Why Businesses Need an Alternative to Microsoft Word

Office automation software needs to evolve

an alternative Word

Word has appeared in business for barely thirty years. Bill Gates with Microsoft was able to impose within each desktop computer and make it standard, sweeping away other word processor that was beginning to emerge to replace typewriters. Companies then invested heavily in training all their teams. These were first the administrative teams, equipped with large desktop computers, then, with exponential sales of lighter, less expensive computers, and laptop computers, it was the turn of the operational and management. Bill Gates had reached his dream: behind every office employee, every frame, there was a computer with its Windows desktop suite installed.

Word, the back of the medal

This technological transition of rupture has left traces in companies. Any new hire needed to know the office suite, "evidence" of its future effectiveness in document construction and communication. Operating procedures and procedures have been put in place to guide the use of these software which has become the norm. The collaborators quickly learned to transform the document by the "magic" of the "copy/paste", ignoring the passage of copyright, swept away by the productivity and power of the tools. It took a few more years and a growing environmental concern for the majority to agree not to print their documents on paper and store them in Word or PDF format. Historically, the reference document was necessarily in a paper format. Moreover, it was composed of pages and each page printed on a paper sheet. The weight of the document was in pages, in sheets. Because of this logic of the paper document, companies quickly found themselves facing increasing volumes. They started by scanning existing paper documents to store them on hard drives, then servers and today in the "cloud", the cloud.

Besides, with the logic of copy-paste,many errors have been generated and initial content quickly escaped their authors.

Word or other word processing is required.

From paper to granularity: technology has evolved!

Born to store digitized "paper" documents, Electronic Document Management (EDM) responds to the needs of companies that now create their documents directly in digital form. However, they continue to record their documentation in pages, with reference to paper printing or PDF format. Thus, Word and its representation of pages remained the norm. Thirty years. Yet technology has ceased to evolve! Now all contents must be broken down into small pieces, granules, composites and modulable between them infinitely. Content, independent of its medium, can be divided, reused... In short, it is no longer possible to quantify a document by its number of pages. However, we continue to retain the paper representation of the document. Why is this attachment to the paper document, with reference to the past, so strong? The revolution imposed by Word thirty years ago relegated typewriters in a few years to antiquities and led companies to change their way of working or disappear.

No Word: a strong trend today

Today, the background blade that leads companies to dispense with Word – for documents for which it is not suitable – is in progress. This evolution is driven by two major engines. In the first place, an increasing awareness of the productivity problems posed by this tool, with which long hours of "gallery" are required to achieve an acceptable result, both in form and in control of data, updates or editing in digital format. Secondly, the difficulty of disseminating content in formats other than Word... Since Word originally had to produce paper documents to replace the typewriter! The web format did not exist at the time.

Changing the way you work: a must in a professional environment

There is no shortage of Word alternatives. But any change can only be made with the support of stakeholders. Over the past decade or so, solutions publishers to produce technical documentation have proposed alternatives to implement XML technologies, which have hitherto been reserved for an elite of programming. These solutions are, however, very different from Word's ergonomics. And Word being the reference, even if it is not always easy to use, anything that doesn't resemble it scares users. Another background current also blurs the maps: the world of the Web and its simplified input interfaces to produce content per kilometre.

An alternative Word for complex documents: Calenco

Calenco, a full web or local structured editor

Today, NeoDoc, at the crossroads of all these web, HTML, XML, XSL technologies, offers a structured publisher in Web or local licensed mode. A simple ergonomics, it finally allows writers of all sides to write structured content, intuitively and efficiently.

Quickly develop its documents, instructions, user manuals, keep all its materials up to date: a vital issue for businesses that Calenco makes easily and intuitively accessible. Find out.

A remedy for all companies, even small, sick of their Word!

Calenco an alternative Word for the production of complex documents