I agree with the Clippy thing, but... I do believe that, whenever somebody responds to software criticism with "he's doing it wrong!", it means the software failed to interface with its human masters in a good way. I thought this was the main lesson "Saint Steve" taught us: the software should be designed to minimize the incidence of "user wrongness", while still allowing for high productivity.
Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!
Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.
"right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!"
Have you used Office 2010? There are multiple options to pasting: Keep source formatting, merge formatting, and keep text only. The options in Excel are even greater.
As crazygringo said, the problem is copying from Office into textboxes. Any developer who's ever worked on a web-based CMS will tell you how painful it is to have to deal with people pasting walls of text from Word.
(And btw, I do use Office 2010 every day of my cursed life...)
Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!
Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.