# \*&^% microsoft word!!!!!! **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [February 18, 2018, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064 "2018-02-18T19:15:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/21 "2018-02-19T02:41:13Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > It is true it wasn’t really designed for Mac back in the diskette days Au contraire. We had word back when your screen looked like this: A:\ … you folks were very fond of your WordPerfect 4.0 (and later, 5.1) and only when you switched to Windows in large masses did you switch to Word. Mac users (god help me) were in love with the stupid thing from the start. It was popular in 1985 when I first sat down to a 512Ke (“fat Mac”) and stuck in System 3 on a floppy disk. I preferred WriteNow and MacWrite (even the primitive one that only let you have one document open at a time) and later FullWrite and MacWrite Pro and the early version of Nisus. Oh, and WordPerfect on the Mac wasn’t half bad once they finally gave us a version. > [@](#): > > you still can’t get the hang of a simple and stable piece of software and still hate it for no good reason. Umm, I don’t hate it for no good reason. I hate it because… • Although it can do everything — it was the poster child for bloatware for a long time, I would not have been surprised if there had been a command for “make a cup of coffee” buried in there somewhere —it wasn’t laid out well and logically and you could spend an afternoon trying to do the simplest damn thing like make the bloody paragraphs indent or turn off kerning; • It’s the epitome of programs that think they know better than you do how you want your document to behave. Hit a couple of returns, a tab, and start typing and damned if it doesn’t decide “Oh, you obviously want a bulleted list, here I’ll do that for you”. Then you spend the next 15 minutes wrestling with the damn thing trying to get what YOU wanted on the screen instead of what WORD wants on the screen; • When you open a document of moderate size (say, a 300 page novel, i.e., 95,000 words) it takes forever. Sometimes it crashes. It’s more likely to crash if you do something like open each of the chunks of a novel, copy each in turn, and paste into the single Word document that some asshole literary agent wants to receive it in. Spinning beachball- lozenge thing goes spin spin spin spin and maybe 15% of the time it crashes and you have to start over. • You paste 11 lines of text and then scroll down and you see that you accidentally copied the line you already had as well, so now it’s in there twice. So you delete the redundant copy and now you’ve got neither copy of that line because no, it actually wasn’t in there twice, the line was just _displaying_ twice. • You click to insert your cursor and nothing happens. Click. Click. Click! OK freaking finally. Agh, no, don’t select the adjacent text! •You copy raw text out of a raw text editor and paste and the pasted version in Word is neither inheriting the formatting of the previous paragraph nor resembles the default font used by the raw text editor. Then you open a Word document and select and copy a paragraph that already has the formatting you want and paste it into the other Word document and some of the formatting doesn’t carry over. WTF, we’re single spaced over here? And once again, no paragraph indents? • OK, you’ve finally got your cursor inserted and you start typing. You’re quickly eight characters ahead of what’s showing on screen. The text below where you’re typing is word-wrapping as you insert and as each word rolls over to the next line, MS Word is apparently contemplating the effects that might have on every subsequent character in the whole damn document, or trying to compute pi to the final digit or something. Yeesh. My text editor is so much more nimble on a million-word document. Yes, I really do prefer to compose in a text editor. Word is so awful with… well, words. It can’t handle very many of them without barfing all over itself. • I realize I need to select the entire stretch from page 109 to page 217 and do something to it. (Most often, reapply the freaking paragraph indent). Click before the beginning of the first sentence on 109. Drag the scrollbar. Somehow it hasn’t paid attention to any pages beyond 134 or so, as dragging way down causes page 120 to appear, a beachball lozenge appears, and the vertical slider thing representing where I am in the document, which I just dragged down midway between kneecap and ankle level in the document, suddenly pops UP to the midway point. I grab and redrag. Repeat. Aha, there’s page 217. Click to insert cursor, with shift key down to cause it to select all in between. Nope, of course not. I have to click and insert the cursor down here and then drag back up and retry planting the damn cursor at the beginning of the desired selection. • I want a section break, I want the page numbers to continue from the previous section, but the header to start with something different. I have a text document and some screen shots saved to remind me of the incredibly arcane set of procedures necessary to do this, because, well… seriously, does _this_ impress you as a well-designed process for doing something that anyone doing anything with chapters would want to do? Insert menu –\> Break –\> Section Break (Next Page) View menu –\> Header and Footer Insert menu again –\> Page Numbers (even though you’ve already got page numbers inserted, mind you) –\> Format… button —\> click “continue from previous section” Click “Header and Footer” button bar thingie in the button-widget area of the top portion of the document –\> unclick “Link to Previous” > [@](#): > > Over a billion people use MS-Word without issues, I suspect it is you. They don’t all use it without issues. A great many of them use it _despite_ issues. > [@](#): > > The software even works on iPhones and Galaxies for free, why you still have problems with it is inexplicable. What the hell does its successful invasion of yet more platforms have to do with anything? Kudzu and fire ants are immensely successful at spreading themselves around and thriving but it doesn’t make them good things to have in your own yard. