More responses to comments on Word posts
Some people publicly and privately have suggested that they find it amazing that I am writing this blog. Some were just generally curious - that's cool. But some of them have been suspicious of my motives because I blog. Three of them have asked how it is that I got "permission" to write this blog, or have assumed it must be part of some "marketing ploy".
Allow me to clear a few things up and maybe provide some insight into the culture at Microsoft. First, I happen to have some time right now because I am on infant care leave for a month (a nice benefit that Microsoft gives to new Dads). My son was born eight days ago and once again is asleep in my lap as I write this. The first post I made about Word took me about 4 hours to write (I am NOT a great typist). I spent more time than usual on it because I suspected it would draw more attention than my past posts, and I guess I made the right call on that one.
The idea that I would need "permission" to have a blog is a little humorous to me. Microsoft has always had as one of its strengths that it gives enormous freedom to its employees. We don't have time cards, no one tracks our hours, and in general we are given a lot of responsibility. As long as we deliver results, it doesn't matter if you come in at 2pm and don't wear shoes (both of which I do occasionally, although less often than I used to).
In a way, the environment in any product group is more like a startup than a big company. We have small teams of dedicated people who don't need rules and oversight to make them perform. In fact, if such bureaucracy did start to creep in, the best people would simply leave - it wouldn't be fun anymore. Microsoft is consistently rated as one of the top places to work in America - even though our salaries are only a little above average and the stock has not gone anywhere exciting for several years. The reason is that the environment is great, the benefits are great, and the typical passion, commitment, competence and intelligence of the people around you everyday is exhilarating, frankly. I mean, I LOVE my job. What could be better than working through tough technical problems with smart people everyday, working with customers to understand their needs and then delivering what they asked for (take a look at OneNote's SP1 - that was a tremendously fulfilling release for our team thanks to the users out there who have told us how much it improves their use of the product, if not their lives). Not to mention designing and building products that are used by hundreds of millions of people the world over. If you can make those even a little bit better, the impact you have is enormous.
You've probably noticed more and more MS employees have blogs (I think it is over 400 now). It's a new technology, so it takes awhile to catch on. There's no mystery or central control involved.
Why didn't I blog sooner? There are a few reasons. One is that from the blogs I saw, I thought blogging was a form of vanity publishing - it didn't seem to be an attractive thing for me since that sort of thing doesn't turn me on. Now I see that those blogs are meant as a way to stay in touch with friends. Actually, you can read about my doubts regarding blogging here and here.
Another reason was that I felt I didn't have much to say. It turned out I did once I got going, although as I noted in those earlier posts, without feedback from readers I doubt I would keep going.
A third reason was that I was leery of the net thugs, frankly. They're so tiresome and impossible to reason with, I was concerned they would simply drown out any kind of mature exchange of information. I didn't want to have to deal with a load of invective every day - not worth the energy. In the end, I decided I wasn't going to be cowed by some gang, so here I am.
A couple of commentators have also raised the possibility (well, "certainty" in their minds) that my blog is a "marketing ploy", and can't be bona fide. As if I am the Mouth of Sauron or whatever. In reality, I am just a guy at home with his baby and therefore have a little free time. I think the automatic assumption that I am part of some evil plot simply underlines my earlier point about people making outrageous claims that I happen to know for a fact are utterly untrue. I can understand some people being distrustful due to the bad press the company has received over the last few years, but for me it's like the 50's - being labeled a communist because you wrote a letter to the editor in support of someone. BTW, rather than being supported by our marketing dept, I suspect the PR people and maybe some in marketing are quite nervous about my blog since if I say something asinine, they will have to deal with it most likely.
A couple of people have asked about the permanence of electronic information and access to it in the future if it is in Word format. Microsoft takes this very seriously. That's one of the reasons we make the format documentation available to governments and other institutions, so that there is no concern that they will not have the ability to access the information at a later date. Personally, I find this whole discussion a little bit overwrought though. If it is access to the content of a Word doc that is a concern, just about any word processor available today can import Word documents sufficiently that you can access their content. You don’t need a Microsoft product for that. The issues are usually around getting the formatting exactly right, not access to the content. Also, if there are "bajillions" of Word docs out there in the future, you can bet that there will be tools to read them. Because they are just bits and not hardware, it is not the same as tapes or wax cylinders of the past, where the hardware to read the data is hard to find and maintain, and the amount of items in those old formats is not "bajillions", it is more like "bathousands", so the incentive to maintain the machines exists only for archivists. Archived bits (as opposed to media) can be translated by software far into the future. The argument that Microsoft would somehow disallow access to archived material in Word format is a straw man not worth addressing IMHO. I notice the same arguments are not raised about PDF, which is another closed, patented, proprietary format. Both of these formats have free viewers BTW.
