Gaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! MS Word

The BBQ Pit
1

{add one quart of Vitrol}

Updating a large-ish work flow document detailing “Soup to nuts” handling of total loss vehicles, appraisal and compliant title/salvage handling. If you didn’t know anything about this job, this doc is all you’d need to walk you through it.

About halfway through I’m updating a bulleted list, and this annoying little callout pops up "<----------[Formatted: Bullets and Numbering] " WTF is this? Track Changes is not enabled, I call The Nerd, The Nerd doesn’t have a clue. “When was the document originally created?” “Uh, 2003.” “Well your system was updated with Windows Office 2003 in May of '04. Maybe there’s a compatability bug between Office 2000 and Office 2003?” Ok, fine, whatever. I’ll just print the damn thing and re-create it in Orifice 2003 and give it a new look as well. Not much going on today anyhow.

About 3/4 of the way through the new & improved workflow (man! Some of that info was downright apocryphal!) I need to reference another Word doc. I chortle to myself that I’ll be absorbing that info into this doc. OK good, great got the info. Type it into my new doc, close the doc I just referenced and (you knew this was coming) * POOF * Word takes its leave of my desktop without so much as a “dijoo wanna save dis?” and … Hey, where’d my doc go? Saka frassin gass blattin marker frackit…

Open MS Word, there’s the “recovered” box telling me “Hey pal, I found this in the trash, did you want to keep this?” Whew, sure did thank’s mate. Good old MS, they think of everything right down to the parachute on their crash-prone aircraft. Click on my doc to open it up from the recovery window and … “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Inigo.”

Fresh document sheet.

Word did this to me way back in the WIN 3.1 days. Ate an essay on Surrealist Art. I told my prof that I had typed it all out and then it was gone–such is the substance and efficacy of the written word to convey experience. Maybe just imagine me turning in the paper? Or maybe let me do 7 pages of psychic automatism for him right then and there? He didn’t go for that. 25 years later I ask you, the reader, to understand that my lack of emotionally descriptive language in this paltry epistle is intentional as I would not want to taint my feelings about this event by cheapening them to fit into the wrapper of mere words.

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Yeah, MS sucks. So what else is new?

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Not to minimize your suffering, but have you considered turning on the “auto save” feature?

Trust me, I’ve been using Word since 1988 or so, and frankly, if I could scare up a copy of version 6 for Windows I’d never use anything else. I just don’t believe word processors got any better after that, just more advanced, whatthefuckever that means.

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More features.

5

It had occurred to me that this would come up. I’m really not bashing MS (all that much). But I’d really like the creative energy and those hours of my life back. I can (and will) restart the project, but it won’t be as good as the one that was lost.

And Autosave (every 10 minutes) IS turned on. I am an insurance guy you know, and a pessemist by nature. But sometimes I think there’s some “Inigo Code” in Word that patiently waits and then eats my children when I really don’t have the time for that.

6

Yeah and so does Ipple. Whatcha gonna do?

7

My paranoia must be greater than yours; I’ve been autosaving on every word processing program I’ve used since 1988 or so every ONE minute. I highly recommend it.

8

MS doesn’t necessarily suck. Microsoft’s made some very fine products. Excel is a hell of a spreadsheet program.

Word, however, is the devil’s undergraduate Computer Science project.

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I guess it’s a question of which one you think sucks less.

10

Header & Footer page numbering nearly made me give up writing my Master’s thesis.

I ended up transferring it to Word Perfect, where page numbering is easy, and then back to Word because the grad school required it that way.

11

I have a version.

It does not run on XP. :frowning:

12

aversion to what?

(attempt at hilarity)

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I bet it would run like a top on my DOS/Win3.1 machine with 384 MB of RAM, though.

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I’m good at H&Fs; if you go for another Master’s, look me up!

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Just throwin’ this out there, and i half expect to get flamed for doing so, but i love the way Word '07 does H&Fs.

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Yes! And I use it on my old computer, when not using (on the same computer) Word Perfect 5.1+.
I’m such a Luddite.

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I’ve been an administrative professional using Word and Excel for over 11 years now. I click the “save” icon like a twitch. I start to sweat when I’ve gone over a minute without clicking it. I feel your pain, Inigo, but seriously, what are you, new? :smiley:

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“So, guys, we can spend a godzilla bucks making our software more or less foolproof, or we can Skinner-box the poor dumb bastards into saving every two minutes. Third or fourth time 6 hours worth of work goes poof!..they’ll catch on! Garcon! Another baby on the barbie, if you would…”

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Please check your email. And thanks for the offer!