Word. Dugg.
Wow! Hello Digg effect. Apparently my post about the proper way to use Word struck a nerve or two.
I want to talk about two things regarding this post.
1. The comments: LaTeX and OpenOffice
The comments about my post all seem to relate to OpenOffice or LaTeX being better than Word. I don't necessarily disagree, either. Many times, I have posted on my blog about how useful LaTeX is, and I'm a huge supporter of both OpenOffice and its Mac equivalent NeoOffice.
In a perfect world, I would typeset about 90% of my documents using LaTeX and the other 10% using OpenOffice (for more graphically complicated layouts, WYSIWYG really is easier than structural markup).
But our world isn't perfect. I have to use Word for work. Although OpenOffice achieves an impressively high degree of compatibility with M$ Office, there are still annoying import errors — especially on documents with complicated tables (the type that I produce at the consulting firm where I work). I tried using OpenOffice and it caused nothing but headaches and me getting screamed at for my documents not looking right. And I do have to admit that OpenOffice is (a) a bit slow and (b) a bit of a memory hog. Hopefully the developers will continue to work on that. And nobody in my field uses LaTeX, which is a real shame.
Besides, the point of the article was not that Word is a superior choice, but that Word users should use the structured document features of their word processor instead of treating it like a typewriter. This applies to OpenOffice users as well. The fact of the matter is that most writing professionals still use Word, and I'm tired of them sending me garbled crap.
Finally, I'm surprised that nobody flamed me about Lout being better.
2. The Digg effect
[Updated: 18 April 06]
My blog went from having about 30 views/day to a max of 34,801. I know that some sites get that kind of traffic every day, but I don't, and I'm in awe of the velocity of the interweb at the moment. Traffic the next day was a little under 1/2 what it was on Digg day, with some rebound traffic from del.icio.us and Lifehacker. I expect it will gradually drop until I'm back in my own blog ghosttown, which is fine. And I noticed that my blog was at the top of the WordPress.com Hot Blogs Today list, which was scary.
Right now I'm trying to come up with some other innovative articles that I could write. I thought about an intro to LaTeX, but that's been done many times over. I suspect that part of what made the Word post so popular was that almost everyone uses (or has used) word, and they're aware of all these other features that they've never used, but nobody has ever shown them how to use them or what they do. If this is true, maybe a little Excel tutorial should be in order. Any ideas? My addy is "disinterested" at the domain associated with the free email service provided by Google.
Oh yeah, a huge shoutout to the WordPress.com guys for making such a great service. I see so many pages hit the Digg frontpage then disappear forever due to the load, and that didn't happen here. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it.