Others have asked about why we don’t use an XML file format as the default for Word. That's an excellent question. Right now of course, you can in fact set Word2003 to use WordML as the default format if you like (Tools/Options/Save, then under "Default format", choose "XML Document"). Changing our default format is a tricky subject, as I wrote in my last post. Last time we changed it, we got fire and brimstone on our heads from customers, and a whole raft of conspiracy theories to boot. So changing the format is not something one can do lightly. We are between a rock and a hard place. If we don’t change the format, most customers are happy, we have a hard time innovating, and we have people complain the format is binary and only Word can effectively use it. If we do change the format, we're free to deliver some great new stuff, but many customers will be upset and on top of that some people will think we did it for nefarious reasons (probably the same people who think we keep it binary for nefarious reasons :-)). So, a no-win situation for us.
One person asked about being able to open or save the Open Office format. That should be possible with a converter or transform. Word has a freely available SDK for its converters, so if someone wanted to make such an import/export converter, they could. Converters are a lot of work though, and we only make them when a critical mass of customers need them. So far we've had essentially no demand for open/save of OpenOffice format (certainly not compared to WordPerfect, where there is still some demand, or Works, or a few others for which we get asked for updates to older converters). Again, this work is done only if it becomes a significant customer issue, and for the OpenOffice format it has a way to go to reach that based on current request rate.
Keep those comments comin'!
Chris
Comments
- Anonymous
April 29, 2004
You know there's something a little worrying about a self confessed "not a great typist" working on the word team <g> - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
Yes, although fortunately I have AutoCorrect plus a whole team of great typists doing the designs these days... In fact it is an advantage to have a variety of user types designing the app - you wouldn't want us to design only for good typists, or whatever user type you are not, would you? - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
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April 29, 2004
I was kidding you know, hence the <g> :)
Mind you I've found auto-correct, like intellisense has made me lazy. There's nothing like someone saying "Can you illustrate your code on the white board" to make you realise how productive things like that really are and how little you are committing to memory. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
Barry, I knew you were kidding :-) - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
I suspect why these complaints aren't raised about PDF is because PDF is not a undocumented format—at a quick glance, it looks like the documentation is <a href="http://partners.adobe.com/asn/tech/pdf/specifications.jsp">here</a>.
As for patents, Adobe <a href="http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/legalnotices.jsp">explicitly</a> state you don't have to worry about those if you're reading and writing PDF files.
Yes, it's closed and proprietary in that it's only Adobe that sets the spec, but it's open in that that spec is available to anyone that wants to read it. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
(This time without HTML markup! - sorry about that.)
I suspect why these complaints aren't raised about PDF is because PDF is not a undocumented format--at a quick glance, it looks like the documentation is http://partners.adobe.com/asn/tech/pdf/specifications.jsp .
As for patents, Adobe explicitly state http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/legalnotices.jsp state you don't have to worry about those if you're reading and writing PDF files.
Yes, it's closed and proprietary in that it's only Adobe that sets the spec, but it's open in that that spec is available to anyone that wants to read it. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
Chris, thanks again for all your blogging. And congratulations on your newborn!
I'd still love to know why Word for Windows has such a weak word count feature compared to Word for Mac. You kinda knocked Word count in a previous post, but many, many, many of us depend on it, and it's frustrating not to have it update live like it does on the Mac. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
A great read Chris, keep it up! If you ever get some time it would be interesting to hear about how you develop Word and OneNote. For example do the developers use Visual Studio or nmake? We have a large project and find that it can take a while to start up with all the different sub-projects / source control etc...
