I was going to write “bitch about Microsoft Word,” but I decided it was wrong to be so narrow-minded.
I’ll begin with MS Word, though. I loathe it with the heat of a thousand novas. It’s so chock-full of features that you have to work three times as hard as you should to find the ones you want, and half the features are stupid anyway. And, on the features tht actually make sense, they set the defaults up in stupid ways. Take, for instance, the auto-capitalization feature, which capitalizes the first word of sentences in case you forget. Nice feature, I’ll admit. EXCEPT that it’s set up to automatically add exceptions to a list for which the feature is deactivated. So if, say, I were to type the previous two sentences in Word, and then accidentally un-capitalized “Nice,” and immediately corrected it, Word would make a note to no longer capitalize after the word “forget.” Thus the longer you use Word, the more mistakes auto-capitalize is likely to make.
And don’t get me started on contextual spelling. It’s a perfect storm of crappiness. It’s ALWAYS WRONG. Just out of curiosity, I turned the feature on and told it to check the sentence “She was stunned at what she saw there.” Word thinks that the last word should be "their.’
And there’s the docx extension, introduced in office 2007. Its purpose, of course, is to suck you into the raping tentacles of Redmond’s exclusivity. It makes things horribly inconvenient when sharing files with others, of course, but that suits Bill Gates’ evil plans anyway.
But that’s just me. I’m sure y’all can think of even more things to hate about vista or the X-Box or some other of Microsoft’s shittty-yet-dominant product line.
Yes, MS created a bunch of “open” standards for it’s office suite, while the rest of the civilized world was working on a completely different standard.
My main problem with MS is Windows. I hadn’t used windows for 2 years, but the other day I got netbook with XP on it, and it’s shocking how horrible it is when you’re not used to its quirks. It’s just ugly, unresponsive, unintuitive, feels unreliable and the shell is a mess. Also (but this isn’t MS’s fault) if you buy a machine with windows already on it, or any kind of hardware, chances are 99% that it comes with a load of auto-starting applications that you’ll never want to use and destabilize the platform.
M$ Word make so many routine and easy tasks hard, that the one and only time I found it make a difficult task easy, I wanted to call the Guinness Book of World Records. I’ve been using Word since the early 90s. There have been times I would have been better off directly editing Postscript using vi over a 300 baud remote line than using M$ Word.
One fine day I was finishing up a piece of software documentation in M$ Word, on a tight deadline. All I needed to do at that point was update the table of contents, print the final copy, and save the file. But Word in its exceedingly finite wisdom decided that when I printed the copy - the copy I had to send to the client THAT DAY so I could get paid!!! - it would conveniently set the page listed for the start of every chapter in the table of contents to page 2. A two hundred page document, but every chapter started on page 2. I did not re-generate the TOC, I just hit the print button, and saw the TOC pages all turn to “2”. Not enough :mad: in the world for that one. I finally learned I had to save the file, update the TOC, save the file again, close the file, open the file, check the TOC, and then print it. Then close the file without saving it again (because M$ Word, which is soooo much smarter than I am - thinks that printing a file is changing it). That usually worked in printing my TOC properly. I think I had to run widdershins around an abandoned church somewhere in there, it’s been a few years. The little magic booga-booga dance got me through the rest of the documents I had to update and print. I’m pretty sure M$ has fixed this particular bug, but that day my co-workers had to talk me out of driving from Maryland to Redmond, WA so I could kick Bill Gates in the nuts.
I’m just as happy to not have a criminal assault on my record, but it would have been very satisfying.
M$ has perfected the art of producing software that people will pay for - whether or not it works. Early versions of Windoze turned most computers into bricks, but people bought M$ Win, and then all the upgrades. :rolleyes: Not that M$ doesn’t make some good products - I’m a huge Excel geek - but they sell an awful lot of crappy ones.
Don’t get me started on MCSEs who, in the words of Babylon 5, combine arrogance and stupidity in one efficient package.
It is said that Bill Gates is a great philanthropist, but he is actually a criminal and an asshole. All that money he is sending to Africa was obtained through illegal monopolistic anti-competitive means, its not his to be giving away. We should prosecute him for running a monopoly, nationalize his fortune and fire him out of a giant canon into the sun.
It was just a fix of windows 95. Call it the Windows 9 series.
They eventually fixed XP and then dumped it for Vista which nobody rushed out to support leaving consumers with older software wondering why they didn’t name it Windows Me Again. Personally, I won’t buy a new computer until Seven comes out. After reviewing all the problems people have with Vista I may just switch to Linux.
Now on to the Newest Version of Excel. they take a time honored tool bar and completely reinvent it with something they call a ribbon. It took me 15 minutes to find the print function and it takes up more space. If given the chance I will hurt the person responsible for this. I don’t need to relearn the same software I’ve been using for 20 years. I already use 2 screens in Excel so I can see more of what I’m working on, I don’ need the view cut down. Beyond this, the original tool bars were fairly universal between MS products as well as other products written to run under Windows. It should stay the same until Jesus arrives with instructions to change it.
Along the same lines of reinventing the wheel, MS took something called File Manager and changed it to My Computer. If I want to look for files I would naturally go to something called FILE MANAGER.
Finally, stop making an OS that takes up more memory than the last one. If you want to do something constructive, build a working OS system on a read-only chip so the computer doesn’t have to boot up. Turn it on and it is ON instead of booting up off a hard drive. That way, any tidbit updates can be downloaded and if you get a nasty virus you back up your docs/photo’s and flush the computer. DONE.
If only they engineered their software like Apple: light-weight, functional, and easy to use.
