Microsoft Word...is it me or is it actually shit?

Me too, Ed.

(goes back to napping flint)

anyway, it doesnt matter if word is shit because .doc is all anyone accepts now.

also, last weekend my brother-in-law was telling me how great google's word processor is for collaborative projects. im going to check it out even though i dont play well with others.

This is how Nazi Germany started

You can do this in Word too surely?

InDesign.

I rather like Writeroom for getting text in and do the formatting later. I use Mac TextEdit a lot a lock it down to PDF for passing around.

I've never used anything except Word, it doesn't seem too bad to me for what I have to do with it, but then again I guess I have nothing to compare it to.

you have trained yourself to follow the microsoft style guide?

You don't use bulletpoints much then. They have a mind of their own in Word.

Yeah, either I want format control or I'm just keyboarding, so I only use TextEdit or InDesign for myself.

Nope, just went in to Tools then Options then Spelling then unticked "Check spelling/grammar as you type"

HINT: BUILD STYLES FOR YOUR DOCUMENTS. USE THEM.

If you aren't using styles using word really is a battle of yr willpower vs. the machine. I finally started doing it this week and it's like WHY DOES IT BE COOPERATING?!?

Also Word HTML makes my blood boil. Word HTML emails arrive containing one line of text in a single fairly plain style and are somehow 200k. Which probably shouldn't bother me in this age of quarter-terabyte disks, but it does. Maybe a flashback to the summer I spent removing all Word's nonstandard tags from vast documents of tedious legalese only for someone to tell me the next day that they'd made some change I'd never find and I should put the new one up.

Having said that, if I want a wordprocessed document I use Word, and nothing about it has irritated me enough to make me find something else (though I used and much preferred WordPerfect last time I regularly did wordprocessing, but that was nearly a decade ago). And at least Office isn't Microsoft Works.

my big problem is that it's a big slow clunky program and it takes TEN MINUTES i swear to open up a document, what with opening splash screens asking me, do you want to open up a ppt? a worksheet? UHH DID I CLIKC TEH BIG BLUE W OR BIG X OR RED P, U TELL ME

now i just want to go home and muck about with the prefs to see how bare-bones you can get it to be.

Styles make things 500x easier, it's true... until you go back to an old document and decide to add some new text, when it seems to pick a style at random and adds some crap like bold and underline, a tab stop, and a bullet completely unlike all your other bullets, and then insists it hasn't added any formatting so it won't turn it off. Gnn.

"IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE WRITING A LIST"

DIE pajbncakjbskhb

If you aren't using styles using word really is a battle of yr willpower vs. the machine. I finally started doing it this week and it's like WHY DOES IT BE COOPERATING?!?

OTFM

Every job I'v every done since I was about 16 I have built a template in word to fit whatever styles I have to work with. It tames a lot of shit, especially rogue typesetting (autonumbering still gets fucked, especially if you use outline numbering)

I have been staring at my out-of-date CV in Word all week making changes and putting them back again and now this thread must feel my RAGE! Sorry.

On the plus side, when I perform the simplest of tasks in Word or Excel my mother/coworkers stare at me like I am a genius decoding a cryptic long-dead language and I get to feel undeservedly clever for the rest of the day (or until it refuses to print right), which is nice.

haha. gold.

And you mention this to a Microsoft loyalist and they'll reply, "Oh, you can just turn that feature off." WHY HAVE IT ON IN THE FIRST PLACE?

It's like buying a car that sounds its horn continuously when you turn the ignition in case there's any oncoming traffic coming at you in the parking lot, and the only way to disable it is to put it in neutral, turn your windshield wipers on, and press a button located underneath the carpet in the trunk.

As one.

I like Word, though. I've used it for so long that I know which parts of it I can control and which parts demand abject surrender (styles, indeed. See also section breaks). I also tend to need to create monstrous documents with billions of foot or end notes and tables of contents and indexes and outlines and bookmarks, thus necessitating a lot of the features that are just bloat otherwise.

My employer has held fast to the WordPerfect ship, which makes me love and appreciate MS Word even more.