Cheers
Lee - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
Kirk, we looked at the Mac implementation and found it dragged performance too much - essentialy any change to the doc kicks off a huge amount of recalcing and slows down the app as a result. You don't notice it with short docs, but it is noticeable with long docs. So we elected not to borrow that code from MacvWord. If you have XP or 2003, may I suggest you bring up the word count toolbar and just click "recount" when you're curious. BTW, I didn't say that word count wasn't valuable to some people, but it is not too useful outside of academic users and writers, leaving the other 90%+ of our users wondering why it shows up in reviews all the time as a critical feature when other more broadly useful features are ignored. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
Chris, you've got a great blog going here. I always suspected Microsoft developers were having great fun reading Slashdot and you've confirmed it!
Keep up the good work. Your history of Word was great, lets have more "behind the scenes" stuff. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
I'm one of the readers who found the blog via Slashdot. I'm really enjoying it and hope that you continue to write. It's always nice to see another software developer talking about how they build things and why. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
Chris, excellent blog - thank for sharing and for your attempts to defuse the Microsoft FUD. Congratulations on your newborn son. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
It's funny how people lump the "typical Slashdot idiot" together in the same way that the "typical slashdot idiot" lumps the MS bloggers in with the marketing dept.
It's easy to see how that mistake can get made though. For every post by you. Rick Schaut, Larry Osterman, or Raymond Chen about the history of an MS product or a technical gotcha you have 50-60(no kidding) posts about {insert the latest MS sponsored conference here} or how some MS product can make your life better. 90% of blogs.msdn.com can be mistaken for PR releases. It sure looks mandated or heavily suggested in some cases even if it isn't. Plus there's that weird way in which they all only link to each other. With the /. postings, the most idiotic are often the most vocal. But there are a lot of level headed people that read and moderate Slashdot.
Your blog alone got me to download the trial of OneNote and try it out. I didn't have any USE for it, but I did give a shot. - Anonymous
April 29, 2004
Chris, thanks for your long posts and your openness to questions and comments. I use Word although I am probably familiar with about a tenth of the functionality. I did have a question about innovation and your legacy decisions. You have commented a number of times about innovation and keeping customers happy; letting customers set your development agenda. Do you find the legacy of decisions that you made in the 90s stultifying? When will it be the right time to take the lead and make changes, say to file formats, calculating that the benefits outweigh the criticism that you will undoubtedly get? What would convince you to make a significant change in the product that would add value? How creative can you be? Can you give an example of a change you would like to make? In this respect, do customers lead the way, or do creative designers and software engineers lead the way? - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
First and foremost, congratulations! Secondarily, it is my hope that this burgeoning practice of MS blogging continues - I for one find much of the information to be quite useful and love the insight it gives. I found your posts on Word to be fascinating. - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
Congrats on your baby! You're the man, Chris.
Joe. - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
I hope that soon this mass can demand openoffice.org Since we already doing it for Dockbooks and other formats that are no way supported with XML converters. The OpenOffice.org is WIDELY formated and ready for action.
I dissagree with Alex
" OpenOffice from Sun, Mozilla from AOL/Netscape, AbiWord from another company and so on. In each case, it is somehow assumed that if you open source a product, it will be better."
Well we got Linux, Apache, XUL, and Evolution as well as many other quality software that are superb and has no commercial background. - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
Scott, when I look through the MS blogs, i find they are mostly by developers talking abotu this or that obscure coding technique or VS feature. There are a few by people who actually work in marketing, but they seem to just be blogging about what they do, which is naturally marketing events and so on. Are you sure you're not reading into it more than is there? Can you name a few blogs that seem "unreal" in the way you describe? I think those people would be interested to hear that feedback. - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
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April 30, 2004
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April 30, 2004
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April 30, 2004
Juan, I agree with you that customers expect perfect fidelity when opening documents, and even a slight degradation will send them looking for an alternative. That's why we try pretty hard to keep compatibility from version to version, even as we fix bugs that affect layout of documents (Check out Tools/Options/Comaptibility in Word someday to see what I mean). My point was in regards to archival access to information as opposed ot daily use of the software. There is a fear that a proprietary format means the content can't be accessed in the future. I was pointing out that I simply don't believe that is true. Access to the content of a Word doc is quite easy, and doesn't even require documentation, as our many competitors have shown. What is hard is duplicating all the exact layout nuances of a Word doc to make sure it looks identical to how it was intended. And that part is true of any format, proprietary or not. As an archivist, you might feel you need to have a layout engine that can render the content the exact same way that it was intended by the author - format documentation doesn't help with layout. Does that mean we have to keep archival copies of Mozilla, IE, Open Office, Word, etc. around, as well as the platforms that run them? If we need pixel for pixel accuracy, yes. But if we simply need access ot the content - no - all we need are the bits of the file and a converter that extracts content and formatting, and possibly does a pretty good job with layout. Content is accessible without those apps, and without even documentation on the formats (although as I said, we do provide it to gov't and instutions that feel they need it).
