Microsoft Word is a software that everyone knows. It was designed to edit text a fancy way.
But most people use it the wrong way. It is so popular that whatever you need to edit
The problem with Word
It’s overkilled.
.docx files are a binary and proprietary format that shouldn’t be used.
Did you know ? .docx files are in reality a zipped folder. Using mac or Linux, the command unzip document.docx will reveal everything used by Word. And these are .xml files and media files mainly.
Bring Your Own Client
If you don’t already know it, Bring Your Own Client is a philosophy that a file (and by extend, a format, like .docx) must not depend on an software.
But only Microsoft Word can read .docx
A solution
Binary vs. text files
There are plenty of extensions. .docx, .pdf, .txt, .png… But for your computer, only 2 types of file exists. Text files, and binary files. Binary files aren’t meant to be read by humans.
Extensions are only a way for computers to indicate how to handle a file (which software to use). It is completely unrelated to the content. But here, we talked about
.docxas a format, not about the file extension.
Binary are often “optimized” to be run by your computer or by a piece of software. There are just a list of zeros and ones that only makse sense for the computer.
Text files are meant to be read by humans. They are easy to read and write, and usually contains information.
We just said that .docx are a binary file… Why not using a text file ?
Markdown
If you just want to type information, open a .txt. It is the easiest way to write information. But you might want to add structure to your document.
Markdown is a great idea. It doesn’t depend on an editor -there are plenty Markdown editors out there.
If you want to write down structured information, create a .md.
The added value of MS Word
Markdown might be a little too minimalist.
The styles -meaning, the way to show elements- is a great feature of word. But this remains messy and not intuitive. And most of the time, it is useless…