Complete nonsense. No-one needs a desktop publishing program
(which is what Word has become) to type a letter.
Yes, they do, if they want a nice-looking letter.
But...
Excuse while I roll on the floor laughing.
Microsoft might want us to _think_ Word is a DTP, but it's anything but.
It's an excellent word processor that has been tarted up with features that
give the illusion -- to the ignorant -- that it's suitable for DTP.
I cut my DTP teeth with the "original" Ventura Publisher, versions 2 and 3,
almost 20 years ago. Those "primitive" versions, which ran under GEM
(Graphics Environment Manager) utterly and totally blow away the current
versions of Word (and, I assume, WP and other word processors) for producing
long, complex documents. * And they're actually easier to use, because they
give you direct control over what you're doing, rather than automating it.
Word has major flaws that make it virtually useless for complex documents,
and even for a lot of simple ones. The worst of these is its unstable image
placement. You cannot insert an image, then expect it to either remain where
you put it, or move the way you want with the text flow. Last year I spent
several hours in a largely unsuccessful attempt to organize the graphics in
a co-worker's document. Once I got it "right", adding text or new images
caused the exisiting images to irrationally shift position, which then
required starting over.
Another problem is that, though Word can create TOCs pretty much by the user
saying "Put a TOC here", TOC formatting is unstable, and often requires
manual alterations to make the TOC look the way you want.
No one at Microsoft seems to care about these problems. And they're not
new -- I was complaining about some of them over a decade ago. For example,
there's a bug that causes Word to spontaneously switch to automatic
repagination for no obvious reason. This bug has persisted across the last
four or five versions.
It might sound paradoxical, but in making products "easy" to use, software
developers often make them harder to use -- at least if you're the sort of
person who cares about what they're doing, and is willing to make the effort
to learn. For example, in Ventura you have to manually insert an anchor for
each image. In exchange for that bit of work, you can choose how the image
will flow with the text -- and it _will_ flow correctly. Word's "automatic"
image-anchoring feature is not only much less flexible, but it's confusing
to use -- and doesn't work correctly, anyway.
The Wordpad (or Write) program included with Windows is good enough
for most letters. It's only real failing is the inability to introduce your own
page breaks. I expect MS did that for fear of crippling sales of Office.
I write for a living. Write is a near-featureless program that _might_ be
suitable for plain letters, but is pretty much useless for anything other
than very plain text. No one in their "write" mind would use Write to write
letters. It's a clunky, slow, poorly designed piece of software.
Word can produce handsome, attractive documents -- if you know how to use
it. Most people don't. They write as if the computer were a typewriter,
rather than using styles for formatting. The result is ugly, hard-to-edit
documents. (Yes, I've had to clean them up. It's appalling.) If you use Word
(or any other good word processor) the way it's supposed to be used, you
have no need or use for Write. **
I depend on Word for non-complex documents, and it doesn't let me down. I
have a 120K-word unpublished novel created with Word. I could convert it --
in a just a few minutes -- to whatever page-layout and typographic format a
publisher wanted.
There is a paradox. In general, software with a shallow learning curve (that
is, that takes a while to learn) *** is often easier to use, because the
slow learning process is the result of the program letting you do what you
want to do -- you don't have to fight the program's "automation" -- or the
fact that the designer didn't anticipate the particular way you want to do
something. A good example is Ventura's TOC and index formatting. They take a
bit of time to become familiar with, but you can achieve pretty much
anything you want. And TOC and indexing creation is bug-free and stable.
* By complex, I mean multi-chapter documents with complex tables of contents
and indexes, tables and cross-references, and flexibly-but-stably-anchored
images, with virtually any formatting the user wants. Such documents are
difficult to do in Word, but are a snap in Ventura.
** I find it amazing that people refuse to spend a few hours to learn how to
use a word processor _correctly_. Once you're proficient, the savings in
time and frustration are huge.
*** I am perennially annoyed by people complaining that a product has a
"steep" learning curve. As "learning curves" would be plotted as "amount
learned" against time, a steep curve is _exactly_ what you'd want.