Goodbye To Word

Goodbye To Word



Look at that headline.  Now think of that sappy old Carpenters song [1].  You get the picture, right?



Here's the deal: for years and years and years I've been using
Microsoft Word to compose almost everything I write.  I know it
inside out, am comfortable with it, and can breeze through it.  It
is something lke touch-typing; I can close my eyes and use Word to get
something in the screen, into a file.



But what I actually should use it for is just one thing: to get words on paper.



Of late I've been writing not just here, but in some other places, in
some other fora, for some other purposes.  Using Word and trying
to cut'n'paste the content into most blogging or site-management
platforms causes headaches, heartache, crashes and general
annoyance.  Word adds in all manner of back-end or back-channel
programming or coding  subtext and undertow.  I am not a
coder or a programmer, so maybe that isn't  stated properly, but
the bottom line is this: copy a Word doc to a blog or site-management
tool, and there is hell to pay.



A year ago, when my son set up the faux-blog [2]
for me, he suggested I switch to a text editor.  When I bellyached
to him about how the software I use in my main blog sometimes sabotages
posts in the composing stage, he again said to use a text editor. 
Now is the time for this old man to listen to his son's advice.



This change of composition tool/writing utility represents a shift for me.  Now is the time for me to reconsider/relearn the writing experience. 
Using Word for web-based documents has become counterproductive. 
Far more than 50% of my writing is for the internet.  My blog
posts or site content entries are more often the end-product than, say,
a document intended to be printed and read by someone holding sheets of
paper.  Notepad (that's what I am using at this moment for this
very composition) or a text editor (my son suggested Edit Plus [3]) will better serve my [composition] purpose.



The time has come to convert to a software composition tool that incorporates HTML in the process.  Notepad lacks this; EditPlus [3] has it.



When I first began writing on/for the internet, around 1990, using word
processing software seemed the logical choice.  Back then I used
MultiMate, which I still pine for to this day, but that software is
long gone.  Programmer and designer friends would chide my choice
of an evil MS product, or a Windows-based program.  Learning HTML [4],
or any programming language, seemed like something best left to others,
those more geeky, those of a more code-o-matic culture.



One sure learns a lot in ten, twelve or thirteen years.



These days I am comfortable enough using some HTML coding, doing some
editing to match the platform, and at ease with needing to learn more
or learn something completely new. 



You might say that I am catching up to the culture.  I just spoke about that in a phone conversation with Doc Searls [5], and wrote about that in a long piece [6] posted on Morph [7], The blog over at The Media Center [8], which is part of the American Press Institute.  The piece is called



I'll be posting more White Paper or think-pieces over there as time
goes by.  And I'll use a text editor, so posting and publishing
via the TypePad tool in use over at Morph will be a simple process.



What's ironic is that I wrote that piece about immediacy and change,
the social culture shifts, and how technology is leading the path
toward adaptive change.  And I wrote it, composing it using
Word.  Yep, Word, which throws a bevy of unwanted background
characters, spaces, and line changes (once referred to, back in the year of the flood, as "carriage
returns").  Now I know better.



Change is good.  Change means ease of use, growth.



No more Carpenters sappy song in my head.  Now it is a variation on an old Everly Brothers hit [9]:  Bye-bye Word.  Hello text Editor.