OTM! I didn't know this either.

These are the same people that when you're giving them a web address, ask "Now do I have to put the http, colon, slash, slash before that?"

HEY CHECK OUT MICR0SOFT'S NEW SLOGAN, YO!

-- Pleasant Plains /// (pleasant.plain...) (webmail), Today 11:51 AM. (Pleasant Plains ///) (later)

or 'is that all one word?'

LaTeX all the way; imported to InDesign for the really tricksy shit.

So OTM.

I even use it for letters, because after setting up one letter template, I can just bash out the text, compile it and print the PDF. I'm not certain this is absolutely better than a well-trimmed Word document template, but for a certain mindset (ie mine) it's more satisfying, way less frustrating and far more portable. xpost

This is funny, though, because Mac people are always like "you plug it in and everything just works" and I go "yeah but it only works the way it wants to and never lets you configure shit!"

Hence I always feel like Word = Microsoft's most Mac-like product (i.e., it impresses people by automatically doing stuff the average user probably wants it to, but if you want anything else in the universe to happen it's a giant pain in the ass).

Word 5.1 was close to killer, though (stupid styles aside), and that really was Mac-like. After Word 6.0 was attacked on all sides for being un-Mac-like, Microsoft commissioned research into what the term "Mac-like" really meant. It turned out it means "like Word 5.1".

I am generally in favor of having to configure everything possible, but that's in part because I always have lower-end computers that need help and jerry-rigging to make them do cool stuff.

No! IT IS NOT ALL ONE WORD! It's several words that happen to be written next to each other, without spaces in between. This does not make several words into one word!

Doesn't make them stupid. It's just something I'd assume one would get on the second try and not something that would actually require you to telephone the radio station for clarification.

You know how your car radio has the scan feature and also the buttons where you can pre-program the stations? If your radio was designed by MS Word, it would start scanning as soon as you turned the radio on and pre-program the first ten stations for you, whether they were gospel or not.

Pretty much all OTM

I don't like the WYSIWYG editors though, mostly because they make my job harder -- they're too device-dependent in my experience. I can see how they'd be great if you were making documents that wouldn't have to stand up to being worked over on other systems (translation for web publishing, in my case). Macros packages from the editors throw a big monkeywrench into the works, especially.

I actually haven't used TeX in conjunction with InDesign, but the combination intrigues me enough that I'll probably try it even though I don't really have a reason to.

Word can suck it.

xpost way up there about the law industry using word perfect. It really depends on the size of the firm. In the last six years, I have not seen this in the two firms I have worked at and the other mid-large to large firms that we exchange documents with. The firm I started at in 2000 had just made the change from WP, and the firm I am at now has been on Office since 2001, I believe. Sure when you have under 20 or so attorney's you may still have WP. I expect this to die out completely when the introduction of Office 2007. I don't know how well WP is going to hand the docx files, or how smooth the conversion will be.

LaTeX is def the way forward, at least after the steep learning curve. have never tried textmate, though, i've only used mactex (i think? suddenly having doubts as to its name).

Play about with other numbers for even more fun!

You can also get a RSS feed of your "published" documents which is rather cool.

I think WP is still pretty much king in legal academe, however, at least according to a couple of perfessers I know

It lets you select NONCONTINUOUS BLOCKS OF TEXT.

WHY IN THE C*NTING WORLD IS THIS NOT POSSIBLE IN ANY OTHER WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM?

it's not like it's some bizarre thing, Photoshop absolutely depends on it, for instance. say you want to make, i dunno, three phrases in the current paragraph italic? do them one at a time. SORRY MSOFT CANNOT HANDLE YOUR CRAZY "non-linear" request DUDER.

in Photoshop, you can say "the cream, the eggs, the flour, and the sugar i am buying." in every text editor/word processor besides Nisus Writer (to my knowledge), one must say "the cream i am buying. the flour i am buying. the sugar i am buying." so yeah OK i guess i should use styles. but i practically wouldn't need them (for my purposes) if i could just select two different chunks of text at once.

