Moving to non-Word formats [long] (was: Re: Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Peter Flynn]

On 15/06/2020 12:34, Chris Green wrote:[...]
 > Do the files *really* need all that layout and formatting?  You can
 > get pretty good results using any of various markup languages, many
 > used by Wikis and such, and they're easy to search using grep.

It's an interesting question. In the case of conventional office 
documents like letters sent as PDF or even on paper or for short reports 
and other disposable ephemera, no, all that elaborate formatting is a 
massive waste of time.

But retraining office staff to think in terms of *data* instead of 
*appearance* is probably not cost-effective. Bear in mind that 30 years 
of Microsoft (and other; remember WordPerfect?) marketing spend has been 
concentrated on the message IF IT LOOKS PRETTY IT MUST BE RIGHT.

*That* is why people love fiddling with the font drop-downs and other 
prettifications. Playing with fonts is fun, even more so when it's on 
your employer's dime. Plus the editor interfaces for non-wordprocessor 
markup systems are uniformly ghastly when seen from the non-user PoV.

Office users no longer think about *why* they format things in a certain 
way: to them it's just bold or italics or a new font. In fact, I suspect 
they don't even know why; it's become habitual to do things a certain 
way, and that involves manual reformatting all day, every day.

A few users do eventually stop and say "this is madness; there must be 
an easier way", and that's a good source of new users for HTML, LaTeX, 
Markdown, and other systems. But the rest simply believe that the 
purpose of a computer is to make things look pretty: they are unaware 
that computers can actually even do other stuff apart from 
wordprocessing, spreadsheets, and browser.

The retraining cost is high, because you are changing people's 
mind-sets. And it's up-front, because you need to use trainers who know 
what they are doing, and charge accordingly. Companies are unwilling to 
make the change, especially when the benefits won't accrue for a couple 
of years (bear in mind that their accountants will insist on an RoI of a 
month or so, and management — like sheep — believe them).

Trying to persuade the beancounters to accept benefits like 'time saved' 
or 'more accurate' is hard when there is little concrete data to go on. 
Cost-free software isn't important: commercial software licenses are 
trivial in comparison to other business expenses — otherwise companies 
would long ago have made the switch.

Professionals in business do indeed curse and swear at Word and all the 
other paraphernalia of office software "productivity solutions" because 
they fail to do what is needed; but while the rest of the world contnues 
to use them, so will they and everyone else.

Except people in a position to determine their own software. That's 
Linux users, and users of other markup/down systems on other platforms. 
We should at least be shouting more about how much better we can do.

Peter