Microsoft Word

The JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. Go Premium Getting rid of those carriage returns one stroke at a time Technology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

“Track changes is the thief of joy.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

Microsoft Word
/ˈmaɪkrəsɒft wɜːd/ (n.)

Word processing software that never quite managed to sort out auto-paragraph numbering but nonetheless sweeps all other office word-processing software before it.

Refuseniks may prefer Microsoft PowerPoint (if trained in middle management) or even Microsoft Excel (if accountancy) as a canvass for composing documents. But the days of purpose-built alternative word-processing software packages, like Lotus Notes or WordPerfect or even the admirable but, preternaturally doomed open-source application OpenOffice are long gone. Google Docs might survive, but only because it purports to fill a very different need. And, Google.

Legaltechbros have a baffling conviction that their prospective clients are not so utterly fused to Microsoft Word that they will abandon a 40 year vintage class-leading application in favour of a browser-based html editor ginned up over a weekend by some Romanian coder they found on UpWork. This is baffling but may reflect the fact, as noted below, most legaltechbro are lapsed lawyers, lapsed lawyers are generally not good ones, and not particularly good lawyers, as a class, tend to be the ones who are fundamentally ignorant of how powerful Microsoft Word is. As to which:

Formatting

Despite Word’s universality and longevity and their supposedly superior analytical powers, few legal eagles have the first clue how the devil Microsoft Word formatting works. They see the printed output of a document that looked all right to them on screen as some kind of ineffable magic — if it works — or the spurious ministrations of the capricious imp that inhabits their typewriter keyboard, when (as is inevitable) it does not.

It goes without saying that the more nuanced skills — multi-level list numbering, consistently applying pre-defined paragraph and character styles and effectively manipulating tables — are beyond all but the most space-aged legal brains.

But most legal eagles struggle with page breaks and tab stops, instead leaning on the space bar or return key and letting it coast out randomly into the middle of the page, or down until it runs off the bottom and onto a new page.

Will these people embrace ChatGPT-3?

Lawyers usually are quite good at using track changes, however. Lawyers love track changes. They wish you could do track changes on emails and text messages, and will take some pains to replicate track changes by formatting in red strikethrough and blue underlining.

See also

• The lost tribes of Microsoft Office

• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Word

• Paragraph numbering