you can test drive the whole suite via a citrix session.

this is the worst computer application of all time

almost nothing brings me closer to murderous rage than word autoformat

did they fix the bullet point system in the recent versions?

the old system:

· click on the bullet point button and start a list
· try to edit the list and get bullet points where you don't want them
· delete your file and start over because you can't get rid of the bullet points

little problem I've been having with Word lately is documents somehow turning double-spaced with no apparent way to fix it. Not as good a wtf as finding out that Word has no idea what to do with a Microsoft Works Word Processor document, though.

almost nothing brings me closer to murderous rage than word autoformat

It is very frustrating to deal with, especially when half the time I'm dealing with students who are in tears because Word autoformat has completely messed up their paper.

i use neooffice because i refuse to pay for something as shitty as word but i'm afraid it might actually be worse than word

hahaha i know that bullet point problem well, too

today when i was writing notes out in word — which i would NEVER ever do, but i was going off of a teacher's study guide and didn't feel like c/p-ing into a google doc - word started switching from colored & empty bullet points to lowercase letters & roman numerals like halfway through the doc

just baffling

ok srsly what the hell are you guys doing that's causing this level of bullet point confusion?????? I mean, I sometimes have issues when I go back in and add things but never like what you're all describing (ESP J0rdan, that is beyond baffling and verging on arcane).

just pressing tab, enter & backspace pretty much

It seems to happen a lot, if all the times I'm asked to help out with bullet point disasters is anything to go by.

If you aren't using styles using word really is a battle of yr willpower vs. the machine.

qft

the biggest thing I hate about Word is how long it takes to launch every time you open a new document. You have a document open already, you'd think it could open a second one within the application instead of having to open a whole other application. And why does a document take so long to open anyway?

The best thing about word is the 'View Side by Side' function, with synchronous scrolling. That's the only reason I haven't lost my mind over various difficulties.

If you aren't using styles using word really is a battle of yr willpower vs. the machine.

yep. even so, it's probably my least favorite application EVER. thank the gods I don't have to use it often.

LaTeX

Automatically numbered lists where the space between the number and the start of your text is too long: sucky!
Accidentally moving the little paragraph formatting bar way over to the left outside of your document and being unable to put it back: annoying!!
Wanting to change the indentation of your line of text but inserting another fucking tab instead: arrrgh!!!

So yes, word is shit. But openoffice and wordperfect are A HUNDRED times worse.

All of Office 08 for Mac runs like shit. Slow to the point of being broken. But what are you gonna do? Not format your resume as a Word doc?

well i make everything a pdf anyway so .odt works fine. i wish people would stop emailing doc and docx tbh. it's rude. way quicker to open preview to look at something.

I get the impression that most employers prefer a .doc, and begrudgingly accept pdfs. Not a lot of human services people sitting in front of a mac.

textedit - indesign if i wanna get fancy

i have reached a point where if it's just me vs word i will win pretty easily. but word can always rely on other people to regain the upper hand. "hey, i did a bunch of edits to that document you were working on and i totally fucked up the formatting. have fun!"

.docx is a fucking scourge

Not as good a wtf as finding out that Word has no idea what to do with a Microsoft Works Word Processor document, though.

on the fucking money. this has been re-baffling me for the last five years as i go back and try to refer to the HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS of Works files i have from the past. i mean fair enough, i was a stupid kid who didn't know about the beautiful portability of rich text files yet. but not supporting proprietary document formats that your own company created? die in more fires than the world already wants you to die in, Microsoft.

I get the impression that most employers prefer a .doc, and begrudgingly accept pdfs. Not a lot of human services people sitting in front of a mac.

I've disqualified potential employers because they asked for a resume in .doc format.

since when is a pdf mac only?????

is openoffice any good?

no, but it's free

yeah you can still open a pdf on windows!! word and acrobat reader will open slowly and crash equally ^_^

if i had to send my painstakingly designed resume in doc to be opened in word i would prob cry.

so is any word processing program good?

since when is a pdf mac only?????