Recently I was looking at some emulators that run 25-yr old Atari and Commodore systems on a PC flawlessly. I wonder if that won't be the way some files are accessed in 50 years? - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
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April 30, 2004
"Kirk, we looked at the Mac implementation and found it dragged performance too much - essentialy any change to the doc kicks off a huge amount of recalcing and slows down the app as a result."
Ummm, have you noticed that it's a Preference in Word Mac (Preferences/View)? Very easy to turn off. (And worth taking a look at Word 2004 to see if it's off or on by default there for new users.) - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
I want to ask how you as an MS employee view the Open Source initiative, wrt R&D. MS, as you say, does try and build a product that satisfies customers (people with money:). What would your reaction be if, for example, someone created an OSS word processor that implemented (or, for a different word, stole) all of the ideas in MS Word? Or, for a more real life example, what would you think if someone made sure that every feature that was available in MS Word was available in Open Office?
I have to admit the reason I use Linux on my desktop is because I like to play with the computer. I like to have absolute control-- for example, if I want to implement my own word count, I can ;) (especially if someone else has already written some/all of the code I need!) My logic is, I enjoy not just using my computer, but playing with it, making it work (or not work, as the case may be:)
Well, I won't extoll all the virtues of OSS here, but I was just wondering what you thought in general about OSS, and specifically about OSS "stealing" your R&D. - Anonymous
April 30, 2004
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April 30, 2004
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April 30, 2004
This gets bit offtopic, but Alex, really, have you ever considered that one (million) might just read and come from slashdot because the value it offers as a place to quickly aggregate all kinds of news interesting to the tech-geek persons? Even many people at msdn blogs say they read it, whether for occasional fun or just the news aggregating effect, I do not know. - Anonymous
May 01, 2004
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May 01, 2004
Regarding the difference between WordML and the binary Word format, won't the WordML format offer much greater possibilities now? It would seem that as long as you didn't get rid of support for old tags, you could keep creating new tags that the older Word versions would just ignore the newer tags that they don't understand, much like an HTML document. Is that just a stupid assumption? An since the Word client could open both formats for a few versions, people could take their time to get used to saving old documents to the new format. You could create two different but similar icons for each format so a customer would know by looking that this document is the old Word format and this document is the new WordML (forgive me if this is already the case, I have not created a WordML document yet). Anyway, a batch converter could be created for those customers who needed to upgrade a large number of documents to the new format (again, maybe this isn't important enough to do if you have a binary Word document viewer).
Anyway, I guess I don't really care about keeping the file format the same as long as you don't completely abandon the old format for a release or two. :-) - Anonymous
May 01, 2004
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May 01, 2004
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May 01, 2004
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May 02, 2004
Alex: I see your point, and don't disagree with it totally, but it depends on your POV. I was concentrating more on the business users of OSS, while you seem to have the hobbyist in mind. The hobbyist will try out new stuff just for the fun of it, but some people don't think like the geek tinkerer and just want to get the job done without too much hassle. If OSS wants to be a viable alternative to commercial software for these users, it's in their best interest not to alienate them by experimenting with the UI concepts, and just stick to the way others like MS or Apple etc... did it before. - Anonymous
May 03, 2004
Betalogue - Anonymous
May 03, 2004
In his fourth post on Word's development process, MS program manager Chris Pratley says the following:
A couple of people have asked about the permanence of electronic information and access to - Anonymous
May 04, 2004
Hello,
About the PDF format, here is the specs doc:
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/acrobat/sdk/public/docs/PDFReference15_v6.pdf
Check section 1.4... it might be "copyrighted", "patented", and whatever, but it looks to me to be same thing as Java: keep control over the standard, but at least let everyone get the impression that you want to work with them.
Can you point me to anything similar at Microsoft's for the Word format or WordML format?
