MS Word: Shit on both PC AND Mac

While I can appreciate a comprehensive disk-repair utility that analyzes situations and makes recommendations and does its own “smart” situation-specific response stuff, I most vehemently do not want a freakin’ word processor that thinks it’s smarter than I am.

Don’t decide I’m making a “list”. If I want bullet points I’ll • make a • freakin’ bullet point, dammit. If I want my items numbered, I’ll stick numbers on them. If I want my items numbered dynamically, so that if cut and paste and reorder them and whatnot, give me a symbol I can type that displays as the ordinal occurrence of that symbol at that indentation. Don’t be popping those suckers in every time I hit the freakin’ return key.

Don’t format my text on a per-paragraph level. I don’t ever, ever, want to backspace or paste or cut or delete something and have entire pages’ worth suddenly go to a different font, size, margin, line spacing, or anything else. Just copy and paste the text with its character-level formatting (font, size, bold/italic/plain, color) and don’t be messing with anything else in the bloody paragraph or page.

Don’t spell-check my document. Don’t put squiggly lines under things as I type them and most absolutely positively do not change what I type to what you think I should’ve typed. If I want spell-checking I’ll run spell-check after I’m done, thank you.

Don’t replace any symbol I’ve typed with a cuter, curlier, but less compatible Word-native replacement. If I want a curly quote (“smart quote”) instead of a straight “quote”, I’ll “type” the damn thing. (And when I do it my way it won’t turn into some other silly-ass symbol when I copy and paste it elsewhere). Ditto for apostrophes.

IN FACT LET’S GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT, SHALL WE? Start with being a text editor and add in other stuff only where appropriate. Here is the comprehensive list of what I want you, as a word processor, to do without me explicitly telling you to do it, as I type:

• make the characters happen as I type them.
• wrap the line at the right hand margin (soft wrap)
• widows and orphans linewrap protection, as per my saved preferences

The rest – decisions about font, indentation, headers & footers, endnotes and footnotes, line spacing, insertions of graphics and how to make text wrap around them, page breaks, page numbering, column settings and formatting, hypertext live-URL embedding, where and when and in what format to save the document, etc etc – I’ll do from a menu. Don’t do them for me.

And, since I know this is coming – Don’t ship the damn product with all these do-it-for-me doodads (including talking paper clips) turned on by default and the zillion separate preference settings for turning them off deeply buried in obscure places! I’m sure I could set up Word to behave as I have described – I could probably set up Word to display all text upside down and save all documents in TIFF format, there’s damn little that Word doesn’t have crammed into it somewhere – but life is too short to bother trying to find out.

Oh, and finally:

•Don’t suck up lots of RAM and processor cycles. You’re a word processor, not a SETI engine or a 128-bit encryption algorithm-breaker.

I like Word, too, but what the shit is up with that drawing canvas? :mad:

You may not want this, but the average user doesn’t want to have to number and reset paragraph indents for numbered lists by hand. I certainly don’t. I much prefer to type Tab-1-period-tab-my text and when I hit return have Word automatically set up 2 for me in exactly the same manner. Same with bullet lists. Why should I have to do the work?

Yes, that sucks. But paragraph styles are, by and large, a good thing. Create your own styles and use them – don’t direct format. Use Word’s styles the way they’re designed to be used, and you’ll get much farther with them.

Again, the average user appreciates the in-line spell checker. Why should I have to run it myself? That would take more time. Point out my misspelled words and let me do what I want with them. And thank you, Word, for replacing “teh” with “the.”

Unless you’re using foot or inch measurements, there is no situation where straight marks are appropriate.

Let’s get right down to it, shall we? You shouldn’t be using Word. You should be using SubEthaEdit. Word is not a text editor, it is a word processor built with the average user in mind by default.

So the common, less-tech savvy user should have to struggle re: how to turn these features on? That’s backwards. Always ship with handholds turned on by default – those who don’t want them should be savvy enough to turn them off, whereas those who do are almost certainly not savvy enough to turn them on.

Most people appreciate inline spell checking, proper quote symbols, easy numbered and bullet list management – why should all of us be forced to hunt and peck to make Word more palatable for the few folks like you, who really only want a fancy rich text editor, not a word processor?

I really don’t know what the problem is.

OOo ate Word’s lunch in a comprehensive test and comparison that C’T ran here a couple of months ago. Word crapped out when the document had too many pictures or too many footnotes or when the formatting got a little complicated. OOo accepted every task given it and didn’t complain - or crap out like Word.

Let me be the first to admit that OOo did not come out ahead overall - it lost out to other programs. MS Office lost in nearly all categories and ended with the lowest ranking.

OOo looks so much like MS Office it is scary. What “ratty open source feel” are you talking about? The way it handles tasks without crashing? The way the menu structure is more logically arranged? The way it can natively export PDF files? The way it handles database access without having the expensive ass Access database system that MS Office needs? What?

You are aware that OOo is the open source version of Sun’s Star Office?

Sorry. Word pisses me off every time I touch it because it can’t do what I want it to do and tries to make my documents the way it thinks they should be. Preach to someone else about how wonderful Word is. Word is nothing more than the program that people are used to using because MS pushed it damned near as hard they pushed Windows. It is not a superior product, it is merely a very common product.

I have a simple gripe, but one that drives me up the wall. Other apps also have this problem…

Somewhere in the MS Office product cycle, the responsiveness of the menus was killed. When I click on “file”, it had damn well better open instantaneously. Nothing makes me want to shoot my computer like “file” …wait…“open”…wait…while Word loads menus into RAM that should have been preloaded in the first place.

Especially in Word, where menu options and actions are often buried several layers deep, it used to be possible to zip through all of the menus near instantaneuosly (Word '97) to search for that elusive command.