It's not, obviously, but some people are still scared of anything that's not a doc file. I ain't saying it makes sense.

if i had to send my painstakingly designed resume in doc to be opened in word i would prob cry.

I have a nice version of my resume, designed in InDesign and exported to pdf. Then I have a Word doc, which, you know, works. The Word doc isn't half as annoying, though, as having to fill out an ill-conceived online form because that's the only way they will accept the resume. For Monster.com or the like, it makes sense to have lists of skills and positions so they can be cross-referenced and searched. No, just one job, with one employer who is a little too proud of its grasp of HTML forms. Maddening.

I never have any trouble with Word.

J0rdan's issue sounds like bullet/numbering styles have been changed from the default -- try restoring them to defaults.

Does it have any "useful" features except that it allows you to type stuff into it, and makes it appear, ON A SCREEN.

This is about all I can do.

Some headhunter-author slickster I had a free "seminar" with says always send a PDF resume, cuz there's no guarantee Word is going to look good on the other end. I know nothing about making a PDF resume and am ignorantly refusing to investigate...

love the mac 'print to pdf' function

Not Mac-specific, either, if you have Acrobat Pro.

Does .docx have any value whatsoever or is it just some dumb plan to get everybody to upgrade their software?

fancier formatting?

Actually, less "fancy" formatting. The text is ASCII, using XML to style it, for much much better interoperability. A old-style .doc file was encoded and styled in inscrutable and super-secret binary bullshit code that no one else could use. So it's getting better.

well... it looks fancier, is what i meant.

but how is it getting better if fewer ppl can use a .docx than a .doc?

Because they won't make the old bad software again, so over time everyone will be able to use docx. If you're in an office, say, that decides to upgrade everyone's machines, you can share documents more easily and all kinds of other stuff. Of course, no one is doing that yet, and even when sending out the ol' resume, I can't really use docx, because like 70% of everyone won't be able to open it.

Yeah, and it's going to be like that for a long time, too. The hardware upgrade cycle that drove MS is slowing *way* down, which is why they can't get anybody off XP either.

Well, the OS upgrades and the hardware upgrades used to be symbiotic, but MS went off the rails with that piece of shit Vista. They basically had to break the inter-dependency with Windows 7, or it would be XP forever.

but os upgrades only applies to windows users. what about the rest of the world?

and i tried to update my office w/ something to let me read docx and it wouldn't install.

xp (Maybe you're joking but) Windows still accounts for 90% of all OS's.

yeah but not even all windows users can use a .docx.
at my job last year, i was running some version of windows and couldn't open it.

When people have sent me .docx files, I've had surprising success extracting the text using...wait for it...Illustrator. But usually OpenOffice works.

xp Oh, I see what you mean. The "compatibility mode" hack is their solution for the moment, and possibly your office machine won't let you install system stuff like that? I'm only guessing. It is a hack, though, and Office files are just going to be a mess for a while.

Maybe we should all just use Google docs.

Wmc -- that's the beautiful thing about them! ASCII text, XML markup.

i run a mac at home, there are no limitations to what i can install, but when i tried to install microsoft's update to ms office for mac in order to read docx, it didn't work.

sorry when i said 'my office' i meant 'my version of microsoft office for mac'.

i may not have had every privilege possible on the work machine that WAS a pc but did not open .docx, so that could have been the problem. still annoying.

but google docs can fuck up formatting, too!!

Yeah, that Word for Mac update was junk. They want you to upgrade to 2008 basically, but it's not nearly as good as Word 2007 for the PC and isn't even fully compatible. I actually really like Word 07, apart from all the Word insanity they've inherited and can't get rid of (no "no style" wtf), and was pissed off at how bad the mac one is.

i mean... i met all the system requirements but the update just flat out would not install!

mac office is soooooo slowwwwwwwwww

It's bleeding ridiculous. I can literally go get a cup of coffee, come back, and still wait a couple minutes before the doc opens. What is going on there? I thought that Office 08 didn't need to run under Rosetta, so why is it like 5 times slower than 04?

srsly annoying.
like, 'oh let me just pull up that spreadsheet...................... uhhhhhh can i call you back in a bit?'

