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!

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.

But I ain’t holdin’ my breath.