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/22 "2018-02-19T02:44:13Z")
> [@Balthisar](#): > > He runs an older OS that may not be compatible, and is still kind of stuck in the past about it. I think I remember a complaint that Eudora would no longer work for him. I’m currently using MacOS 10.11.6, actually. My version of Word is 14.2.0 and, while neither is cutting edge newest, they’re not stuck in the past. I do still use Eudora. I run MacOS 10.6.8 in Parallels in order to do so. Not relevant to the situation at hand. I’m on a 4-core 2.3 GHz i7 laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD drive. It runs everything else I throw at it without the miserable performance I get from Word. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/23 "2018-02-19T02:46:28Z")
I hope you realize that was far too long of a post explaining how you’re incapable of using a word processing tool that a billion people can use ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/24 "2018-02-19T03:26:50Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > I hope you realize that was far too long of a post explaining how you’re incapable of using a word processing tool that a billion people can use That was a rant, son. ---
**Author:** ![Allthegood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c68b51/32.png) [@Allthegood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Allthegood)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 8:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/25 "2018-02-19T08:43:33Z")
I used Word in constantly updated versions for 20 years because I worked in a law office. I became something of an expert at using it because each time they updated it, I would sit there and play with the different functions until I knew where everything was and what all the pull-down menus had in them, and so on. People would come to me for help when they couldn’t figure out how to do stuff in the newest version. (It was not my job to help with word processing questions. I did help them, though.) So, I do know how to use Word, but I still hate Word and I still long for the days when WordPerfect was the standard. ---
**Author:** ![Grim\_Render](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a87d85/32.png) [@Grim\_Render](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grim_Render)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 9:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/26 "2018-02-19T09:29:43Z")
When working with Word, I find that my greatest frustrations are not getting it to do something or figuring out how to do something, but to stop Word from doing stuff I don’t want it to do. From marking text where it insists on including more text than I want, to when it absolutely must format more than the marked text into columns… It all needs to be switched off, and frequently, that does not help. It seems that the most mind-bogglingly annoying issues with the program have been lovingly designed in. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/27 "2018-02-19T14:59:57Z")
It looks like you are trying to blow your brains out. Do you need some help with that? ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/28 "2018-02-19T16:48:20Z")
MS Word used to be crappy, but it’s vastly improved. Those flaws AHunter listed are largely gone in Office 365. It doesn’t do the “looks like you’re trying to do this” any more. Granted, it does have some features that make life both easier and harder at the same time. For instance, by default it will capitalize the first word of a sentence for you, and I’ve gotten used to doing it that way. Anything that’s even an iota less work, I’ll do. Capitalizing is for suckers. However, message boards don’t do this, so I’m constantly having to go back and UC. AHunter: instead of clicking and dragging across several pages, insert your cursor at the beginning of the text you want to to copy. Don’t hold anything down. Scroll down to the end of the text, hold down shift, and then click at the end of the text. The entire area will be highlighted. Also, in the latest versions of Word, you can use several pasting options. Insert the cursor where you want to paste your content, then right-click. A little menu pops up. Hover your mouse over the paste options, and you’ll see how your content looks before pasting. Default is destination style, but you can also choose the last option which uses no formatting. Other options include source formatting, and you might get some extras in case Word predicts what you’re trying to do. At least you get to preview before committing. Word works best when you use templates that already incorporate styles, like CSS for HTML. That way, you don’t have to go back and format as much. You can just insert your cursor in a paragraph, select a style, and voila. As an alternative, try Google Docs. All you need is a gmail address. It’s free, works the same way as Word, and auto-saves for you every 30 seconds. It can’t do anything fancy on the level of InDesign, but if all you’re wanting to do is stories, you’ll be fine. Google Drive is where I’ve created spreadsheets and wikis for work, and I keep all my game design, stories, and art projects there. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/29 "2018-02-19T17:02:52Z")
