Processing Improvements Making Word Processing

¶ … Processing Improvements

Making Word Processing Applications More Efficient

A common perception of word processing programs is that only the majority of people relying on these personal productivity applications use a minority of the features. This figure would certainly increase if word processing applications were more agile and responsive in meeting the needs of users. The intent of this analysis is to recommend the most valuable potential additions to a word processing application so its usage is increased.

Making Word Processing Applications More Intuitive

The user interface continues to improve in most word processing applications, including Microsoft Word, now on version Microsoft Professional Plus 2010. Even with the advances in ergonomics and usability however, there is a significant gap in text categorization and support for multi-threaded file management, including role-based taxonomy support (Moens, Dumortier, 2000). The lack of role-based taxonomy support will restrict the functionality of word processing applications as tablet-based PCs and devices including the Apple iPad begin to dominate the low-end of the market. What word processing applications need is the ability to quickly create role-based taxonomies of data, and then have previous documents assigned to specific areas of that taxonomy (Rokaya, Atlam, 2010). Creating taxonomies like this will change word processing application software from being so person-centric to being the basis of more collaborative workgroups and cross-sharing of documents (Bai, Weston, Grangier, et.al. 2010). There have been hundreds of software applications specifically designed to allow for this type of cross-collaboration and workflow sharing, many of them based on portal-based architectures and platforms that are inordinately more expensive than a word processing application. With the adoption of XML as an integration standard, this long-standing requirement of corporate and enterprise customers to have so for a more efficient means for sharing work documents is attainable (Hwang, Ryu, 2010). Creating workflows entirely within word processing applications over a secured network running XML is what Microsoft is attempting to do with its Office Online applications, however the performance has been disappointing. There is much work to be done in order to create a more effective word processing application that can truly scale and be truly collaborative as well.