, because Word could still mimic the current approach for novice uses, while allowing intermediate users better control.
• Frames, another buried feature in Word, are used to implement sidebars, but, unfortunately, frames bleed into the margins instead of flowing to the next page, making sidebars risky.
• In another questionable decision, individual shapes are anchored to specific paragraphs or characters instead of pages, so when text is added or deleted, shapes become unaligned with each other or bump into the constraints of the page. Word 2003 currently inserts a drawing canvas, which is a hack.
• One pet peeve of mine is how numbered list items don’t stay align, when an extra tens or hundreds digit suddenly appears, because the user inserted the tenth or hundredth list item.
• Locking down styles for a professional document is difficult in Word, because new styles are automatically creates upon indenting paragraphs or copying text from other applications.
• Text new diagrams and org chart drawings introduced in Word 2003 are quickly cropped or wrapped out of the view because of the unreasonably large default margins.
• Finally, using Word has become increasingly unpredictable over the last few versions, because of the myriad obscure AutoFormatting rules that have been added.

I put this list here, so that maybe someone from the Microsoft Word group will read this and fix some of these problems. By the way, Microsoft Word is the only wordprocessor that I use, so I am partly responsible by making Microsoft my exclusive supplier.

These are some of my thoughts that come to mind when I mention that Microsoft innovates too slowly, because the simple features that I mentioned above and used in multiple products a decade and half ago are still not in Microsoft’s products.

Before the new changes introduced in the Office 12 user interface, building a wordprocessor that was essentially equivalent to Microsoft Word in form and function from the perspective of low-end users wasn’t super difficult. It doesn’t require two decades, the entire history of Word, especially with the high-productivity tools and libraries today. FullWrite was developed in the 1980s and, more recently in the 1990s, Eric Sink produced AbiWord; there are also a number of comprehensive wordprocessor controls on the Web.

With all the resources at Microsoft, one would think that the experience of using Microsoft Office would be prohibitively expensive for any other company to reproduce, and maybe that might be happening with Office 12+, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I myself spent over a year replicating the essential wordprocessor functionality and user interface of Word (and other wordprocessors) including Word’s long-delayed nested tables and was shocked at the resemblance upon completion. My intent, by the way, was not to compete with Microsoft, which would be suicide, but to proceed in an entirely different direction altogether with a new product category that happens to deal with text documents.