On Word-Processing Literacy in Publicly Available Documents

Word-processing (WP) was and still is one of the ubiquitous applications for many computer users. After about a half of century of its existence, it is considered stable, and is widely taught on all educational levels. Many users find themselves quite proficient in creating documents. However, after examining a number of publicly available documents and document templates (mostly from public sector, universities and scientific publishing) we found that many template creators and users just grasp basic knowledge of WP concepts while some of not so advanced concepts are mostly not used at all. In some cases when users were forced to use some of these features, they reverted to manual and forcible (overriding style) formatting and insertion of a numbering manually. Here we present our findings in WP literacy and give some recommendations for creating document templates, for teaching WP, and propose some modifications of WP applications for better acceptance of the more advanced concepts. The development of WP applications is mostly stagnant and recent additions only address collaboration features while other WP concepts that are considered widely known are not changed at all but obviously not well emphasizes in WP applications.