It’s simple; you’ve seen what food processors do to food right?

In general, all word processors are the same; you type, words show up on the screen, some of them might even be spelled right, and if you’re lucky the grammar checker wasn’t written using RPN.

The tricky part is when you go to save all of that furious typing… Because the only real money-maker left in the word processing world is how proprietary you can make your file format while still making it relevant enough to warrant people paying you for your product.

That said, I just paid a $99 “subscription” for Microsoft Office for my M1 MacBook Air — for a file format.

See, I’m working on a report for a client, and while I can happily use the built-in didn’t-pay-a-dime-for-it “Pages” and “Numbers” that came in MacOS to actually create this report — and I did — those aren’t actual Microsoft Office…

Pages, to its credit, can actually export your work into a DOCX file, but this won’t really be an upper-case-W ‘Word’ document… So things will get a bit strange when you open it in actual Microsoft Office.

And this simply doesn’t fly when writing a client-facing report.

Anyway, the process of cutting and pasting between Pages and Word was pretty painless, and it only took a few minutes to convince Word to stop helping and to do things my way.

Which is the real reason I don’t use Word; it’s typical Microsoft in that it tries to be all things to all people — which dramatically over complicates the thing and makes it a chore to use. Every time I need to use Word, there’s an inevitable stop in productivity as I page through 1×10^32 functions to find some basic thing like search-replace…

I need an app simply lets me save stuff I type with some optional formatting flair — not a desktop publishing suite with more nested options and cryptic menus than the Burj Khalifa has floors.