> [@Knowed\_Out](#): > > AHunter: instead of clicking and dragging across several pages, insert your cursor at the beginning of the text you want to to copy. Don’t hold anything down. Scroll down to the end of the text, hold down shift, and then click at the end of the text. Yep, that’s exactly what I was doing. It often doesn’t work as advertised the first couple of attempts. Especially with large chunks of text. I click at the end with hte shift key down and nothing selects and I have to try again. > [@](#): > > Also, in the latest versions of Word, you can use several pasting options. Insert the cursor where you want to paste your content, then right-click. A little menu pops up. Hover your mouse over the paste options, and you’ll see how your content looks before pasting. Default is destination style, but you can also choose the last option which uses no formatting. Other options include source formatting, and you might get some extras in case Word predicts what you’re trying to do. At least you get to preview before committing. I’ll try that, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/30 "2018-02-19T18:32:32Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > I hope you realize that was far too long of a post explaining how you’re incapable of using a word processing tool that a billion people can use Glad to hear that the OP was able to reconstruct his lost work. But on this particular topic, I have to say that I sympathize with **AHunter3**. With the caveat that I’m not familiar with the latest versions like Office 365, what **AHunter3** is describing is quite valid and not an indication that he’s “incapable” of using Word correctly. I think you would find that the vast majority of those “billion” people use Word for relatively small documents and for simple, basic functions. Word is (or was) internally an appalling mess of unstructured spaghetti code that practically guaranteed obscure bugs and unwanted behaviors, and poor design decisions like trying to second-guess what the user wants only adds to the woes and needless complexity. On those occasions when I’ve used it for large documents (many hundreds of pages) with complex requirements I’ve definitely run into the kinds of issues **AHunter3** mentions, and worse. Perhaps many of these problems have been fixed in recent versions and the piece of crap completely rewritten, but in general “Microsoft” and “software excellence” are not synonymous. ---
**Author:** ![Helena330](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/helena330/32/531_2.png) [@Helena330](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helena330)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/31 "2018-02-19T19:41:45Z")
> [@Knowed\_Out](#): > > MS Word used to be crappy, but it’s vastly improved. Those flaws AHunter listed are largely gone in\*\* Office 365\*\*. It doesn’t do the “looks like you’re trying to do this” any more. Granted, it does have some features that make life both easier and harder at the same time. For instance, by default it will capitalize the first word of a sentence for you, and I’ve gotten used to doing it that way. Anything that’s even an iota less work, I’ll do. Capitalizing is for suckers. However, message boards don’t do this, so I’m constantly having to go back and UC. I have Office 365 as well, and I have it set to save automatically to my One Drive account. I still manually save things to my laptop, but it’s nice to know I won’t lose much if something goes haywire locally. I do occasionally check to be sure saving to One Drive is still working, however. No problems yet. ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/32 "2018-02-19T20:08:55Z")
> [@Helena330](#): > > I have Office 365 as well, and I have it set to save automatically to my One Drive account. I still manually save things to my laptop, but it’s nice to know I won’t lose much if something goes haywire locally. I do occasionally check to be sure saving to One Drive is still working, however. No problems yet. The main problem I have with One Drive is that when I have to change my password every 45 days, OD sometimes doesn’t connect on all circuits. It will tell me my work hasn’t saved because I’m not logged in, but it worked anyway. I have to visit IT and get them to untangle it. ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/33 "2018-02-19T20:16:13Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Yep, that’s exactly what I was doing. It often doesn’t work as advertised the first couple of attempts. Especially with large chunks of text. I click at the end with hte shift key down and nothing selects and I have to try again. This might be due to not having rebooted your machine in a while. Your memory eventually gets used up and needs to replenish. ---
**Author:** ![control-z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/eada6e/32.png) [@control-z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/control-z)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/34 "2018-02-19T21:19:10Z")
I don’t know if it works in the version of Word you are using, but Alt, F, S does a save. I do that every minute or two. Once you’ve done it a few times you don’t even think about it. Alt, F, S, use it or lose it. ---
**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/35 "2018-02-19T22:10:11Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Umm, I don’t hate it for no good reason. I hate it because… Much as I enjoyed your rant, your issues sound like a classic case of PEBCAK. Most of what you describe are non-issues if you have a reasonable level of skill at using the program. The other ones sound like they come from having a slow and out-of-date computer. > [@](#): > > • It’s the epitome of programs that think they know better than you do how you want your document to behave. Hit a couple of returns, a tab, and start typing and damned if it doesn’t decide “Oh, you obviously want a bulleted list, here I’ll do that for you”. Then you spend the next 15 minutes wrestling with the damn thing trying to get what YOU wanted on the screen instead of what WORD wants on the screen; On one hand, I agree that the makers of Word seem to think they know better than the user what the user wants. On the other hand, all of the automatic crap can be rejected on the spot, and turned off permanently by changing the program options. If you’re spending 15 minutes or even 15 seconds trying to un-do the automatic stuff, then you’re just not proficient with the program. I just installed a brand-new version of Word on a brand-new computer, and boom, there was all the annoying automatic crap that I had disabled on other machines that I use. I said, “damn, that’s annoying,” and spent all of 3 minutes setting options so that it did exactly what I wanted it to do and no more. ---
**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/36 "2018-02-19T22:18:29Z")
To late to edit - Maybe your computer isn’t crappy - I don’t know from Macs, but I have only had the computer-related problems you describe when using a particularly old and junky computer. ---
