The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/21494
Going Native with Word? Better Beef Up Your Training Budget! by Jeffrey Roach Changes acting a little squirrelly? There’s an add-in for that. Numbering going haywire on you? There’s an add-in for that. Revealing too much behind-the-scenes information about your file? There’s an add-in for that as well. Now, nearly 15 years and five releases beyond Microsoft’s landmark Office 97 (the suite that launched a thousand migrations), we continue to rely on these add-ins to deliver functionality that is now available in Word itself. The question is, should we? Are add-ins still relevant? Yes they are, but the reason for their relevance may surprise you. The fact is that relying on native functionality may end up doubling your training time. L ong before Apple’s “there’s an app for that” campaign became ubiquitous, legal technology users often heard “there’s an add-in for that.” Every time Microsoft Word fell short of the mark on some critical feature, a new add-in would appear. Track “The fact is that relying on native functionality may end up doubling your training time.” The concept of offloading some of the heavy lifting to other products is not unique to Word. Historically, WordPerfect relied upon other applications for complex tasks like comparing two documents. In fact, CompareRite was so completely entrenched in the culture of law firms that people continued using it years after LexisNexis officially retired the product in 2002. The New World of Word What was new about Microsoft Word was the fundamental idea that the word processor could do more; that tasks historically performed outside of the word processor could be incorporated as part of the workflow. In other words, not only could you create your documents with Word, but you could also compare them using Word. This focus on breadth (of features) over depth has always been Word’s secret sauce and its Achilles’ heel. The development cycle of the product works like this: Word introduces some new functionality and, over the course of several releases, continues to fine tune the feature until it incorporates nearly all the functionality of competing solutions. Can there be any doubt that LexisNexis saw the writing on the wall when Word 97 debuted the Review Toolbar with its beefed up (and renamed!) Comments and Track Changes? Why would customers buy CompareRite if Word would allow them to compare documents? This thinking is alive and well today. Word 2010’s ability to capture and edit images has put a whole host of photo editing software vendors on notice. Who needs Photoshop when you have Word? Some may think that if a feature like Track Changes has evolved to the point where it’s perfectly capable of producing an accurate redline, then it must be time to get rid of the Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 61