Why Microsoft Word must Die, by Charles Stross

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 14, 2013 at 10:14 AM

The key learning points for me were that

- there are benefits to NOT doing your actual writing in Word or using your Word file as your main archival file;

- Word is fine for those for whom it works. If it doesn’t work for you, decompose it into the separate tasks that matter to you (outlining, writing, referencing, collaboration, typesetting etc.), use other specialist software for those, but with an output/conversion option to Word (or RTF), if necessary. This may or may not be worth your time, depending on your needs.

As for myself, I’ll continue writing in Markdown for now (in Gingko + WriteMonkey), in order not to get bogged down in formatting and typesetting decisions. I’m also learning LaTeX slowly, to get more control over typesetting. Lyx sounds promising for taming LaTeX.