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"

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/