Can We All Just Stop Using Word Documents?

It won’t come as a surprise to many of you that I really dislike Word documents. I think they have some serious issues and shortcomings. For example:

• Difficult to collaborate around - Hard to make parallel changes and merge to a master copy
• Difficult to maintain consistency - One erroneous copy-and-paste can destroy the formatting
• Hard to version control - Appending v1, v2, etc to the end of documents is a poor work-around
• Difficult to maintain chain of custody - Who made these changes? Are these valid?
• Difficult to control access - general sharing pattern is to email, which is a whole other issue
• Requires proprietary software - Ethical argument more than anything

But I can’t work without Word!

Sure you can! Have you tried Google docs? It has:

• Much simpler layout (sure, it has less ‘features’ but how many do you actually use?)
• Better sharing and security model - can control who has access, whether they can view or edit and who they can share with
• Real time updates
• The ‘suggested updates’ feature is much much easier to use than ‘track changes’
• Built in revision history and ability to revert to older versions
• Built in change tracking with timestamp and author

Even better - Try a Wiki!

Even if Google docs has made serious improvements on the way we handle documents, it is still bound by the outdated concept of a document. It is related to the days when most things would be printed and so is still bound by ideas like ‘pages’. If you are actually writing for print, then great, but I never do. For information that is designed to work online only a Wiki is a solid choice. It is a living document and a single source of truth. All updates are immediately available and often the team can self-correct the information by submitting changes.

The right tool for the right job

OK, OK! Despite the title, I don’t totally discount Word. There are places where it is the best tool for the job (for now). One area might be law firms or other places requiring traditional, general-purpose editing of documents where cloud based tools are considered too risky. My point is that those situations are the exception rather than the rule and even inside companies like that, most of the communication could be improved by something like a wiki. There may be a contract document that needs to be released to a client, but all the research, collaboration and internal company documents could be easily converted to a wiki.