My word processor usage history

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’.

Switching (mostly) to LibreOffice

I love Microsoft Office and I consider myself a power user of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but it’s time to start disentangling myself from the Microsoft ecosystem.

I’ve already made good progress on the operating system (OS) front, with Linux Mint as the primary OS on my laptop. But I’m now taking things up a notch by making LibreOffice my primary office suite.

Why now, though? This meme explains it best.

Photo of a teenage schoolgirl pinned up against a wall by the bell of a massive tuba that is completely enveloping her head. The bell of a tuba is the big, round bit at the front from where the sound comes out. This tuba is behind held by another schoolgirl who is standing in front of the first one. Text overlaid across the girl at the receiving end of the tuba reads, “Me trying to do a basic task I’ve managed to do every day without incident for many years”. Text overlaid across the tuba reads, “AI” (that is, artificial intelligence). Text overlaid across the girl holding the tuba reads, “Every organisation on Earth”.

Shove Copilot into everything

Yes, Microsoft is shoving Copilot into all parts of its Office productivity suite.

When you open a blank Word document, you get asked what you want to write. #RevengeOfClippy

Screenshot of a Microsoft Word window with a red arrow annotation pointing to a Copilot prompt above the blank word document. The text in the prompt reads, “Describe what you’d like to write”.

When you write some text in Word, the Copilot icon follows you down every single line of the page, hovering creepily just off the left margin.

Screenshot of the text in a Microsoft Word document with a red arrow annotation pointing to the Copilot icon hovering immediately off the left margin of one of the lines (the line that the cursor is presumably on).

When you’re working in Excel, that Copilot icon is with you in Every Single Cell.

Screenshot of the cells in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with a red arrow annotation pointing to the Copilot icon hovering off the top-right corner of the selected cell.

And when you’re in PowerPoint, Copilot is not only in the menu bar (“New Slide with Copilot”), its icon also hovers off the top-left corner of each slide, messing with your slide zoom level.

Screenshot of a Microsoft PowerPoint window with red arrows annotations pointing to two things. The first is a new button in the toolbar next to the ‘New Slide’ button. This new button reads, ‘New Slide with Copilot’. The second is a Copilot icon hovering off the top-left corner of the blank slide.

All this reminds me of that scene from the movie WALL-E in which the captain of the evacuee ship Axiom comes to the realisation that AUTO, the ship’s AI autopilot, has been hovering ominously over the shoulder of all the past captains and is, indeed, the antagonist.

Screenshot from the animated film WALL-E. The scene shows the bridge of the spaceship Axiom, specifically one of the walls of the bridge on which there is a row of holographic portraits of all the ships captains. Hovering over the left shoulder of each captain is AUTO, the ship’s autopilot AI.

Wait, does this mean you hate AI?

No, I don’t hate AI.

AI is cool and I’ve enjoyed using aspects of it for many years. Heck, I’ve been a fan of AI since I took Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in my computer science undergrad back in the late 1990s. I even got an A- in that subject :)

What I hate are these things.

Desperate tech giants

I hate the AI bubble we’re currently going through. It was caused entirely by tech giants that are desperate to gain (or at least not to lose) their first-mover advantage.

These tech giants are throwing stupid amounts of money at getting their brand of AI in front of everyone in the hopes that they get to be the ones to make billions of dollars off this revolutionary technology in the future.

They’re also stealing all the intellectual property they can get their hands on and are consuming ridiculous amounts of energy while doing so – all in an effort to work harder, not smarter, and hoping that this approach will give them a leg-up in the short term.

Well fuck them.

Throwing shit at the wall

The inevitable outcome of this desperation is tech companies throwing shit (AI-powered apps, features, tools, and functionality) at the wall (which, in this metaphor, is us) hoping that some of it sticks and that people actually find something they want to use.

This is much like the “killer app” madness from a few years ago when hordes of tech bros were scrambling to make an app so useful that it would justify people’s ongoing use of their platform – which they would then eventually attempt to monetise. The same is happening now with standalone AI apps (like all the generative AI ones) and AI functionality added to existing apps (like adding Copilot in Microsoft Office).

Everything is branded AI now

I hate that everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon.

AI has been through several hype cycles and, when there’s money to be made, every algorithm is suddenly said to be based on AI.

Of course each hype cycle has historically been followed by an ‘AI winter’ during which the term AI becomes so toxic that people start calling their work other things – like ‘machine learning’ and ‘neural networks’ and other such euphemisms.

But for now, the bandwagon effect means that algorithmic functionality that Microsoft offered a few years ago under a different name is now being called AI and then shoved in our faces.

LLMs are maths pretending to be language

The AI tech that’s led the charge in the current hype cycle is large language models (LLMs).

The problem with LLMs is that:

  • they aren’t actually intelligent;

  • they don’t genuinely understand what you’re saying, asking, or implying;

  • they make mistakes, like, all the time;

  • their outputs can be biased one way or another by their creators;

  • they can’t be contained and controlled (ie they can be jail broken surprisingly easily); and

  • people believe them.

