Word isn’t perfect, but it does everything I want an more. I’ve absorbed fantastically useful keyboard shortcuts like Shift-F3 to swap cases the the point that I can hardly write without them. For typing that’s hurried rather than fast, spending a little time right-clicking for AutoCorrect instead of just correcting means you never have to do it again. I know it’s fashionable to bash Office, but frankly nothing else has as many features. And I actually like the ribbon because now I can find all of them. Plus, you know, live word count in the status bar? The writer’s friend.

Maybe if you start with what it is you *don’t* like in Word other than the fact that it’s Word?

I know how you feel - I always find I go back to Word (and Excel and Powerpoint). Back in the day we had Wordperfect, Wordstar, Smart, Ami Pro then Word Pro but Word is pretty much the only one left standing so someone is doing something right.

The odd exception to this is that I don’t use the Blog feature of Word for updating my Blog at www.jasonslater.co.uk and instead I use Live Writer - go figure!?

I, on the other hand, as a long-time user of Word (for translation, copywriting) bitterly loathe it, not least because it’s so much more likely than most of my other major apps to seize up, disrupt or otherwise damage my workflow. I’m a very happy OpenOffice user - and speaking as one who has to count words all the time, there’s no such thing as a perfect wordcounting program; the longer the document, the more variation you’ll find between different word-counting utilities/applications. The only thing I miss in OpenOffice? The truly impressive Word ability to search on format attributes (e.g. font coloured red). Otherwise OpenOffice is vastly more stable, especially when you’re dealing with longer documents. Oh, and forget Excel if you’re using your spreadsheets to manage blocks of text (Excel is an increasingly popular intermediary for CMS): OpenOffice Calc wins the day here, with all the same spellchecking and formatting features available as in Writer - no more ghastly problems with truncated text blocks. Sorry, Microsoft, but given Word’s pedigree, I’d expect it to be a lot more stable and a lot more user-friendly than it is (yes, those hidden but obtrusive codes are the other thing that cause my blood to boil! “Alas, WordPerfect - I knew him, Horatio”, to paraphrase Hamlet).

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