I hate Microsoft Word
Posted by Geoff | Filed under Rants, Technology
[Warning: Objectionable language within.]
I can’t really think of much more frustrating than to find out that two days — 16 hours of hard thinking — has suddenly vanished before your eyes. Not because someone stole your work (though I admit that would be very troubling) or because of something you’ve done yourself.
It’s because Microsoft Word decided to “forget” all the changes I’d made — and saved — effectively erasing everything I’ve done.
Gone.
Deleted.
No history, trace, or anything.
This is not the first time I’ve run into issues with Microsoft Word. I’ve hated this software for a very long time. I used to be a Technical Writer in a previous life. I used to find all sorts of annoying formatting bugs that would continually stump even the Development Engineers.
This is far from annoying. I want to fucking kill someone. I don’t work without saving. And it’s all gone.
Hey Ballmer — here’s a thought: You want to rant against all the open source software out there? You want Microsoft to be the big, shining star of the software world?
Then get your shit together and writing a fucking word processor that doesn’t delete my fucking work.
Tags: microsoft, open source, software, word
October 11th, 2007 at 19:25
Someone not getting enough sleep what with the new baby in the house?
October 11th, 2007 at 23:11
That obvious, eh?
(Actually, it was work that kept me up to start with, which didn’t help.)
But this is a long-standing bit of hatred. Very long-standing. Open Office, I’m a-comin’!
October 12th, 2007 at 08:09
I don’t object to your choice of language, Geoff.
December 29th, 2007 at 10:12
i have no good reason to hate microsoft
December 29th, 2007 at 10:14
i want free software websites
December 29th, 2007 at 10:15
too booring
December 29th, 2007 at 10:17
i hate microsoft because the monoply
January 16th, 2008 at 10:10
I hate Word 2007 because it takes me half a day to figure out how to change font to small caps…
January 16th, 2008 at 10:16
Rumour has it that Microsoft’s next version of Word has a dramatically altered UI to try and eliminate that very kind of problem.
But I ain’t holdin’ my breath.
January 23rd, 2008 at 06:58
I don’t know you, I have never been here but searched “I fucking hate word 2007″ and came here.
I HATE WORD 2007……I HATE IT, I HATE IT, I HATE IT. It’s taken me forever to do even the littlest things.
Oh….I feel better.
Thanks.
January 23rd, 2008 at 08:01
Who says a good vent can’t make people feel better?
January 31st, 2008 at 20:53
OpenOffice now supports import and export of Office documents, make sure you give the bastards no money.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:44
I am so fed up with Word 2007! It takes a million years to find simple things, I unloaded it and reinstalled a previous version, in addition it always asks me if I am sure I want to save it in an earlier format (duh, have to have other users be able to read the file). Excel the exact same thing. Pissed off and ready to get my money back if I could.
October 1st, 2008 at 09:55
/Profanity
I FUCKING HATE THE NEW FUCKING WORD 2007. I SHOULD MAKE A FUCKING ORGANIZATION CHART FOR A FUCKING MILLION DOLLAR PROJECT BUT EVERYTHING IS UPSIDE-FUCKING-DOWN AND I HAVE TO LEARN EVERYTHING FROM ZERO WITH THEIR ‘FUCKING IMPROVED RIBBON THINGY. FUCK YOU VERY MUCH MICROSLUT! I TOTALLY FEEL FOR THE GUY WHO TRASHED HIS COMPUTER IN A VIDEO.
/profanity
Thanks. I bet this saved my monitor
October 1st, 2008 at 12:08
Wow… and I thought I had a serious hatred. Tomi, I feel for you. I really do.
October 23rd, 2008 at 16:49
It sucks, its a regression. They are seriously some dumb mother fuckers. Did they fuck up on purpose just to piss everyone off or are they really AS FUCKING STUPID AS THE NEW VERSION!!!!! You type HATE WORD 2007 on google and you get 8.9 million queries FUCK YOU MICROSOFT FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
February 18th, 2009 at 09:58
I too hate Microsoft word 2007. I really does my head in. Why did they change it. It makes not any sense. It is like someone changing the keys around on a piano or a computer keyboard, – you have learned how to play/use it and then you have to learn again. In short it makes no business sense. I have been using Office since 1994, it has never been perfect; but it worked easily. I went to college to constantly keep up to date with I.T so I adapt to change quite easily. Microsoft Word is a nightmare – if it’s not broke – why fix it. What used to take seconds in word, now takes an eternity. For instance: I want to use autotext (save names, signatures, addresses etc ) – I used to just click in seconds to store info’, now it is a science!! Microsoft need to sort this out.