Preload the fucking menus into memory!!!

Only on the surface, and only from a distance. Underneat it is much less newbie/average user friendly. Lots of overly-technical crap abounds, like asking users to set preferences for memory buffers and other stuff no one should ever have to care about.

Lots of dorky technical talk. Styles are not as easy to set up… as I recall, it asks for space between paragraphs in inches. Inches? That’s absurd. And the dialogues are overwhelming with way, way, way too many options and sections.

I’ve only ever used it on the Mac, so I got to “experience” OO.o’s default file open/save dialogue boxes, which are utterly horrible.

The entire program has the look and feel of an old version of Word, not modern at all.

Wow, don’t be an asshole and pass off personal opinions as undeniable facts. The menus in OO.o are no more logical than Words, and likely a whole lot less customizable.

Tell me this, where’s the one-button-easy way to have a constantly-displayed word count in OpenOffice? A word processor is basically worthless to me without this feature. Hunting down into a modal properties dialogue is not acceptable.

That’s nice, but it has nothing to do with the UI, which is the above all determinative factor on whether or not I’ll use a program. Plus, all programs on my Mac can natively export PDF files, so that’s not all that impressive.

Yes. Of course, Sun’s not exactly known for being good at UI. The default widgets in Java are atrocious.

OO.o is at present like Gnome or KDE: functionaly impressive, but with a UI that looks and feels like an old version of Windows/Office. If these programs were as impressive in terms of UI fit and finish as they are in terms of functionality, I might consider using them, but until then they can just sit down.

They need to be more like Firefox: as visually pleasing as it is functionally impressive.

If you’re tech-savvy, and life is too short to learn how to use a flexible program like Word, I see a couple choices:

  1. Hire another tech-savvy person to fix your preferences so all the bells and whistles are turned off; or
  2. Get to know and love Wordpad, also packaged with your computer.

Meanwhile, here’s a hint: Ctrl+Z (Undo) is your friend. When Word does something obnoxious and you don’t like it, hit Ctrl+Z, and it’ll undo that auto-format or whatever. Easy as hell, and the first thing I teach anyone who’s reached that level of proficiency in Word.

The bells and whistles can work in your favor: I’ve worked in Word for years, and know all kinds of bells and whistles, and use them all the time to my advantage. There are still more bells & whistles I’ve not learned, but I have learned how to stay away from them. And there are bells and whistles I hate (I write up lots of notes for fantasy roleplaying games, and this drives the spellchecker crazy, which in turn drives me crazy), so I turn those features off.

Daniel

Well, if you don’t like OOo, then you might want to give AbiWord a try. It’s a smaller download, and you might like the interface better.

The automatic bulleting on Word can cause incredible frustrations. Once it makes a goof (which it often does), it is very, very hard to fix it. For example, sometimes you have two numbered lists separated by paragraphs–but Word still numbers the second series as though it is a continuation of the first.

Which brings us to an important point: Any time there is automatic formatting going on, you should be able to reach in with the mouse and change any part of it arbitrarily. Maybe I want to number my list 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 61. That should be my prerogative. But it is near impossible to do this thing in Word (and keep the tabs and indentations looking the same).

Tabs are also a nightmare. Very damaging to the spirit.

So did you rename your normal.dot yet?

Ctrl+Z, young grasshopper. Ctrl+Z.

Daniel

… or you can just turn the automatic formatting off. They make it versatile like that.

I wonder if there’s a rogue process or something that’s really pegging the OP’s processor? Or perhaps too much paging of virtual memory?

And the process may be within Word itself. There is a ton of products out there that attach themselves to Word like leeches. The first step is to remove them one by one and see if performance improves. That’s why my first idea was to rename the normal template. When I did Word support for Microsoft, this was standard troubleshooting, and fixed the problem 90% of the time.

Unfortunately, the OP, much like many of my customers, seems more interested in whining about the problem than in actually fixing it.

I’ve never used OOo on the Mac, but I do know that it doesn’t run natively - it needs X and so isn’t well integrated with the OS X desktop.

So, is the more modern look and feel actually any better or does it just have more eye candy?

Undeniable fact? No, but any word to the contrary that Word is better laid out also no more than an opinion formed by someone who has gotten used to it.

Would it be OK if you could click a single button and get complete statistics about your document? It is trivially easy to add an icon to a toolbar that will pop open the document statistics. OOo is as wildly configurable as Word when it comes to the toolbars and menus.

Not impressive to you because it is something you’ve already got. For many folks (Windows users especially) there is no easy, inexpensive way to make PDFs. OOo gives them an alternative to Adobe’s software, or having someone install a PDF “printer.” Granted, that isn’t related to the GUI.

A matter of taste.

Form wins out over function once again.

Honestly, I don’t like Gnome, and find KDE adequate but a memory hog.
Early versions of Gnome were too unstable for my taste. These days it has gone the way of Windows and tries to dumb things down and hide the settings in a registry type database. Not my thing at all.

KDE does a good job, but hogs more memory than I like. On the other hand, I’ve been using KDE since version 1. something and have been able to maintain all of my settings through all upgrades to the version 3.1 that I’m using now. In the same time, I’ve gone from SuSE 6.2 to SuSE 8.2 and have never had to reconfigure or reinstall anything. Imagine having migrated from Win 95 (which was current when I installed SuSE 6.2) through Win 98 and up to Win2000 without having to change user settings or setup your internet connection each time. I’ve not yet changed to SuSE 9.1 because I know that there is a postgresql database server change that will make things a little painful.

No argument there. Firefox looks good, works well.

Given a choice, though, I’ll take ugly but stable over pretty but flaky anyday.