Like iTunes. I just bought an iPod touch so I could put Epocrates on it. Of course it makes sense that I shouldn’t be able to drag and drop PDF’s onto it for use with the on-board PDF reader and I *should *be forced to register my iPod with a desktop computer using iTunes 8 which weighs in at a svelte 71 mb to do what Windows Media Player does in 25 mb.
Agreed, but they finally got it right. Well, almost - it took Win98SE for things to settle down to comfortable stability (especially when it came to things like USB support).
For those who detest the Office suite with a vengeance, I’m just wondering if any of you has tried OpenOffice, and has any opinions. My 7-year-old PC is underpowered and overcrowded, so I’m going to have to bite the bullet soon, and get something new. I don’t use Word and Excel much these days, and I suspect OO may be more than good enough. I use Thunderbird for email and Firefox to browse, so other than the OS itself, I think I can pretty much avoid the MS stuff.
(A Mac isn’t really an option - I do some software development, and my users are almost all on Windows of one vintage or another. I need to know how things will behave on those platforms.)
I have never used Word, but it looks awful. I have gotten used to XP and rather like it. Vista is dredful, just dreadful. I guess I will get a netbook next since I think that’s the only way to avoid Vista. After that?
What I really hate is that people send me Word attachments in email. Simple Word files, I open in WordPad and try to save in txt files, but Word always manages to turn things like quotation marks into incomprehensible gibberish. Usually, I can copy it (if small enough, I guess) to a clipboard and then into the excellent editor I use. But why can’t Word save it thus?
Outside of Word and Vista, I don’t hate MS at all. I have written or cowritten three beautiful (typographically, at any rate) books using my faithful editor and TeX.
I use OO on my MacBook. It’s more than good enough, but I haven’t tried anything really complicated in terms of templates, indexing, etc. I can work on Word and Excel documents from work just fine.
One feature I do miss from Word/Excel in OO is the command to list the full path and file name in a header or footer. I use this all the time in my M$ Office documents, and it imports into OO just fine, but I have yet to find the magic in OO to put the full path in the header or footer in a new document. Not a huge deal for me, but there you go.
I put OO on my work computer. It lets me open documents when my slow computer and my over-active AV program would not let me open documents with Word. I can’t entirely blame M$ for that one, adding new RAM helped a work machine enormously, although they did create the flawed security environment in which AV programs are necessary …
See? Microsoft’s own programs don’t even play nice with each other! What hope do we have…
I also use OpenOffice.org here. It mimics almost every single option the MS Office suite has, except for the more obscure ones… and even then, there are probably plugins and workarounds.
Microsoft also wrote a patch to allow Word to read ODF files, so I sincerely hope people begin spreading ODF files around… but given how difficult it is to download anything from microsoft.com, I’m not holding my breath.
Come to think of it, this may be what’s causing some capitalization autocorrect weirdness in a couple of docs I’m working on; I’ll have to look into that when I get back to work. Thanks for pointing this out.
Anyhoo, it looks like you can turn off the switch to automatically add words to the autocorrect exceptions list, as well as delete items that were added to the list.
Never thought to test this in OO but I found it with a little poking around. You would insert a footer and then ‘insert field’. chose ‘other’ then under the ‘Document’ tab choose File Name and the Path/file name.
We used the file path as part of file protocol at my last company. When you’re working on multiple projects at the same time and need to bring up someone else’s work it’s important to be able to find it.
Why does windows have to lock up a system for 5 minutes when I connect a USB drive or insert a DVD? If I want to look at the fricken’ pictures or open the documents I can do that myself. I have never, ever used this craptacular function and have neve met anyone lese who has used it. It’s sole purpose is to disable the computer when you are in a rush to do something.
And the generally wierd shit. My thesis contaned over 50 pages of tables.If I converted the tables fomr Excel and inserted them as WMF or similar Word randomly resized the fonts and did similar shit every time I closed down and re-opened. Very useful feature that.
But if I inserted them as Excel tables it was fine, except that word wouldn’t let me print in half the page. Not because of margins or anything. It just didn’t like using half th epage. I asked how to correct this problem on every message board I could find, inlcuding this one. I also asked the techs at work and several knowledgable friends. The answer: “Yeah that happens. If you want to insert tables over 3/4 of the page width you have to use Publisher.”
So I re-did the entire thesis in MS Publisher. This is actually a very good app. Except that there is no way to go to a specific page. So when you want to change the bibliography and then update the table of contents to reflect the change yu have to spend 5 minutes scrolling form one end of a 300 page document to the other, one page at time.
Another favourite: Microsoft help files that don’t help. Just yesterday I was trying to change the password in XP. Not on a network but a stand alone PC that I had full admin rights to. No search term worked. You coudln’t allow “change password” to return instructions on how to change the password. Oh no. That returns results on how to change passwords on network accounts, how to set password rules and so forth. Nothing at all on how to change a login password. I finally remebered how to do it, but even then I couldn’t find instructions in the help files.
I could go on with a MS rant all day, but it is hard to thnk of any other major manufacturer that produces such counterintuitive, unfriendly crap full of bugs as MS.
How is Microsoft a monopoloy? They have competition in every area they operate in from multiple companies. Also Bill Gates no longer works at Microsoft.
Autoplay can be turned off. I can’t tell you how to do it at the moment as I am using Windows 7 and the procedure is different from earlier versions of Window. But it certainly can be turned off. Its something I always do after a new Windows installation.
Thank you! That works perfectly ofr text documents. I was able to pull up something similar for spreadsheets - OO remembered that I had this in previous spreadsheet footers. I can’t quite get the footer with path and file name formatted the way I want, but I have other things to do today. Ignorance fought! And M$ taken down a peg.
