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#msword

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Public
Phil

Factors:
1. Accessibility. Not everyone has really fast (or stable) internet.
2. Environmental. There's no reason to use more computing power than necessary for the task at hand. It's wasteful. Very few people need the fancy features advanced text editors introduce.
3. Interoperability. Text files I write and send are readable *everywhere.* Try loading up Google Docs on a 1024x768 screen with a 256MB RAM Pentium 3. You'll be lucky if Google Docs even loads.
4. Privacy. A text file is easy to protect. GPG is the most straightforward. It remains small, and there's no way middle-men can read it. Google Docs? Google has root and they're not encrypted from them. So, good luck.
5. Account requirements. Text files require no accounts anywhere. All you need it an Internet connection and a DNS server that'll point your computer the right way. SaaS requires that you also have up-to-date software, a powerful computer, and that you register an account with them to access files shared with you.
6. Storage space. A text file takes kilobytes. A .docx file takes megabytes. My daily journal, which granted has some meta-data but is still plain text, is nearing on 580kb after three years of diligent, detailed journaling. I can't help but doubt that Word would even open a .docx file that large if formatted natively. (Thousands of headings, links, timestamps, etc.)
6. Feature-set. Plain text lets you do enough for 99% of all tasks. Yes, it's not as pretty, but within the bounds of putting characters into a file, you have complete freedom. Proprietary services, on the other hand, have a very very rich feature-set, most of which is irrelevant for 99% of users. The drawback of this is that every user is forced to load these rarely-used functions onto their own computer when the applications load up. That's wasteful, and likely cost the world hundreds of millions in unnecessary energy expenditure already.

TL;DR: Use plain text unless you absolutely positively can't help it. It's seriously better in every way.

#plaintext #emacs #txt #notepad #bloat #bloatware #saas #googledocs #msword #microsoftword #rant

RE: https://fed.bajsicki.com/notes/a6uy06mot0

IpseityIpseityA family instance.
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Public
AnneTheWriter

@UnCoveredMyths

Remember, #Office365 has everything that you enter into it also go into their #AI called #CoPilot .This might not bother you, but if the subject of AI scraping your documents is important to you, then try to find an older offline copy of #MSWord . But then one problem would be to have a copy of Word on every device you use.

You can also use #LibreOffice (which I am told is very similar to Word) or #GoogleDocs (a Cloud program that probably shares your data to Google's AI), which is very similar to Word.

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petersuber

Update. As you can see, I welcome #AI training on my (nonfiction) publications.

But I hate the idea of AI training on my unpublished drafts. Among other things it could make my future publications look plagiarized or AI-assisted. If you share that aversion, and if you use #MSWord (even if rarely and reluctantly like me), I urge you to turn off the setting that gives #Microsoft permission to train its AI tools on your docs.
medium.com/illumination/ms-wor

Thx to @clawrenc for the alert.

ILLUMINATION · MS Word is Using You to Train AI - ILLUMINATION - MediumBy Dr. Casey Lawrence
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

medium.com/illumination/ms-wor

ILLUMINATION · MS Word is Using You to Train AI - ILLUMINATION - MediumBy Dr. Casey Lawrence
#Microsoft#AI#GenerativeAI
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petersuber

Update. I just remembered a related peeve, this time about Microsoft Word. Grown ups with PhDs employed by a major university once asked me to re-submit a letter of recommendation I wrote for a colleague because it wasn't in MS Word. It had to be in Word to be "official" (their word).
web.archive.org/web/2019031620

web.archive.orgThe last Word. I recently wrote a letter of recommendation for a colleague w...The last Word. I recently wrote a letter of recommendation for a colleague who was applying for a senior position at a major public university in the U... - Peter Suber - Google+
#Formats#MSWord
Public
nathans :ms_weed:

Musk gets fact-checked by Twitter community, engages in petty public spat

Elon Musk, who was forced to buy Twitter for $44 billion and is doing everything he can to make it as trustworthy as a self-driving Tesla, was corrected on his own platform today for a misleading tweet.

"Microsoft Word now scolds you if you use words that aren't 'inclusive'!" tweeted the world's saddest billionaire. He included a screenshot of a Word document with the word "insane" underlined and a pop-up that reads, "Inclusiveness – This term implies mental health bias."

However, as Twitter Community Notes users pointed out, "This feature has been available in Microsoft Word since at least 2020 and has to be turned on manually." It links to a July 2020 article in How-To Geek titledt links to a July 2020 article in How-To Geek titled "How to Check for Inclusive Language in Microsoft Word."

#News #Elon #Musk #ElonMusk #X #Twitter #Microsoft #Word #MSWord

boingboing.net/2023/12/15/musk

Boing Boing · Musk Corrected on Twitter for Misleading Inclusivity Tweet Elon Musk gets a reality check from Twitter users for his misleading tweet about Microsoft Word's inclusivity feature
Public
Sören

“What’s a good language for long-form printed documents” seems to come up every other year at my company.

#LaTeX? Inscrutable. #MSWord? Unreliable and difficult to version-control. #Markdown? Poor support for print layout.

Looks like #Typst, now OSS, is a recent contender: typst.app/docs/tutorial/writin (via old.reddit.com/r/programming/c)

TypstWriting in Typst – Typst DocumentationTypst's tutorial.
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Kath Kirk

Why, hello there! I guess I'd better do the intro thing too.

I'm Kath Kirk, and I run Gecko Edit. Basically, my job is to help make the #Words gooder. I toot about #Editing, #ConsciousLanguage, the #Craft of #Writing, #Editing #Conferences, #MSWord #Hacks, and whatever other stuff caught my #Focus that day. I'm #Neurodivergent and #Queer and I live on a volcano in the Andes.

CIEP Professional Member

Also: #StetWalk, #AmReading, #GeckoTips, #WordsHavePower, #ScienceFiction, #Fantasy, #TTRPG

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