Word processing templates — Hero or villain?

For some reason today I got to thinking about word processors. I think it was because during a meeting I started to wonder if Word had outlived its usefulness when it came to writing design documents. Perhaps all design from start to finish could be wiki based? That’s something to ponder but that’s as far as I got since, you know, I needed to actually be paying attention during the meeting.

Seriously, I even made a note on my paper that reads:

“Blog idea: Word templates”

I think that note is actually an accident since I meant to write “Word vs wiki?” but the conversation had moved on and someone had said something about templates. Reading my poorly transcribed note made me think of two things.

1. It is good that I didn’t choose court reporting as a career.

Judge: “Would read back the last statement please.”

Me: “The defendant claimed that the box had fallen off the back of a truck and a roast beef sandwich sounds like an excellent idea for lunch.”

I wonder if you can be held in contempt of court if you were a working officer of the court? Something else to ponder.

2. I don’t recall ever using templates from a word processor.

See look, here’s MS Word and Pages, check out all those templates.

I automatically look for the one named something like “Blank Document”. In fact, all my writing tends to be essay type stuff, I can’t recall the last time I wrote a formal letter. I don’t even know if I own stamps to send a letter. Come to think of it, I don’t think I know how much a stamp costs. That’s probably bad. *Shakes fist at online billpay*

Thinking historically I must have at least written a resume with a template although it’s been so long I don’t remember.

Let’s try it this way, let’s list out all the word processors or text editors I remember using and see what I did with them.

1. Bank Street Writer - I used this in junior high to write many a five paragraph theme. If memory serves it didn’t support word wrapping so I doubt it had much in the way of templates.
2. WordPerfect - This was the main high school guy in all its DOS glory. I also used it in college on some crash-happy Mac Quadras. I even started the VMS version once on the VAX because I simply couldn’t believe that it had been ported to that platform. (Does anyone wonder why they are niche player today?) Anyhow, college papers don’t require templates, they just need ghost writers. Ah, yeah, err, forget you just read that. A ghost writer must have written it.
3. LaTeX - It’s true, I’ve used LaTeX. But it was in college and it was very experimental time. I don’t remember much about it other than it had to do with very complicated and advanced math which I’ve barricaded into a dark and distant corner in the back of my brain. To inquire further would run the risk of letting all that junk out and quite honestly it’s not worth it.
4. vi - Templates? Ha ha ha. Um, no.
5. Emacs - Couldn’t tell you, I gave it up once I found vi. Although I’m sure I could use it to write a lisp macro that would generate templates for me. You know, if I hadn’t found vi.
6. TextMate - Excellent for Ruby on Rails programming but I’ve never used it for documents.
7. BBEdit - Mostly like TextMate with the exception I have a non-eval license key for this one. I’ve typed loads of plain text documents in it but I’ve never needed a template.
8. MS Word - Used it for more documents than I can count, no template recollection.
9. Pages - Ditto.

So there we have it, a walk down memory lane that proves beyond any worthwhile doubt that I don’t remember using word processor templates. This was a fun exercise and I’ll tell you what, this post’s format was spot on. I should probably save so I can use it again, maybe make a template or something. Hey wait…