The next version is a rewrite apparently, but the last time they did that they came up with Word 6, so god knows.

I bought Nisus last year. It's pretty great, especially as it uses rtf as its file format, which everything can read, now and forever.

amen.

I hate Word for the aforementioned reasons. I hate that academic publishing houses by and large require Word docs. Like, I don't really care that much about the formatting; I wrote a bunch of words, now you guys make it look pretty if that's what you sell. Especially now that I can, just by posting a PDF to my webpage, get my paper to its intended audience, why I should have to spend 2 days per paper getting it to follow your Word specs? Note that this is harder for me b/c my papers are full of math, which is brutal to work with in Word.

i don't know kenan, something is wrong somewhere on your system, I run the same version of word under snow leopard and have no similar issues. I still don't like word but I don't have that problem.

I have to use Word for Mac a lot for my newspaper. Of course we use InDesign, but people who turn in copy or articles hardly do. Word is illogical and a very 'difficult' program in a way, in that if you're not a noob all sorts of problems arise. But half of the problem surely lies with people who use it that simply don't have a clue. For one, I hate it when people add photos to a press release and have pasted them in Word. I still haven't figured out the logic behind how Word will treat a photo in a document. It's a pain to get them out, and when I do, it's always like Christmas just before opening your gifts if Preview will will show the whole picture, or has Word compressed it already, and sometimes Word has managed to ADD those square marker points INTO the picture, which means I will have to slice off the borders... Crazy.

However, the rise op PDF presents problems as well if it's a press release or text you have to edit. For you must first ALWAYS get that text out of the pdf. It's not difficult to do, but it's an extra action I can do without.

It took me tweaking Word over the course of months to finally reach a setup I can work with, most of the time. And I must admit I was surprised how fast Word for Mac has become (way faster than for my pc).

Oh, if anyone can point to me how I can make some simple macros for Word (for Mac), that would be greatly appreciated. Because that was WAY easier in earlier versions.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats ^

they should bundle it into automatic updates really though.

I don't really hate Word anymore, the alternatives all seem so much worse.

i don't know kenan, something is wrong somewhere on your system, I run the same version of word under snow leopard and have no similar issues. I still don't like word but I don't have that problem.

well, apparently it's tehresa, too. And everyone, absolutely everyone, I have ever mentioned it to prior to reading this thread. It must be a known issue, but I usually get around the problem by lighting a cigarette and telling myself not to care.

Oh hey, look at this!

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=425149

Goddamn MS Word sucks.

hahaha i just went through the classic

type word -> green underline -> right click, choose suggestion -> green underline -> right click, suggestion is original word, choose suggestion -> green underline

never ceases to amaze/amuse me

i'm required to put my last name next to the page number at the bottom of my pages, but i can't figure out how to do this. is it even possible?

header and footer yo

this is fucking retarded

Yes. Show header/footer, then enter your name in the required place. It should then copy this onto every page. (xp)

I'm moving to OpenOffice but it seems quite slow and when I save as Word compatible the formatting goes awry. I have to save so others can open the documents in Word, so I'm not sure if it's worth the change.

this is the worst program known to mankind

just don't, for the love of god, fuck w/any section breaks

it takes three hours to load and makes it impossible to do actual work

i used to write my papers in MS Paint pixel by pixel to save myself time

lol

Header/footer stuff is extremely simple, dudes. It's not that bad.

Section breaks are pretty horribly done, mind you. Don't EVER try to do columns. Or tables.

i try to use google docs as much as possible

Section breaks are pretty horribly done, mind you. Don't EVER try to do columns. Or tables.

― emil.y, Thursday, April 8, 2010 2:28 PM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark

i had to copy a table from SPSS into a word doc two weeks ago & i almost picked up the computer and threw it against a wall

wtf tables are one of the few word features i like

the page break was going haywire

yeah that's not surprising...word is generally terrible at importing outside stuff. doing an original table within word is easy and usually looks good tho

To be honest, the tables thing could just be me being rubbish at handling tables.

