We probably need a clear definition of what we mean by ‘plain text’ On this level I could argue that MS Word uses plain text characters.
This forum is far from a plain text forum IMO. Unrendered markdown is plain text but most people want the rendered version. When Obsidian renders the markdown, it’s no longer plain text, but rich text. Which is exactly what MS Word does although in a different way.
Even as I can firmly agree on some of the conceptual proposals being posited here, I will continue to disagree (sometimes adamantly) on the assumptions behind and the practical assessments of the costs, resources, and time required to implement those concepts successfully into practice.
I intend no personal insults in my bluntness.
In the meantime, discussions are devolving into the nuts-and-bolts level feasibilities of individually-championed answers, even as the conceptual designs for the problem at hand are not yet well framed. Indeed, in retrospect, I am starting to wonder if the problem at hand is even yet well enough framed to engage in the nuts and bolts discussions. Or if such nuts-and-bolts level discussions are fraying this thread disruptively.
With due respect in realizing the above, and to waylay continuing in my own bad engineering habit of enthusiastically promoting solutions to a problem that does not yet exist, I will step back.
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JJW
There seems to be an increasing number of knowledgeable people who are expecting an AI native operating system to emerge within the next year or two. One that might be rapidly adopted.
We all may be playing a game while the rules are changing.
I could not agree with this more! I suspect that we’ve constructed workflows designed to fill a software-shaped hole in the form of a legacy, 40 year old Office suite rather than creating a new suite of tools that meet our current workplaces’ needs. Were we designing an enterprise-grade word-processing app from scratch today, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t look much like Word or its brethren. We just don’t need an all-purpose, everything from a one-page memo to a multi-page, full-color product brochure Swiss army knife of a software program on every desktop anymore.
These tools already exist. I believe the reason MS office is still so popular is because it is needed. Bear in mind that Office development hasn’t remained stationary.
I’m sorry, but that’s way too general. It certainly doesn’t cover my situation. In the corporate world printed style documents are still needed. As are documents that require rich text. I suspect that except for coders many others require some form of rich text. Even markdown itself is a recognition of needing rich text (unless of course your end product is not rendered).
In reality if plain text was all that was needed everyone would be using a plain text editor. We are probably not talking about just using plain text, but more about how much rich text do we actually need? And this varies massively from simple markdown to multimarkdown to MS Office and Adobe Indesign.
I believe MS Office has its place and I’m glad it is there. I may not use all its features all the time, but sure am glad I can do so many things with it. I like its feature richness as it solves so many day-to-day office problems as well as many others.
And let’s face it. Unless you are genuinely only using plain text there is still some form of vendor lock-in. Just look at Ulysses Markdown XL. It’s all but a proprietary format. Apple Creator Studio is moving in that direction also. MS Word is perhaps the least locked in format. You can batch convert with Pandoc. If you’re files are all in Pages it’s not so easy.
It might help to think about the process of writing and reading documents as two different things: each with its own requirements and expectations. What’s good for one might not always be good for the other.
Text has evolved for at least 5,000 years (and maybe much, much longer). Pretty much everything we take for granted (spaces between words, paragraphs, margins…) evolved as a way to make things easier for readers and many (but certainly not all of them) are helpful to readers and indirectly to writers. A document is much more than its plain text content: we communicate so much by our choice of typography, layout, even the paper we might print on.
I’d say we have to have a suitable degree of “richness” to produce the range of documents we might want to communicate. HOW we produce them is much more open - Latex is capable of producing almost any document you can think of, but it’s about as far from the final, rendered version as it is possible to get. WYSIWYG was and is a very powerful concept and removes many obstacles - allowing non-experts to produce documents comparable with those of what were highly skilled experts before it came along. But neither Latex nor Word is the right tool for producing all kinds of documents: especially as we are now stretching the concept of “document” so far beyond ink on paper.
I’d guess that the next revolution in text will avoid the need to use a keyboard, but persuading people who are so heavily invested in their keyboard skills to change will not be easy. We stick with things like MS Office because the vast majority of users have spent many years developing skills to use it and so have a deep and instinctive grasp of how to produce something with it. Similarly, Markdown is popular (where it is) because it adopts the skill set that its users have in their fingers (coders love it - especially if they never have to lift their fingers from their keyboard).
Horses for courses. Documents and their tools to make them will continue to evolve, but there are many, many reasons it won’t happen quickly.
Let me reassure you that I am not proposing that plain text is all we need! Far from it. My experience in both for-profit and non-profit organizations has only underlined the need—and frankly, the desire—for the thoughtful, flexible, and aesthetically pleasing production of text in all its forms, whether on a screen or a piece of paper. My point is, we don’t need to put an all-in-one tool designed for the workplace of 40 years ago on every desktop and mandate its use for work that doesn’t require its capabilities. Word is terrific if you know how to use it correctly, but at best a source of frustration if you don’t. We can give people who don’t need to produce purpose-built text a better tool.
This is an excellent summary of my position as well.
A friend of mine works for a company that puts a line at the bottom of every email, asking people to stop and think before they print it out - does this email really need to be printed? They’re not saying “don’t print this.” They’re saying to think about it for a second.