March 17th, 2009 at 08:02
One the whole I find Word OK, BUT there’s always been something that bugs me in every version and I can’t believe that I’m the only one that gets so frustrated by it.
Section breaks and formatting f**king sucks!!!
It’s the two lines either side of a section break. Somehow the formatting is unavoidably linked, so the last line of a previous section HAS to be formatted the same as the first line of the next section and it is a f**king PITA when I’m trying to get a pixel perfect document.
So there I am, casually typing away in Body Text. I want to add a section break (any one, column, new page etc). So I add one and set the font style to “Heading 2″. BOooOM!!! The last line of the previous section goes to “Heading 2″ too!!!! FFS! I DON’T WANT THE LAST LINE OF THE PREVIOUS SECTION TO BE F**CKING “HEADING 2″!!!!! “Body Text”. Just go f**king “Body Text”, F**k it, now the first line of the next section has gone f**king “Body Text” too – and so on.
AND, I don’t want an extra page which I can’t f**king delete at the end of my document just because the previous section is two column. FFS! I try to delete the last section break and “Boom” my whole f**king document goes to single column! FFS!
I f**king hate Word. The only problem is I haven’t got any f**king thing better to use. Open Office is just too “dark side” for me and, well…., f**k getting a Mac!
March 22nd, 2009 at 16:25
Just wanted to add my own frustration with Word 2007.
I really LIKED all previous incarnations of Word–not perfect, but so very very useful. Then came 2007 which forces you to relearn how to do (and where to find) everything.
And the results are actually worse, not better, because the software undoes formatting that you could easily keep before.
Hate. Hate. Hate. (And the analogy of piano keys or typewriter keys above is perfect).
Otherwise, I’m a big PC fan (and even like Vista–no complaints.) But Word 2007–even after significant time with it–still is MADDENING!
October 2nd, 2009 at 13:55
MS Word is a bloody disgrace. Anyone who finds it even tolerable doesn’t use if very often – period.
If anything else I bought worked as poorly and gave me as much shit I would bin it and move to an alternative without thinking twice. But you can’t do that with MS as they have it embedded in bloody everything. It’s the formatting rubbish that does my head in, I spend hours formatting and then reformatting documents. We even brought in a design firm to lock down the formatting so that all our documents were the same font, size, color etc but MS bloody Word has even managed to cock that up.
If I ever meet Bill Gates I’ll punch his lights out – he’s caused me more stress than every recession I’ve lived through! Can’t they even write some simple bloody code – what a company of pompous wankers. Can’t wait until Apple (who are definitely not my favorite either) or the shareware guys (I know, fat chance of that happening) rip you a new asshole you self righteous, ineffective tossers!
Rant over – thanks for the outlet!
October 15th, 2009 at 09:05
Funny what you find when typing “I hate Microsoft Work 2007″ in Google (which are another possible subject of hatred, but it’s another topic altogether so let’s pass on…).
I have just been made brutally aware of how one company, whose products I’ve been taught to use for over 15 years, can disrupt my tranquil way of life… I guess that I too will soon turn to OpenOffice.org. Luckily, I haven’t paid too much for it, it being the official soft for where I work and I have bought it at a reduced price (legal here, btw), but still… and the worst bit is how if I don’t take extra special care I won’t be able to send docs to my friends and colleagues who are so 20th century and still use previous versions: they won’t like the .docx extension!
Another good vent, thank you for all the fish!!!
Olivier R, Switzerland
October 19th, 2009 at 12:53
Hey Olivier,
Brace yourself for OpenOffice. As much as some of us have an extreme dislike for some of the “features” in Word, OpenOffice has a share of its own. (My wife’s found a few of ‘em, herself.) I hate to say it, but there’s little replacement for a good ol’ text editor, these days.
