Spent two hours creating an email to send out to our customers in shitty word, and go to copy and paste it to the email and it changes the whole entire format. Things are now underlined that were not before, things are spaced out wrong. The pictures that I added in are now in different spots, screwing up the whole formatting. So I got to spend an additional hour trying to get it to look right in Outlook… They are both made by the same damn company, WHY DOES THEIR SHIT NOT WORK RIGHT TOGETHER. FUCK MICROSOFT ALL TOGETHER! DONE WITH IT.

I hate Word. Every single version I have ever used of Word, all the way back to version 2.0 “for Windows” when “Windows” meant “3.1″, has occasionally pooped out some random crap all over something I was working on.

And now, because Microsoft cannot figure out how to compete on, you know, having good software, we have not one, not two, but _three_ subtly incompatible file formats to choose from. We can use the “open” patented Microsoft Word docx format. We can use the OpenOffice-delivered open doc format, except that it can only sometimes be read by Microsoft products. Finally, we can use the ancient broken packed-binary .doc format.

Each of these suffers subtle formatting losses when taken to one of the other systems. And since for some reason “Word processing” involves painting shit on the screen as opposed to, say, _writing decent prose_, those formatting losses are a big deal.

OpenOffice is just as bad. It’s a _bad idea_ to tie the formatting so tightly to the text, as the HTML world has known since gopher was still an application you could use on the Internet.

A pox on all their houses. I want to go back to WordStar or something. Here we are, 20 years on, and an ancient DOS-based pile of crap is _still_ better than the latest and greatest Word for Mac that I have to pay over $500 for. Shoot me now.

What was so terrible about menus and buttons? Hundreds of millions of people seem to have figured them out just fine. Instead, we are forced to use this abortion of tabs and colors and icons and all this shit I will never use. The entire thing looks like it was designed by a kindergarten class on LSD.

Why change for the sake of change? If some people want to use a new everything and spend the next year looking for all the things they could once easily locate, then God bless them but why is this fucking mandatory for the rest of us?

I had no choice because my company upgraded me but I hate this so badly that I am taking the option of wiping my drive, returning my licenses to the pool and installing Fedora and Open Office instead. At least OpenOffice is less change for me.

Very curiously, no open source authors have ever managed to make a fully functional (and non-crashing) combined mail/calendar client for Linux that works well with exchange (yes, I know of Evolution), so my solution is to forego calendaring on the desktop and simply use my iPhone for that.

I would use a MAC but my company, while they do not prohibit them, will not buy me one, so Linux is my only way to go.

Fuck Microsoft and if by any miracle they ever had any friends, fuck them too!

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

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.

Nobody knows how to open these things unless you speak computer, which I don’t speak. Grr, I fucking hate this!

Saludos desde España

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.

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

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!

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!

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!