This is from Bill Roberts of Swirrl, a company that offers a hosted online workspace for sharing knowledge. The Swirrl Blog is a good source of information on business collaboration and knowledge management. – Stewart

Luis Suarez posted recently on “A world without e-mail”: his attempts to cut down greatly the amount of email he sends and receives, by moving his communications to other more appropriate tools. I have a more modest goal, which over the last few months I have pretty much achieved: a world without Word.

Now I’ve nothing against Microsoft Word in particular – I’m just using that as the archetypal example of a whole class of tools. I try to avoid OpenOffice and other word processors too. The rest of the world prevents me from making a totally clean break unfortunately. If someone sends me a .doc file, then with a sigh, I still have to crank up Word or OO.

Word is one of the hangovers from the (nearly) bygone age of paper-based communication, being focused mainly on formatting text for printing. About the only thing I print now is airline boarding passes (another system crying out for something more sensible, but that’s a story for another day).

Most of my business communication is done over the internet and most of my writing is in wikis and blogs. So I want to format things for a browser, not for a printed page. If I’m just making rough notes I’ll do that in plain text in Textmate, though it’s usually not long before I put those notes in our company wiki – we use Swirrl of course .

Once in a wiki I can tag them, search them and other people can have access to them too. I can paste a URL in an IM chat or an e-mail, I can link to them from other pages and it’s so much quicker to load a web page than to open a document in a word processor.

When I started my first ‘proper’ job after leaving university in 1991, the company had a ‘word processing department’. This had formerly been the typing pool, but since the younger staff like me were inclined to type their own reports, their role had evolved. Their main task was formatting typed text to match the company layout standards, for reports that would then be printed and bound. (There would then be multiple iterations to correct all the mistakes they had introduced into my mathematical equations).

Over the next couple of years that group disappeared as most people learned to format their own text. That was a baby step towards the online world, but in most respects it was just a more efficient way of producing paper documents. Now I think we are finally heading for that long talked about paperless office and that marks the beginning of the end for word processor software. I won’t miss it.