Dave Pawson wrote:

>Then add that to the fact that 80% of office (Writer |Word) users
>only ever use 20% of the functionality,
>  
>
I have heard this lament about office so often over the past 5
years........we use only 10% of our brains but  dont consider this an
intrinsically bad characteristic.

Just getting to the critical mass of functionality in an application
lets say like 'notepad' is heroic in my opinion, Word is massive,
emacs....well I wont even start.

I think that multiple overlapping interfaces/functionality is one way to
ensure adoption/usage across a broad spectrum of users with
software....so the argument could be that everyone gets a measure of
bloatware for the common good (an analogy could be made with
biodiversity and everyone/thing living walking around with lots of
useless genetic code).

for my 2 crowns, i generally agree with Uche O. comments and would like
to always be able to escape to my own home cooked xml format for whatever.

as a seperate thought....how long will it be before we start seeing
automated composition of documents for human consumption...not talking
newspages on Yahoo, or rss aggregation; we have a 10 finger speed limit
on the creation of documents currently...with magnitude increase of data
(live and historical) I can see a tipping point where are at a minimum
assisted authoring may come more into effect. How does this affect the
authoring experience within an application like Word?

cheers, Jim Fuller