Vortex editorial: thoughts from the centre

Weakness of Wizards

There is, near where I live, a local community college which provides an impressive array of adult education courses. Among these is one which claims to teach people desktop publishing. The problem is, they only use PCs (even the most fanatical PC magazines use Macs in the production department), and everything is done in Microsoft Word. Anyone under the impression that the course is a stepping-stone into a publishing career will be in for an unpleasant shock. How on earth did this situation arise? I mean, Word is good and all that (although I rarely use it), but a page layout tool it ain’t!

The problem here is that Word tries to do too much. Over the years Microsoft added all sorts of complex features into Word, most of them not actually relevant to the core duties of a word processor. When most users got stuck trying to use many of these features, rather than rethink the processes, Microsoft added Wizards to do things for them.

On the surface this may not seem like such a bad thing. It means someone can produce more than just basic styled typing by making some choices and clicking some buttons. But is this really much help in the long term? What if something needs to be changed afterwards, or if the options just don’t match the user’s needs? As the end users never really learned how the features in the program actually work, they’ll be left high and dry.

Wizards, assistants - call them what you like, they are actually an indication of a failure in software design. If the thing is so damned easy to use, why does someone need a digital helper, pushing their work into a canned, prefabricated look? Ready-made style producers aren’t really there to help people learn how to use the software better, they are there to hide the flaws which make it confusing and difficult in the first place.

I use a word processor to process words. I may use formatting features to smarten things up, but to make page layouts I turn to, logically enough, a page layout program. Ok, I have an unfair advantage, having access to most software on the market. But the point is this: there are jobs and there are tools, and using the wrong tool for a job will always make your life harder.

This goes as much for those designers that type their correspondence in QuarkXPress (yes, you know who you are) as the businessmen and women that try to put together complex corporate reports or even Websites with what is really a glorified digital typewriter. The designers are likely to have a copy of Word or AppleWorks kicking around already, but the business-level users are less likely to have QuarkXPress, Dreamweaver or Freeway, or the energy required to learn how to use them.

By all means learn to use a word processor in order to write and format word processing-style documents. But when you want to stretch your horizons - perhaps producing reports with charts, photographs, multiple text columns and professional output - if you don’t learn another tool pronto you are, to put it technically, stuffed. You could try a Wizard, and if it happens to be set up for what you want, you’re in luck. If not, well...

There are two messages here. If you’re involved in making software, don’t believe that adding Wizards to get users over difficult processes is actually a good solution; if something is hard to grasp, your software has a major flaw. If, like most of us, you’re an end user, then always remember that just because your favourite application is good for some things doesn’t mean it is good for everything. Use the right tools for the job, and learn how to use them. In the end you’ll be able to do more, and do it with less effort. And isn’t that what you bought your Mac for in the first place?

Speaking of using the right tools, you’re probably wondering what I use if I don’t use Word. Well, I use something I made myself, which does exactly what I need - text editing and a live wordcount - and nothing more. I call it Wordless, and it is the perfect tool for my job.