Got a weird thing to show you, so tell all the boys and girls

A friend of mine works in an office where all the systems keep crashing. Email doesn't work, applications are losing data and user log ins fail. IT suspects the problems stem from their recent upgrade to the new version of Word.

Putting out my short stories on Kindle (here, ici et voila) required coding HTML and graphics, zipping and uploading it to Amazon, checking in two different applications and adapting to the quirks of same. Publishing on Smashwords would have required updating manscript(s) in Word. At which point I thought fuck that, and returned to my (new) writing. I don't have time for that shit.

I wrote my first novel in Word 4. On a Mac Plus with an external 30 megabyte hard drive. Word 4 was brilliant. Word 5 we were told to avoid. 5.1 was tolerable: more features than you needed but the keystroke to capture and move a paragraph up or down was useful. I think Word 6 was not Mac native code – Apple was a dying company, and Microsoft ruled the world. I lost track of the next versions. I became so frustrated I briefly attempted working in Claris Works. (A benchmark of desperation.) Then I discovered Final Draft and started working in that.

Final Draft is not perfect either but it is simple. One font, thank you; one page layout, automatic page numbering (top r/h corner), para and linespacing preset (1.5, with a line break after each para), and that's it. You write in scenes (or chapters) which can be viewed as index cards and, most wonderfully, moved around in chunks. Prints one way, too; saves to easy to locate back up folder. There are some production planning features for real screenwriters which I don't require. I block out a treatment in FD (automatic scene numbering) and then write in the app or in Text Wrangler and drop them in. Just like typing.

Word could do all that, of course: the problem is getting it to do just that and no more. 'You can configure it,' as my friend Paul Reynolds loved to goad – we would bang on about Word the way other men talk about sports – but no matter what macros I deleted or features I switched off, something else would pop up: an auto address complete, a custom ellipsis, a line that demanded to be Helvetica bold italic underline, the pod bay doors that wouldn't open. That's why I started working on laptops: they're easier to throw across the room.

I still have a copy of Word on my computer and flinch when I have to open it. I don't know anyone who enjoys using the application. It puzzles me that after decades of computers and software becoming better, faster, sleeker, simpler that Word only gets harder, more tangled, more complicated, less reliable.