Popularity ≠ superiority. Proprietary text document formats is yet another proof of Microsoft’s crookedness—their subpar products only able to stay afloat by unethical anti-competitive behaviour.
Popularity ≠ superiority. Proprietary text document formats is yet another proof of Microsoft’s crookedness—their subpar products only able to stay afloat by unethical anti-competitive behaviour.
Some of this is the fault of the design of Word. Even modern versions have direct formatting in the Home tab, to the left (chronologically “before” for people used to left-to-right paradigms) of the styles box. The styles box itself becomes rapidly less accessible if the window is not full sized.
If they moved direct formatting to a formatting tab, had a more focused concept of styles, and possibly repurposed some of the direct formatting buttons for quick style application, people would use them a lot more reliably without any training.
I’m less hopeful. People would just switch to the formatting tab and use that. Most people center text on a title page by repeatedly hitting the enter key to go down and then the space key to go right and then they get to the next page by pressing the enter key until they get to the first line of the next page like they’re using a typewritter.