Let's see... Office 2003 XML reference version 2
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FE118952-3547-420A-A412-00A2662442D9&displaylang=en
Released April 15, how convenient. Available only in an EXE decompressing to .DOC and .CHM... not so convenient. Do we see any kind of intention from Microsoft that they want to share this information? Hum, nothing! The only thing they say is (among other things)
"Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights or other
intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights or other intellectual property."
Wow, if I were Corel, I would really want to implement WordML in my Word Processor, NOT!
Also, why isn't WordML available in the "normal user" version? For 95% of the population, it means they still have no choice over which format they can use: .doc. In OpenOffice, we can for example, at least save it in .pdf. - Anonymous
May 04, 2004
Samuel: Désolée, but as I mentioned earlier, the Word fomat documentation is available on request to partners, gov'ts, institutions, etc to ensure good interoperability with Word content, and to alleviate concerns that the format will not be understandable in the future. We choose not to make it public - our prerogative.
Re WordML on the other hand, we have a program to support people using the WordProcessingML schemas, as well as SpreadSheetML, etc. If the fact that the files come in an self-extracting exe for ease of use on the Windows platform distresses you, you can access the documentation from other, non-Microsoft sources as well (e.g the Danish gov't: http://rep.oio.dk/Microsoft.com/officeschemas/welcome.htm) and this is in a format you can read in your browser.
I wouldn't second guess Corel's intentions - I can imagine several reasons why they might want to license the patents for converting WordML into word processing data structures.
WordML is available in all versions of Word2003. Please check your facts. You're probably referring to the additional support for customer defined schema embedded in documents that is in the "Pro" version of Word (about 65% of the user base. I am not sure how you arrived at 5% - that is quite wrong). Since you are comparing products, this additional XML support for customer-defined schemas is in fact not an option in OOo, although feel free to use Adobe's PDF format instead :-).
FWIW, Word has four full roundtrip formats: RTF, HTML, XML, DOC. RTF and XML are fully documented and available. For XML, we also released a transform from WordML to HTML that any HTML viewer can use that supports XSLT, and also an IE add-in that uses that transform to show WordML docs in the browser. With this, a WordML doc can be viewed anywhere, to the extent that a browser can support word processing capabilities and XSLT. The HTML styles that Office defines for roundtrip purposes you can more or less figure out by looking at them (despite all the rhetoric), and DOC format documentation is available on a limited basis as I mentioned. - Anonymous
May 04, 2004
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May 05, 2004
Whenever I get to this point, I remember one +5
>Funny post I saw (but unfortunately didn't
>bookmark - it would have been an excellent post
>to save) that glibly suggested that an
>apparently naive parent poster browsed at +5.
Aha!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=101500&cid=8650805
Via Google query for "slashdot browses +at 5" (no quotes in actual query). - Anonymous
May 06, 2004
Ryan:
Don't even get me started on formatting issues. I spent more time fighting Word to get the formatting I desired or needed that I would ever like to admit. Maybe I am too used to latex now to handle word. Admittedly, I am in the minority who enjoys "coding" a document. While you get what you see in Word, I get what I type (and want) in latex.
Me:
Thank you Ryan - I can see I'm not the only one who has that "problem". I too get so frustrated, when Word does that non-intuitive "formatting", that my work-collegues thinks I'm getting a heart-attack, as I growl loudly at the monitor.
I constantly revert back to Notepad or similary (better) text-editors, so I can get my work done, and forget all about layout and formatting - even though it would have made the result better looking.
Maybe I should check out that LaTeX stuff... - Anonymous
May 06, 2004
Some of the comments i read here seem to indicate that there are quite some misunderstandings about the PDF format.
It is true that the format is documented as pointed out. You can download the full specifications for free.
It is not true that PDF is a closed format, with specs written by Adobe and that's all. In reality PDF is extensible, and there are several companies that have defined their own extensions. There is for example PDF/X and Certified PDF.
One very strange thing about the PDF format is that while it is documented, some details are kept secret. This is the case for example for the formulas used to calculate PDF 1.4 blend modes: All you can do is guess how Adobe is doing it. This is a very bad thing. PDF is now becoming the standard for document exchange and print (much like PostScript has always been, but also for other areas than where PostScript has always been used). If there is no definite interpretation of certain features that everyone agrees on, this can be a serious problem. When printing a document you could get completely different results than intended. - Anonymous
May 12, 2004
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May 12, 2004
Samuel, 65% is the percentage of Pro in the user base of legal copies, which includes corporate users. I am not sure why you would treat a company that has 100,000 users of Office Pro as a single user.
