More is not always better!

Microsoft Office has been accused of bloat for many years now, and Microsoft Word has been no exception to this criticism. To some extent, this is unavoidable: Word needs to be such a general-purpose product that you have to cram it full of features in order to get as many people to use it as possible. Of course, each of those users only needs a subset of those features. I use the Word Count feature when I’m writing a manuscript for a journal that has a strict word count, but most users have no need for it. For creative writers, a majority of the features in Word are useless - tables, graphs, even fonts - are unnecessary and clutter up the creative process.

Steven Poole has written an excellent blog post about his history with electronic writing and promotes a program called WriteRoom that does away with all the distractions and interruptions that Word and computers in general provide. Writing suddenly looks like paper again with WriteRoom:

This application would likely drive me crazy, as I often need PDFs and spreadsheets open as I write my scientific manuscripts. But for those that just need to write, the distraction-less interface of WriteRoom is likely as close as you can get to computerized perfection.