Auto-formatted bullet points, on the other hand. AAAAARGH FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.

Also, sneaking Microsoft spyware into your updates: DOUBLE FUCK YOU WITH A SERRATED STRAP-ON.

Um. Sorry about that.

oh god bullet point and numbers make me want to slay

yup yup yup

at least it's a solid tool for making websites — produces simple, readable, valid HTML 5

Just try editing .dot templates originally created in Word 2007 but using Word 2003. Something just goes utterly wrong every time and it's better just to start over in the old version.

And don't get me started on the fucking 2007 ribbon.

word is pretty good imo, but then i'm inculculated into microsoft office software exclusively since about 1995.

we call that stockholm syndrome

not denying the possibility, it's true

Been using a Beta version of MSWord 2010. Took me a while to figure out how to Undo.

.docx

why

i like the ribbon -- a true improvement over the menu bar. they need to stop changing the interface with every version though. they must be making a lot of money in retraining people every 3 years.

Took me a while to figure out how to Undo.

what, does ctrl+z not work?

tables in word suffer from a kind of principle of entropy, in that they start off pretty nice and clean and functional, but as you go on they start to collapse beneath your fingers.

the menu bar in the new version confuses me so much. i'm sure i'd be happy with it if i learned to use it, but my electronic style is being intuitive, and it seems determined to defy any intuitive thinking.

I really don't mind Word that much since I can navigate it so well (I mean, at least the old version that didn't fucking rearrange everything), but my BIGGEST pet peeve is when people use Word for everything. Like emailing me a picture, or printing a picture, or making a brocure, etc. OMG IT IS A WORD PROCESSOR, IT IS NOT USED FOR EVERYTHING.

.docx

why

seriously

I really don't mind Word that much since I can navigate it so well (I mean, at least the old version that didn't fucking rearrange everything), but my BIGGEST pet peeve is when people use Word for everything. Like emailing me a picture, or printing a picture, or making a brocure, etc. OMG IT IS A WORD PROCESSOR, IT IS NOT USED FOR EVERYTHING.

Where I work, our IT dept has not only enabled, but encouraged our 14,000 employees (who are all in healthcare, so are obviously geniuses) to use Word to create brochure, posters, fucking everything. I spend more time trying to fix posters built in Powerpoint (?!) than working on legitimate projects.

Fuck my life.

OH GOD I HATE DOCX!!!! It won't open in ANYTHING except the v new versions of Word and no one has the fucking sense to save something in another format, because docx is the default, and that's the easiest.

the docx thing was the worst idea. i hate bullets, hate section breaks (used a lot of these in legal documents that require tables of contents and it takes as long to format as it does to write the whole thing), tables are ok. my resume looks pretty nice thanks to tables. yes i removed the borders, lol.

there needs to be a whole new model of word processor or maybe i should just take the time to learn LaTeX for good. because the alternatives like openoffice and wordperfect totally suck.

whoa how do you use tables for resumes -0-

i put my name and contact info at the top then started a two-column table. "headings" like education, experience, etc. are in the left column with descriptions on the right. and every section is divided by an empty table row. so everything stays in the same line without it fucking up the tabs when i run into another line or something. then i saved as pdf.

/_\ that is genius

er no the contact info is in the right column at the top. columns are divided like 20/80 on the page. i'm proud of myself!

now i'm looking at it. there are *three* columns, the middle one is just so i could easily adjust the space between the other two.

gonna steal harbl's idea whenever i need to write a resume again

:D

can you plz post or email me yr resume (without personal data or w/e) so I can jack your layout?

What is LaTeX? I use OpenOffice which is OK but it takes about 3 months for the damn program to open.

the only thing worse than word is cunty publisher. trying to format chapbooks in pub has been a fucking nightmare, so we are finally moving to indesign. hallelujah.

it's the unpredictability that really gets me, eg:

i made a 16 page layout awhile ago for a book, which printed out all fucked up, so i made a template from the printout to allow me match the supposed page 1 with the actual page 1 (in terms of folding). so when i wanted to make another book, i used this template. BUT this time the pages all printed out in the order they were supposed to print out. so i rearranged everything. printed it out. it was all fucked up again.

there needs to be a whole new model of word processor or maybe i should just take the time to learn LaTeX for good. because the alternatives like openoffice and wordperfect totally suck.

