I’m always looking for an excuse to create a graphic, and now that I’m also looking for an excuse to play around with LibreOffice Impress, I figured I’d document all the word processors I’ve used over the years, since those were my gateway into using full office suites.
(In case you missed it, in my previous post I explained why I’m dumping Microsoft Office for LibreOffice.)
Randomly, while doing research for this post, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft Word isn’t even the most popular word processor in the world. That crown goes to Google Docs which has almost three times as many users as Word does!
It’s been fun learning how to use Impress, especially since I am such a PowerPoint super user. It’s been frustrating at times, sure, but still fun :)
Anyway, here’s the graphic (created in Impress and exported as a PNG).
Timeline graphic (similar to a Gantt chart) that is titled ‘My word processor usage history’. It shows a list of all word processors used from 1987 to 2035 in a list, with usage bar charts labelled by year next to each row. The chart data is as follows: WordStar 3.0 (DOS) 1987–1990; WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) 1992–1993; WordPerfect 6.0 (Windows) 1993–1994; Word for Windows 6.0 1994–1995; Word for Windows 95 1995–1997; Word 97 1997–2000; Word 2000 2000–2003; Word 2003 2003–2006; OpenOffice.org 2.0 2005–2006; Word 2006 2006–2010; Google Docs 2009–2025; Word 2010 2010–2013; Word 2013 2013; Microsoft 365 v15 to v17 2013–2025; LibreOffice Writer 7.0 2020–2023; LibreOffice Writer v24.0 to 25.2 2024–2025.
By the way, this isn’t the first office suite-related chart I’ve created. Here’s one from 2013 about how you can track my career progression through which parts of the Microsoft Office suite I use the most: ‘My Career Progression Through Microsoft Products’.
It’s also not the first time I’ve written about my history with Office products. Here’s one from 2018 celebrating twenty years of using PowerPoint: ‘20 years since my first PowerPoint presentation’.