RTF: RTF is actually used a lot more than you might think - not so much as a word processor document format as a way to carry formatting on text blobs. Many vertical market applications use it as the way to pass formatted text around and between applications. For kicks, try copying text out of any app that uses formatted text, and then check the clipboard to see if RTF is available - it is more common for this use than HTML actually. There are also several small-audience text processors that use RTF (e.g. for movie scripts). When they open a Word doc saved as RTF, naturally they can't display many parts of the Word document - this is more a function of their lack of features relative to Word than it is difficulty with RTF.
HTML: the point of using CSS to roundtrip word processing capabilities not supported in HTML was to make it possible to use a format for documents that could be viewed in any browser to amke the information more accessible.
XML: there is actually quite a lot of info on how to support XML in Word. Check some of these out:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/xmloffice/tools/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/xmloffice/articles/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnofftalk/html/odc_office01012004.asp">http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/xmloffice/articles/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnofftalk/html/odc_office01012004.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/xmloffice/articles/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/word/articles/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/word/articles/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dno2k3ta/html/odc_of_wordxmschemas.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a56446b0-2c64-4723-b282-8859c8120db6&displaylang=en
If I am showing this snobbishness you mention, please let me know (with examples) so I can either explain or modify my writing style. Thanks. A bientôt. - Anonymous
May 12, 2004
BTW, a good blog to read if you are interested in building on Word's XML support is John Durant's: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnrdurant - Anonymous
June 01, 2004
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June 01, 2004
Hi Samuel,
Actually, I am trying my best to answer your questions. Above, I wrote "65% is the percentage of Pro in the user base of legal copies". "legal copies" does not include pirated copies, which we can't track directly of course. If pirates generally take the Pro version, then the percentage would be even higher.
How exactly would you propose to put RTF "out of its misery"? It is used all over the place and relied on by many other companies. We have to keep supporting it even if we didn't want to. RTF has a place too - as you say, HTML is inadequate to carry the kind of information word processors need, so RTF fills that role pretty nicely, since it was designed for that purpose.
Regarding XML support, when you say that "Microsoft [doesn't] want to help anybody", you are actually referring to me and my colleagues. I can assure you that we added our XML support because we felt it would be valuable to our customers - it would help them. I would not say that a large number of customers were complaining about the lack of XML support although some were, that is true. Largely they did not know what XML is, and are just finding out now.
Bear in mind that my job actually consists not only of responding to complaints or user requests, but also understanding what future technical needs our customers will have (often before they know it or understand the technology themselves) and building the product to meet those future needs. If we waited until a significant portion of our customers knew well enough what they wanted that they could ask us for it, it would then take 2-3 years for us to respond from that point with a new product - way too late for them and even later for those customers that are ahead of the curve. Instead, we have the situation we are in today where many customers are pleasantly surprised that we thought about their needs and built in the kind of XML support we have that allows them to hook Word into their business processes.
The point of your last two paragraphs eludes me to some extent. You seem to be criticizing the company for listening to its customers. The section you quoted is simply relating a fact - some customers have a concern that too much of their corporate info is stuck on their desktops - so we are trying to help; not just with file formats, but also portal software, search technologies, etc. Are you sure you are not falling into the trap of simply criticizing whatever the company does? - Anonymous
July 11, 2004
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July 11, 2004
Parl, did you have a specific question? if you're talking about reveal codes, see the third paragraph in the previous post: http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/archive/2004/04/28/122374.aspx
For your bug on table styles, I tried the steps you describe and could not reproduce it. The text accepted the paragraph style just fine. Can you send me the document, or post it somewhere? (BTW, from your description it sort of sounds like rather than applying a paragraph style, you applied a new table to the paragraph, forcing Word to create a nested table - is that by any chance what you did?) - Anonymous
August 04, 2004
You shouldn't take anything posted on the internet to heart. There are a lot of people out there who love the ability to flame anonymously and will do so inevitably. Nothing can be done about it except to try and ignore them. - Anonymous
April 04, 2008
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