<rant>

Difficulties in Collaboration

All of my colleagues use Word for curriculum development, tests, and assignments. Colleagues don't get it when I send a markdown formatted document to them. While I use textmate for a variety of tasks, I stumped at how I can drop Word without retraining my colleagues.

I just got two emails from coworkers with both about 5 lines of text in a word document attached to an email. Can someone please explain to me why they did not just enter the damn text into the email? Luckily gmail can display .doc as html, I really don't care about having Word just for crap like this.

Why are people so ignorant? Both my coworkers do complain about Word being sucky and complicated and all that -- but you would think they might do something about it. I wish WYSIWYG and Word were never invented, it dumbs people down, just like PowerPoint tends to do… anyone remember the hype against PP -- http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000111&topic_...

There is whole businesses losing their right to exist just because the average pc user thinks he can do it better, as well as people losing their appreciation of quality (as long as they pay for it).

How do you re-train your coworkers and surroundings?

THAT is why TextMate is so cool. It makes it easy to create text/code, it makes you love the act of writing the content and not fuss with the annoying stuff around it -- but it doesnt force you to create bad code. Maybe people would be dumping Word if they had a good text editor on their hands (*dreaming*).

Ah. Need to get coffee. </rant>

Dan