Why would you spend hundreds of dollars for a word processing program? That seems silly in this day and age. You can use a very powerful word processor right now without touching your pocketbook and also without installing any software.
Computers and computer programs change rapidly. I find it fascinating to watch the changes in the industry that occur every year. One year of change in computers seems to equal ten or more years of change in the automotive, aviation, and most other industries. One major change going on right now is in word processing.
The recent changes seem strange as word processing software has been more or less stagnant for years. You can switch from a nine-year-old copy of Word 97 to the very latest version and hardly notice any changes. Word processing programs were introduced in home desktop computers in the late 1970s and haven't changed all that much since then. To be sure, over the years the word processors have added graphics, soft fonts, the ability to import spreadsheets or databases, and more. However, the basics of writing and formatting text have remained unchanged for a quarter century or more.
For the past twenty-five years, each individual typically has created documents and then stored them on the local hard drive of his or her own desktop computer. In office environments, files might be saved on a file server some place on the corporation's network. If the document is to be shared with others, sent to a different person, or used to generate documents in another format, some external process has to happen. In the past year or two, some fundamental changes to the process have started to appear.
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