(Or: Do you want to process words? Don't you really want to process a document? )

I am not really thrilled with the term word processor, as it is not particularly descriptive of the sorts of things people actually want to do. Unlike the good old days'' when WordStar and Wang Word Processors were king,'' these days, people don't process words;'' they want to build tables (that are not words), insert pictures (that are not words), include spreadsheets or graphs (that are not words). Even back in the good 'ol days,'' people weren't really working with words;'' that is a task for a dictionary, thesaurus, or some other such word'' manipulation tool. It was always ``documents'' that people wanted.

Unfortunately, too often these days, people have so little grasp of the language that they are using that they cannot even spell the words or string them together in correct order.

The term that I favor over ``word processing'' is document processing, as it more correctly describes the thing that people are actually working with.

Some common varieties of documents include:

• Letters
• Reports
• Memos
• Theses
• Faxes

Documents might contain nested instances of other documents (e.g. a fax may be composed of a cover page that is attached to a letter and some other documents). One could develop a whole taxonomy to represent specializations of reports, where the following examples merely scratch the surface of the richness of representation that is possible:

• Corporate Reports
  • Financial Reports
    • Monthly Financial Statements (released to management)
    • Quarterly Financial Statements (released to shareholders)
    • Annual Financial Statements (that include a full-scale annual report of corporate operations)
    • Budget details
    • Budget summary
    • Federal tax returns
    • State tax returns
  • Sales Reports
    • Graphic reports
    • Numeric reports
    • By Region
    • By Product Group
    • By Customer class
  • Manufacturing Reports
    • Defect rates
    • Consultants' recommendations
    • ISO 9000 certification reports
    • Labour productivity
  • Memos
    • Company-wide announcements, complete with ``secrecy classifications'' and legal disclaimers
    • Corporate News
    • News about industry activities
    • Agenda for departmental staff meeting
    • Weekly/monthly status report
    • Internal job postings
  • Product Sales
    • Product overview
    • White papers
    • Product specifications
    • Sales pamphlets
• Personal Letters
  • Letters to family/friends
  • Christmas cards
  • Thank-you notes
  • Letters to insurance company
  • Letters to IRS
• Legal letters
  • Court summons
  • Expropriation
  • Filing for divorce
  • Land deed
  • Request to serve as juror

Keeping purpose to this, these are all sorts of documents with which one might reasonably attach some sort of common structure, perhaps creating a ``template'' containing some combination of formatted text and graphics to allow individual documents to be written more quickly.

People tend to use word processors to ``manage'' many of these sorts of documents, generally making up uninsightful names on file systems that ultimately make finding old documents a big headache.

They would be far better off having some more formal document management system, as well as some sort of ``template'' to simplify the process of creating each sort of document.

Unfortunately, adding structural'' intelligence has the tendancy to make document processing systems somewhat more complex to use. Ensuring that users can handle the sophistication is not a trivial task. There is value to having the user interface discourage them from doing wrong things;'' if the interface does not also encourage them to do ``right things,'' then users will get frustrated, leading to rejection of the tool. Thot and Amaya are good cases in point; while they may ensure that documents are nicely structured, as an unsophisticated user of these tools I find that I often fight against their structuring approach.