Been thinking for ages that an old-school dtp app like Quark 3 is a much better way of word processing. Word processors as we have them now are just descendants from the days of 128k computers, so you couldn't have text or picture boxes or stuff that made sense.

Tested this out by getting my mum started with an old Quark instead of Word and she's already making docs that are nearly impossible in Word.

pages works a bit like that now, not sure why there was so much hate for it in 2006 upthread.

It was pretty bad back then, tbf. I quite like it now, but it still treats multiple boxes and dtp-esque things as if they're an advanced feature instead of how you should start.

Trying to fit everything you want to do basically into one giant box is why word processors are so fucked up.

Word is about as complex as I like anything. I treat my computer like a typewriter w/ a screen.

I hope everyone is using styles properly here.

.docx sucksx yes but I gotta rep for .xlsx, Excel 2007 added some v nice stuff & generally feels a lot more functional.

Moving a Word file from one computer to another is such a goddamn formatting nightmare. Nothing during my tenure at Kinko's made me want to put a gun to my head faster than someone bringing in a .doc file, and that includes the guy who was calling me every day to share sexual fantasies about his bodybuilder wife. This is why the .pdf was invented, humans.

But .xls files? Never a problem. Why did one always work so well & the other so poorly?

Word formats the document based on the selected printer, unbelievably. So if they have a wildly different printer from the kinkos one it'll fuck up.

This and fonts is the main reason Word resumes go to shit.

started using textedit in place of word a couple years ago and ive never looked back

i got my girlfriend to design me a fancy resume in indesign

Been thinking for ages that an old-school dtp app like Quark 3 is a much better way of word processing. Word processors as we have them now are just descendants from the days of 128k computers, so you couldn't have text or picture boxes or stuff that made sense.

Tested this out by getting my mum started with an old Quark instead of Word and she's already making docs that are nearly impossible in Word.

― stet, Saturday, April 10, 2010 2:16 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ otm

stet, thank you for your clear & useful answer!

I agree desktop publishing is xmillion better than Word, it's such a shame for the general public that Publisher's so crappy (since so many of them own it).

And yes everyone has a wildly different home printer than a Canon pro copier.

i actually quite like word

also third-party software not being able to open docx stuff is really their own fault, though the botched backwards-compability upgrade thing i can see why that would be annoying to people. docx is a good thing though!

FWIW Pages can open .docx files.

dear people who know word 2007, if i want to add a centered page number to the footer of a document, is there a way to do it that bypasses the ribbon's fucking PICTURE MENU of page number orientations that takes 15 seconds to load on my work computer?

I know they probably spent a lot of money designing a readable serif type but 'cambria' is so fat

Word formats the document based on the selected printer, unbelievably. So if they have a wildly different printer from the kinkos one it'll fuck up.

This and fonts is the main reason Word resumes go to shit.

That's what PDF is for.

Many years ago I frequently used WordPerfect and it too formats for the selected printer when a document is brought up on a different computer. Just like web pages are formatted for whatever screen size you have.

You only have one browser window size; you can have lots of different paper sizes in the one printer. And you making your window small doesn't break the page for me.

If WordPerfect does this it's wrong too. The right way is to use and show the document size set in Page Setup, and complain at print time if it won't fit.

PDF isn't for this, it's for read-only. You should be able to collaborate on a document without it going to shit because someone has some fucked up dot matrix Epson hooked up.

I'd forgotten that about WordPerfect. The amount of time that must have cost me back in the day. WordStar for life, suckaz!!!

Damn was WordStar primitive though. Early versions were like trying to compose a document in the vidiprinter from Grandstand.

Plain text is the one true format.

Is there a vim vs. emacs thread?