Importantly, LLMs aren’t the be-all and end-all of modern AI. They’re a hammer that everyone has gotten a hold of and, boy, isn’t everything they’re trying to do now starting to look like a nail?

The beatings will continue until morale improves

All that said, the thing that shits me the most as far as Microsoft Office is concerned is the lack of choice in all these AI “upgrades” we’ve being blessed with. We never asked Microsoft to add this AI functionality to their software and there is no way to opt out of it or disable it.

So fuck Microsoft specifically.

Goodbye, old friend

I’m sad to be using less of Microsoft Office. It’s a great tool and I’ve been happy to pay an annual subscription for it for the last twelve years (I signed up the instant it became available in Australia in 2013!). But there is a limit to how much enshittification I can take before I walk.

I’m not going to cancel my subscription though. I’ll probably still need bits of Office at some point in the future. Also, I have a family subscription and the other people on the plan need this for their work.

And I’ll still be using all of Microsoft Office at work.

But going forward, for my personal usage, I will use LibreOffice for all my document, spreadsheet, and presentation creation needs.

Hello, new friend!

I love learning how to use software that’s (relatively) new to me and, eventually, becoming a power user of it. That is very much what I intend to do with LibreOffice.

So let the fun begin!

PS, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about hating Copilot in Microsoft Office. Here’s what wrote about six months ago, before I realised that Microsoft wasn’t going to let this go and I decided to make the switch to LibreOffice: ‘Copilot’s integration into Microsoft office is really shitting me’.

Also, if you’re interested, I created a chart that shows my word processor usage history, from Word Star 3.0 for DOS in the 1980s to today :)

Copilot’s integration in Microsoft Office is really shitting me

I pay an annual subscription fee for Microsoft Office – or what is now called ‘Microsoft 365’. That means I always get the latest versions of Microsoft’s Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Well, the latest versions of these apps all now have Microsoft Copilot integrated into them in the most irritating way possible.

The revenge of Clippy

In Word, for example, Copilot muscles its way into your writing flow through an icon that appears at the start of every new paragraph on your page (highlighted by the red square in the screenshot below).  

Screenshot from Microsoft Word showing the first two paragraphs of this post being written. There is a Copilot icon in the left margin, just next to where the author is about to start typing the third paragraph. That icon has been highlighted in the screenshot by a red coloured, rounded square.

Infuriatingly, in PowerPoint this icon appears above each slide, forcing you to reduce the zoom on your slide if you want to be able to go from one slide to the next using the ‘Down’ arrow on your keyboard or the scroll wheel on your mouse with just a single keypress/scroll.

Screenshot from Microsoft PowerPoint showing a Copilot icon above the top-left corner of the slide. That icon has been highlighted in the screenshot by a red coloured, rounded square.

Tell Microsoft to stop it. Just stop it.

I’m not the only one who finds this incredibly irritating. Unfortunately, an online search on how to remove these icons gave me only questions and no answers:

I did, however, find two requests in the Microsoft Feedback Portal about these annoyances:

So if you’re someone who also uses Microsoft 365, could you please do me a favour? Sign into the Microsoft Feeback Portal to both vote for those issues and add a comment of support under each as well (since that counts for more than just your vote).

Thank you!

What does the fox say?

For the hell of it, I asked Copilot how I could remove that icon from PowerPoint and the answer it confidently gave me was completely wrong (though it all other situations in PowerPoint this answer would have been completely right).

Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user to right-click on the Copilot icon and select “Hide Icon” from the context menu.

I down-voted that answer and asked again. It gave me another wrong answer. (Though, again, if Microsoft had integrated Copilot in the usual way, this answer would have been right.)

Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user to go to File > Options > Add-ins and disable the Copilot Add-in to PowerPoint.

To its credit, when I told Copilot both answers were wrong it asked me reach out to Microsoft Support and to provide feedback on the Microsoft Q&A Community. It even offered to help me post my query and feedback. So at least that’s something.

Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user, “I understand how frustrating that can be. It seems like this is a common issue, and there isn't a straightforward way to remove the icon through the PowerPoint interface itself. I recommend reaching out to Microsoft Support for more specific assistance. They can provide guidance tailored to your version of PowerPoint and system setup. You can also post your concern on the Microsoft Q&A Community with the tags PowerPoint and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 Development. The experts there are proficient in handling such customization queries.”

The beatings will continue until morale improves

Microsoft will continue to shove Copilot down our throats until enough of us complain and maybe then they’ll give us the option to disable it. Or better yet, make its annoying icons opt-in instead of opt-out.

Though given how user-hostile and user-indifferent Microsoft has been over the last several years (aka how they’ve been on the path to enshittification), who knows if anything will change without governments fining them heavily and forcing them to change.

*sigh*