#“26 Years of Word Processors Missing the Bleedin' Obvious”
I have used the same basic document layout since I first wrote a school project on a giant ICL dedicated word processor in my Dad's office in 1985. The same layout through Wordperfect 5.1, Word for MSDOS, Word for Windows v1.0-2007, OpenOffice/LibreOffice and Google Docs.
I bet you use the same layout:
- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- Section 1 (with header and footer on all following pages)
- Section 1.1
- Section 1.1.1
- Section 2
- …
- …
- …
- Section N
- Section N.n
Why then, after 26 years does Microsoft/Google/Sun/Oracle give us a bloody blank template? The template we all use is not even an option in any of them. Clippy never once said: "Oh I see you are trying to write a document with the same structure as everyone else on the planet, will I create a non-tacky template for you?".
By far the worst is OpenOffice/LibreOffice. You have to manually create a numbering structure from scratch to get 1, 1.1 etc on your headings. In 2011. Seriously.
And no LibreOffice, when I hit carriage return at the end of a section heading line, I don't want another line with section heading formatting, I want body-text FFS.
And no Google Docs, when I cut some bullet points and try to paste them further down in the bullet list, I don't want to randomly indent them, I'm trying to bloody move them.
This is basic basic basic stuff. Anyone want to write a word processor that actually works the way humans do?