(OT -- So OT It's Not Funny) Good Grief How I HATE MS Word

[barsoomcore]

Sorry, but it's 5:30 on a Friday afternoon and if it weren't for Word's "Helpful" nature I'd be going home by now. As it is, my massive document is hosed and I have several hours of mind-numbing labour ahead of me.

Holy crap I'm irritated.

So many of the features in Word seem like good ideas. Styles, for examples. Styles seem like such a great idea. Always indenting your paragraphs a little more than default? Want to use custom bullets in all your lists? Create a custom style and baddaboom baddabing, there you are. Problem is with documents that pass from one user to another. You end up with this incredibly long list of styles and no easy way to determine which ones are getting used where. Or, more to the point, which ones ought to be getting used so that the document not only looks okay, but that its tables and footnotes and glossaries get generated properly.

Auto-numbering. I am ready to throw my PC out the window just over the auto-numbering of lists. I'm a pretty strong-willed lad. I can take lots of mental abuse. Vancouver winters don't faze me. The last four seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess didn't faze me. Not even Red Dragon fazed me. But Word auto-numbering is enough to reduce me to helpless tears of impotent rage.

Make it stop. Please, God, make it stop.

Thanks everyone. I feel better now.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

I hear you, and share your pain. I have to support Word and all of the other MS Office crap at work. I use WordPerfect for all the stuff I have to do, and it is so much better than the MS stuff it annoys the heck out of me that I'd never get them to switch.

Got a little revenge the other day when one of our VP's had a multi-hundred page document she was working on get corrupted. It would crash Word as soon as she tried to open it. Of course she hadn't saved a backup copy, and she (despite numerous warnings) had saved it on her local hard drive instead of the network, so there was no tape backup either.

I grabbed the corrupted copy and imported it into WordPerfect 11, which had zero trouble with the file, and re-saved it in Word format. Saved her about a week's lost work, and hopefully convinced her of the importance of saving her stuff on the network.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Auto-numbering. I am ready to throw my PC out the window just over the auto-numbering of lists. I'm a pretty strong-willed lad. I can take lots of mental abuse. Vancouver winters don't faze me. The last four seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess didn't faze me. Not even Red Dragon fazed me. But Word auto-numbering is enough to reduce me to helpless tears of impotent rage.

Make it stop. Please, God, make it stop.

I HATE auto-numbering. Whose brilliant idea was this? In order to save me the effort of hitting a number, a dot, and a space, which takes all of maybe 1 second, I have to undo the auto-numbering every time I hit enter when I'm working with certain types of lists, which takes closer to 5 seconds. I can't even figure out a way to turn that function off. What makes Word think that it knows that I want a 2 after my 1 instead of an A? Stupid smarty pants Word...

 

[jgbrowning]

I HATE auto-numbering. Whose brilliant idea was this? In order to save me the effort of hitting a number, a dot, and a space, which takes all of maybe 1 second, I have to undo the auto-numbering every time I hit enter when I'm working with certain types of lists, which takes closer to 5 seconds. I can't even figure out a way to turn that function off. What makes Word think that it knows that I want a 2 after my 1 instead of an A? Stupid smarty pants Word...

Yess. I hates thems toos.

joe b.

 

[barsoomcore]

The TRUE horror of auto-numbering only become apparent when you realise you've made a mistake somewhere back on page 6 -- and you're on page 47.

Nothing like going back through each and every numbered list (oh, and the document in question is a software test plan -- it's basically a massive set of nested numbered lists) and finding out WHICH one it thinks it's continuing.

*beats head on desk, cries in frustration, disembowels Hottentots*

 

[Piratecat]

Oh, I feel your pain. However, I intend to feel your pain over in the software forum instead of General. It's cozier there, y'know.

I actually like autonumbering occasionally. I do a lot of surveys, and before autonumbering NOTHING sucked more than adding a question #3 and having to change 180 other numbers. And then having to do it again. And again.

Shudder.

 

[Remus Lupin]

My problem with MS Word isn't auto-numbering, it's footnoting. I have never never been able to figure out why MS Word will just randomly decide to take one of my lovely footnotes and place it on next page, while the number that refers to it remains on the current page. Is it really that difficult to fix? I know that they made this sucker for business writing, but surely so many people use it for academic writing that they ought to put in the effort to get this particular feature right!!!!!

 

[Henry]

I'll be the unaplogetic fanboy in this thread who loves Word, hates Wordperfect, and has the EXACT opposite experiences from the previous posters. If I could get the darned stragglers and holdovers in my organization to switch from Wordperfect/Quattro over to Word/Excel, I'd be one happy camper.

I've had ten times the corrupted files in Wordperfect 8/9 than I have in Word 97/2000/XP. I can count many days I had to open a WP file, copy all the text and images, open another WP file, paste them there one at a time, and figure out which chart/image/graphic clipart was crashing the system.

For both stability, crash recovery, and overall look and feel, I choose Word over WP any day - this coming from a guy who cut his computing "teeth" on Wordperfect 5 for DOS.

 

[Dimwhit]

I feel all your pain. I, too, use Word. I use their newest version for Mac. I do have to give the MacBU at Microsoft credit, though. They built a very stable version of Word for us. But I'm still forced to format my document how and when Word choses to let me. The auto numbering is also one of my peeves.

There just really isn't a great alternative I've found on the Mac or PC, really. I'm in favor of using plain text files for the simple stuff, and a way overkill app like InDesign (or Quark) if I need to layout a paper of any decent size with any serious formatting.

So I'll join in the lament, if you all don't mind a lowly Mac guy chiming in his agreement.

 

[shadowlight]

I too feel your pain. I wrote my Master's Thesis in MS Word... ouch. I do have to say though, once you get your head into MS Word's twisted logic, you gan generally get it to do what you want. I never would have been able to get my thesis done on time if not for "styles."