January 9th, 2010 at 07:53
Its just a plain bad design and full of wrong logic. The formatting (which is some 80% of a word processor) is a nightmare – every so often you find yourself spending valueable time trying to figure out how to circumvent the “logic” and get the result you want (or an acceptable compromise). If I were part of the developer team, I would feel embarrased. It’s simply a bad product. The world is full of them but it is really an “achievement” that giant MS can produce this S**T. They must have some serious organizational problems??
Saludos desde España
February 1st, 2010 at 22:13
what is up with this new docx thing for saving??? What happened to the good old .doc? Why, why, why would you change it? I have spent a few hours today trying to figure out how to “extract files” and download compatibilty software (compatability my ass) to no avail. I still can’t open a fucking document from work, so instead of doing it in the comfort of my home, I will have to get up early to go to work so I can get this damn thing done now.
Nobody knows how to open these things unless you speak computer, which I don’t speak. Grr, I fucking hate this!
March 1st, 2010 at 00:34
I’m sorry to be boring and repetitive, but: I also don’t know you, because i typed in “Microsoft 2007 you stupid fuckers” (a version of which i type in every single time i use it) and, like the woman above, i ended up here as well.
I resent, of course, that it is a bad product; i resent that it makes my life and job more difficult; above all i resent that because of the rage that swells within me each time i encounter one of its profoundly unhelpful and irritating new characteristics, i can only assume that my heart is being damaged, just a little bit, by al the toxic hate-chemicals my body releases. There you go: Microsoft Word 2007 is ACTUALLY KILLING ME.
March 5th, 2010 at 05:53
Thanks , I googled Word 2007 styles fucked and got this. Nice to know everybody else is as fucked
March 10th, 2010 at 04:13
Give Microsoft a break! They’re awesome and make great products.
March 10th, 2010 at 10:59
Hey Mike,
I gave Microsoft breaks. Lots of ‘em. My problem is that you can only give someone a break so many times before they really start to look more like a failure than a success. The way many of us see Microsoft, they’re not succeeding — they’re coasting. Windows 7 is their first major success in a long time, but only after their significant problems with Windows Vista.
Microsoft needs to take input from their users, pay attention to the problems they have, and actually correct the problems. Microsoft Word, in particular, needs an overhaul. It needs to really have a wholesale reorganisation, and functionality rewritten. It’s clear that after a couple of decades of using Word that there are issues that either cannot be fixed, or a complete lack of interest in fixing them.
I’ll but Microsoft a break when they’ve proven to me that it’s worth giving them that break.
June 21st, 2010 at 09:11
I’d just like to add my kick in the a$$ to MS for taking a product that worked pretty darn well and redesigning it into a trip down the rabbit hole. God! I just want to read a document without having to have page breaks in it, making it impossible to scroll down without major annoying jumps and lost places. I do not believe for a minute that this piece of crap was ever user tested before it was released. I’ll bet the testing that was done was sectioned out and tested in pieces by different groups. There is just NO continuity or logic. What a piece of crap.
August 27th, 2010 at 13:21
I ran into this blog when I typed in I HATE WORD2007 in the google search and now I need to add my 2.5 bits!
I have not been involved in tech writing for approx 5 years and now back in the game (another issue, another blog perhpas) but now that I have tried to format a document in WORD-CRAPOLA-2007 I have discovered that MS has not done anything useful with their time in at least the 5 years that I have not used WORD.
SERIOUSLY – you have got to be kidding – this is the worst I have every seen WORD and how it operates with the numbering system for technical documents is making my world a freaking living hell !!! CRAZY bastards at MS – who the hell is at your head table when you designed this junk? Did someone step out of the office when this was being developed and put Mr Burns from the nuclear plant on Simpsons in to design it?
Give me a break …. I am not a new user of this product and as a matter of fact I use to be an instructor – back in the days of 1990 something …. BUT STILL…. and ……
I was an original word processing operator back in 1984 when there were dedicated machines – anyone remember the XEROX 860??? I loved that dinosaur! Hell bring back that concept so I can get my technical documents out….
Oh well… its Friday and its time for a martini … and try and forget about this nightmare for the weekend ….
thanks for this blog —- thanks for the space to rant and rave … I feel better now!
TT4now