Actually, IIRC WordPerfect allowed you to override the formats-to-default-printer upon file retrival, so that it's always formatted for the original document creator's printer of choice. WordPerfect document files more closely resemble HTML than an MS Word .doc file.

Basically, a long string of characters with imbedded codes that turn features on or off, or change settings along the way, rather than style sheets.

embedded

I've really been digging the new feature on Acrobat X that allows saving pdfs as word docs. It was buggy in the past, but seems to work pretty well now (with the exception of opacities, translucent polygons, etc). I'm constantly being asked to reproduce design files as word docs, and now I can pretty much convert them with one click.

Oh man, I so want Acrobat X. I do a ton of work w/ PDF documents and our office is still on 8 (pro).

8 allows you to save a PDF as a Word, but IIRC, it saves the text in text boxes, which is really annoying. Or if it's an image only (not OCR), it saves it as an image embedded in a Word doc.

wow. i have not used this thing for 15 years. it's awful!

but i have to use it now.

i want to get rid of basically all the chrome. i'm nearly there. there are still buttons at the bottom of the window to change the view (outline, page, print, etc.) and zoom. how do i get rid of this bottom toolbar?

http://i.minus.com/ibd3DUYpam3tkN.png

a little bit of black tape should work

thanks man

why on earth do you have to use it

fuckin track changes maybe I guess fuck that fucking forever though

i am teaching collaboratively with biologists, neuroscientists, etc.

they should know better than, wtf

lol nope

when I am asked to referee an article written in Word I sigh a sigh for the cosmos, so ugly, even without notation

saudade of typewriters at that moment tbh

yeah, it's not just the UI for writers, which is obviously garbage. it's what actually results. the defaults are toxic and the rendering/layout engine results in just plain ugly paragraphs and pages. the amount of work required to make something not look like total ass is enormous, whereas the amount of work required to make something look worse is tiny.

it's like it was built for dot matrix printing

so otm xp

i had to put in a lot of time with word over the summer - i developed a grudging respect for it

Word on Mac is an atrocity.

Maybe b/c I don't know any different, I don't have a problem w/ Word on Windows. Do everyday, non-specialist people commonly use something else?

I really liked (PC) Word 97 up to 2005, because I pretty much mastered it.

Word 2007 (PC) and its ribbon fucked things up. Not being able to completely customise toolbars (and have them float anywhere on screen!) made it much more awkward to use.

At work I have to use Word on a Mac (think it's the 2011 version). It's crazy. Like some piece of freeware that sort of works but whose features haven't been thought through at all. Six clicks to do things that should take one click. Amazing bugs (google "mac word 2011 paste freeze" - oh yeah, you can't even copy and paste in 2011!). Literally hundreds of basic problems with this shitty program.

so what do mac people use that's good? agree that word 2011 sucks. i bought office for $10 when i got my macbook last year because i don't know any better. i hate outlook soooo much.

I am a latex priss so ignore me maybe but for most shit people use word for, wouldn't just like the free notepad or, on mac, textedit, be enough?

textedit is totally fine. notational velocity if youre not writing anything super long and want nice syncing/file mgmt options

bean if youre attached to having "a word processor"

ty

yeah I use notational velocity full time too, no formatting but if we're comparing with word

I use Pages or Nisus

NV allows basic formatting right? i like it because any formatting it wont let you do is probably formatting you dont need

Help me ILX! A coworker sent me our org chart in a big docx file and I have to remove an arrow entry. How the fuck do I edit this monstrosity??? I’m using Word 2016. How am I supposed to tell whether this is a Word template thing that I can edit in Word, or is it just a huge image pasted onto a word document?

If it is an image you should be able to delete it in one stroke with the delete key.

(not that you want to delete it but that will tell you if it is an image)

Aha! I see “Drawing Tools” and I can edit the arrows and boxes and employee names and such, so it is a Word thing. Now how to change the number of arrows in a particular entry?

Interesting read on the end of Nisus Software and what happens when your business is no longer viable but you still believe you can extract further income from your product, no matter how it affects your users.
https://tidbits.com/2025/10/25/nisus-writer-schrodingers-word-processor/