**Author:** ![IvoryTowerDenizen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ivorytowerdenizen/32/17937_2.png) [@IvoryTowerDenizen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IvoryTowerDenizen)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/37 "2018-02-19T23:24:25Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Yep, that’s exactly what I was doing. It often doesn’t work as advertised the first couple of attempts. Especially with large chunks of text. I click at the end with hte shift key down and nothing selects and I have to try again. > > I’ll try that, thanks. You can also turn off auto formatting (for making lists or bullet points) etc. Easy solution built right in ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2018, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/38 "2018-02-20T00:38:02Z")
> [@Green\_Bean](#): > > Much as I enjoyed your rant, your issues sound like a classic case of PEBCAK. > > Most of what you describe are non-issues if you have a reasonable level of skill at using the program. > > The other ones sound like they come from having a slow and out-of-date computer. > [@Green\_Bean](#): > > To late to edit - Maybe your computer isn’t crappy - I don’t know from Macs, but I have only had the computer-related problems you describe when using a particularly old and junky computer. Ahem! Did you notice that **AHunter3** provided the specs for his computer? He says it’s a 4-core 2.3 GHz i7 laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD (:eek:) running MacOS 10.11.6. Now, I don’t know from Macs either, but it happens that a friend was recently here with a very similar laptop, a Macbook Pro, 16 GB i7 except 2.2 GHz and a smaller SSD. That was one hell of a machine. He was using it to do professional video editing and he claimed it was much faster for this application than his newly built Windows desktop with a 6-core i7. If this is “crappy hardware” incapable of properly running Word but fully capable of 4K resolution feature film editing then Microsoft, never known for efficient software, must have really and truly outdone itself this time with this version of Office! 😃 As for skill level, I have no idea what **AHunter3** ’s skill level is, but I can sympathize with his rant because I’ve had similar problems as I noted before, although I’ve no experience with recent versions like Office 365. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with large or complex documents so I don’t remember many of the specific issues and annoyances, but in general they were things like Word badly mangling attempts to merge sections of a document that different collaborators had been working on, and that occasionally some innocent action would send it into a fit of reformatting that would mangle the entire document. Just bad, bad design and, from what I’ve read, really sloppy code inside. Which is probably why the Internet is full of scathing critiques of it. Perhaps you would like to argue that my own level of proficiency with Word is lacking. Maybe so, but my experience with word processing goes back to the days of TECO and RUNOFF. If you don’t know what those are, TECO was a powerful but cryptic text editor that used one- and two-letter commands that could be assembled into powerful iterative macros – it implemented, in effect, a programming language for text editing. And RUNOFF was a text-based document formatting program based on the idea of a markup language – kind of a precursor of SGML – that was manually added throughout the text to define what you wanted the printed document to look like. If I had no trouble with terminal-oriented text editors and markup languages, why do I have trouble with what is supposed to be a modern WYSIWYG word processor with a graphical UI paradigm that in theory a child should be able to use? Could it, just possibly, be bad design and bloated, unnecessarily complex, non-intuitive and buggy implementations? ---
**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2018, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/39 "2018-02-20T04:41:05Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > If I had no trouble with terminal-oriented text editors and markup languages, why do I have trouble with what is supposed to be a modern WYSIWYG word processor with a graphical UI paradigm that in theory a child should be able to use? Because you failed to keep up with the times? ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2018, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064/40 "2018-02-20T06:15:24Z")
I have one complaint about Word. Well, about MSOffice. In fact, it involves other MS products too. Whomever decided to localize shortcuts and pseudo-programming commands should be taken out back, flayed, covered in honey, deposited atop a fireant mound, rinse and repeat. And the people who have allowed related functions in Excel to be programmed with differing criteria and those criteria left undocumented should be the ones moving him around and caring for him. Oh: add whomever chose two completely different pseudoprogramming methodologies for Excel and Access. He can wipe the ass of everybody else. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/microsoft-word/809064.md?page=3)