That’s what I’m driving at with text. I’m not suggesting that everything has to be plain text and/or Markdown. I’m suggesting that companies think about their use cases - specially if there’s concern about a business risk to continuing to use Office. For many of those use cases, a basic text editor - or a slightly-less-basic free Markdown editor - would swap in just fine.
A number of formats can be opened in and exported from Google Docs, including .dotx, .odt, .rtf, and .md. The wrinkle is that a .gdoc file isn’t a document itself: it’s a shortcut to a document stored in Google’s cloud.
I agree that it is one of the least locked in formats. And the same is true for other MS formats (xlsx, etc). I can’t recall ever being asked if I have MS Office. Microsoft Office formats have been the standard for businesses for decades and people assume everyone can open them.
Even Google added the ability to directly edit Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) in Workspace a few years ago.
With the exception of a few online sites, I never found any third party way to convert Pages and Numbers documents to another format. YMMV.
Until literally a month ago, I was still using Word, Excel and PP for making most of my documents. This is because, even though I draft in outline/mindmap and then markdown, at some point it has to be put into Word, because that’s my company (and industry) standard. It’s easier to get into it sooner rather than later, so you can start faffing around with style sets and TOCs.
However I’ve been using Claude Cowork for the last month and I honestly think this could radically change how we all use Microsoft Office documents. It makes Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents that are incredible. Like, vastly better than I would have the time, inclination or ability to create. And you don’t even need to open the document to do it. It just appears in the project folder, fully formed.
I just gave a presentation to some students and, when I wrote it, I basically sat there for 40 minutes chatting to Claude about what I wanted from each slide, having it do research now and again and critique what I was saying. Then I pointed it at my company’s branding guidelines, left it for 10 minutes, and what it came up with was mind blowing. Easily the best presentation I’ve ever made.
It wasn’t just headers and bullets. Flow diagrams, embedded images, box outs, colour squares. Every slide was different with a clear visual design. Hell, it even summarised the key points into the Notes part so I could refer to them in presenter view.
It’s the same with Word & Excel. I’ve been writing things in chat and just getting it to make these flawless documents at the end. And as for Excel, well, it’s impeccable.
I had this dizzying realisation the other day - I never need to format another word, excel or powerpoint ever again. For an office worker like me, who has spent hundreds if not thousands of wasted hours awkwardly laying out our Microsoft Office docs, this was a revelation.
But then I found something else, it will do PDFs that are just as good. I gave it a CV and wanted it to re-order it and add a new section. Which it did, flawlessly.
It later occurred to me - if I no longer need to create Word Docs by opening them and typing into them, but instead have Claude just poof a file into existence that looks better than if I did it by hand, how long before I stopped needing Word at all?
Why not just use PDFs instead? Document branding is a weird necessity in life, and PDFs let you make things fully branded far better than Word does. The downside is that it’s a pain to edit - but Claude just eliminates that particular problem.
Not everyone will be as AI-forward as I am, but it was only released last month and for me it’s already made the old idea of typing into Word obsolete. I think if others share this experience in the coming years, then the traditional paradigm of office documents could be under threat. The idea of keeping it simple when you create and getting your AI to gussy it up at the end could become the norm.
I’m sure I’ve shaved years off of my life from the stress of re-jiggering PowerPoint presentations for the umpteenth time because some in senior management had a whim about logo placement or animated bullets or whatever. It would be a literal life-saver to hand that nonsense off to a bot.
OnlyOffice Desktop Editor may work; give it a shot.
Thanks, but I converted all Pages and Number files to MS formats after reading about Creator Studio. Then installed LibreOffice and deleted Pages & Numbers.
The only Apple apps I currently use, that contain important data, are Health, Messages, Photos, and Wallet.
For me It was more dragging an image down a couple of lines in Word to find that it affected something on another page 6 lower.
Something I find incredible is that I can only auto-save if I save to OneDrive. I think that’s absurd in the year of our lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six.
That is impressive!!
I wonder if the more accurate word is “expected”. It’s the norm and very much a paradigm. Having said that, until there is a better paradigm, it’s probably here to stay.
Perhaps, MS Office is akin to the wheel and fire! 
Edit: just read @nfdksdfkh post, maybe the new paradigm is here! 
I’m going to try that today!
My Microsoft Word randomly defaults to different languages… IN DIFFERENT LINES ON THE SAME DOCUMENT.
WHOA! I just had the same experience. I’m ready to hand all of my document prep over to Claude. I was prepping for a conference call about some of the gnarly by-ways of non-profit accounting. I gave Claude some context, identified the issue the organization needs to resolve, and asked for some help researching the relevant accounting standards. All fine and good: I got exactly the kind of help I’d expect with this kind of query, plus a nice four-tab Excel workbook I could use for scenario analysis. I asked for an outline I could hand out to guide the upcoming discussion. I expected bullet points; what I got was a gorgeous Word document with sensible headings, numbered lists, tables, headers, footers, and footnotes. It’s so pretty I’m saving it as one of my Word templates.