A Stylish, Painful History

This is a guest post from Steve Hudson, aka the Word Heretic. It originally appeared on the word-pc mailing list in response to a query about customizing Word's style gallery. Steve has been active in the Microsoft Word community since the 1990s. Back in the 2000s, he was delving into the innards of VBA and Word's insanely complex object model. Here he brings us a bit of Word's history and some insights into why Word is the way it is. 

I am totally snowed under rewriting an editing tool at the moment, but this is definitely a customisable feature I am interested in including, as I need it as well. I have gone the QAT route before (with one line macros to implement the style, it’s not rocket science lol), but the customisable gallery option is available as well if you take advantage of the new properties that styles have. I have done a proof of concept on that already Howie, so I refute your ‘an add-in cannot do this’ ;-)

But then again, I am a little strange.

As I am knocking back a few vodkas, let’s get into some serious background here on this issue. Back in about 2002 when I was a Word MVP, they invited a few of us to give an online presentation of our ‘daily macros’. Of course, I had a full interface reworking of the product. Those long-timers on this list will remember those crazy days back then, RIP Maggie. Word was so damn buggy that this list was jumping, and also it was pre the modern MS forums.

Anyhow, this interface of mine included a bunch of features that we slowly see MS introducing in each version. Why didn’t they just do them all at once? Because of enterprise licencing purposes! IE: pay MS a lot of money every year, and MS promises new features every few years. So they are eking out my list of stuff. Examples include pre-made watermarks, and, pertinently, vertical toolbars at each side of the screen, as horizontal monitor space was increasing, but standard Word menus chewed up vertical space. One of these toolbars was my list of styles, as icons.

 Of course, MVP and MS staff jaws thudded to the ground as I unveiled my GUI, and MS followed up with dragging me off to Singapore to pick my brain, with my mentor in tow to keep me in check, as I am a somewhat… unique personality to be polite, or an off the rails raving heretical lunatic, to be more accurate. Whichever you feel more comfortable with :-p

Part of the outcomes from this was a whole new render engine which is why 2007+ releases have elicited a whole new range of display bugs, but also was part of smashing the numbering bugs. Another part was “How do we better present styles for use for technical writers, as compared to ordinary hacks.” Now THIS was a major departure from standard MS thinking, which is, 99% of the time, ONE SIZE SHALL FIT ALL WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT! TLDR: I have ranted against this many times but they won’t budge. They need Word Lite for Grandma, Word for most office users, and Power Word for serious technical style writers, but they won’t ever do that. Instead, we at least get second best. We get the ability to pull up some stuff that average users won’t use, to do our thing.

For Styles We Want Quick Access To, we agreed that it’s template-based, but individual documents may vary that requirement. There was no ‘editor only’ solution, which would be a hard enforced global setting. We were focussed on AUTHORING documents.

 And that is why you have what you have today.

So, skipping forward to 2007 when the new interface came out, we had these newfangled things called Task Panes, as vertical “toolbars” down both sides of the screen. We had “no control over them”, you can google up my article I spent several months fulltime developing for the MVPs that gave you as much control over these as you could have, which basically flew in the face of MS saying “You have no control at all”. When MS saw the interest this drove, they realised they had to open this up, plus they wanted to get rid of the old CommandBars approach, which didn’t fit the newly expanded interface paradigm I helped usher in.

Thus, from 2010 onwards I believe, you could develop Task Panes using XML. I dunno, about the time I finished the Word Heretic’s Task Panes article, I was already receiving grievous amounts of hate mail for “How dare you change the interface on us!” and I fled to Asia and enjoyed a delicious midlife crisis resolution for a number of years before returning to people being generally contented with a much better Word, with a whole bunch less bugs, and a more customisable interface. So I went from 2007 straight to 2016, more or less.

What did I get out of this? The satisfaction of seeing millions of Word users have their major issues SLASHED, and a whole lot less super-problematic document solutions required. Now any old MVP or experienced technical writer can help the vast majority of regular users solve their problems, and the Woodys, Rados and Heretics can relax and get back to writing or drinking beverages of choice.

And I get bragging rights, exercised once every few years pretty well exclusively on this list because this will always remain my home. Ha! Have a great day, people!

Steve Hudson
Word Heretic

Steve's post is © 2020 by Steve Hudson.