MSWord rant du jour

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Well, it’s frustrating. On the other hand, I’ve been shafted by Word so many times that it’s hard to work myself into a real rage, anyway there’s nothing I can do about having to use the flipping program.

But–what the hell are they doing? Today I had two issues.

First, I was editing a file (and boy do I long for the days when I did my editing on paper, with a pencil). I needed to insert an em-dash, and by golly Word can do that. All ya do is type two hyphens in a row–instant em-dash. Oh, except wait a minute, I disabled that because I had a situation where I needed to represent the look of a typewriter. Okay. So the quick fix is to go “Insert > symbol > special,” find the character and insert it. I do this–click on “Insert,” go down to “symbol” and, before I can click on it, or maybe at exactly the same time…
it disappeared. All gone. No more “symbol” on the insert menu.

Wha’ hoppen?

I then had to go to !@#%^ MS Help to find the "shortcut keys" which seemed like a better way to do it than to reinstall the @#%^& program.

So did it apply some update I was unaware of? What has it done with my symbol menu? How do I get some other symbols? Aaaiiieeee!

Next thing. (And this one I have not solved so if anyone could suggest help, it will be welcome.) I have a document whose front matter is numbered in Roman numerals (which should be banned, IMO, but I don’t make the rules). Everything fine until page 21, or “xxi,” at which point instead of “xxi” the page no. at the bottom of the page says “21.”

Soooooo…I click into the footer, click on “format page no.,” and lo and behold, it’s correct. It’s set up to use Roman numerals, the page number is the correct page number, it is picking up the numbers from the previous section. All good. I close the “view headers/footers”.

Page 21.

Oh, okay, maybe I didn’t, er, save it? (Now I should point out here that in my office, which admittedly is very small, I am the Word expert. That is because everybody else outranks me and refuses to use it so that I get all the crappy Word files to deal with. But what I’m saying here is, there is no help from my coworkers.) So I try again, with precisely the same result. (Which doesn’t always follow when using computers–the same result, I mean.)

At this point I blew my top, closed the file, shut down my computer, and exited my office. It was 4:26, a bit early, but I had had it and I got the hell out of there. Apparently I am going to have bad dreams tonight, in which I press the right keys and nothing happens. Bad boring dreams.

What is with this stupid program anyway, or is it just me?

2

It is not you. Well, unless it’s you and me. Word is Suck in digital form.

I doubt I can solve your problems, which sound like typical Word schmack–although I would print out page 21 to see if you get a roman numeral on the printed page. I have had many, many instances where the page as shown in layout mode, or in page preview mode, did not resemble the page as it actually printed.

Due to font issues I am going to have to typeset an 880-page book in Word instead of a sane, appropriate program such as InDesign (cue angels singing). <Spock touching Horta voice>PAINNNN!</StHv>

3

One of my biggest complaints about Word is that the headers and footers are just insanely stupid, non-cooperative and non-intuitive crap. In previous jobs I was usually seen as the person to come see if your Word doc gave you problems, and it never failed that someone couldn’t figure out how to format their page numbers, or reformat their headers. I can’t count how many times I’ve suffered the same problems myself. Idiotic design, in my opinion.

I’d offer to take a look at the document for you, but I don’t have Office installed on this machine.

4

Sounds like you encountered the “Magic Menu Delete”, which removes menu items without asking you first if you’re sure you want to do that. Did you happen to press Ctrl+Alt+hyphen? That key combination changes the mouse pointer to a heavy horizontal line, and if you click on a menu or toolbar item while the pointer is in that form, whatever it is disappears from the list - poof - without question.

If you see your mouse pointer turn into a heavy horizontal line, pressing Esc will change it back.

Also, there’s a web site with a lot of Word tips & tricks on it called MVP, which has instructions for putting the menu shortcut back.

Last, if you haven’t already, you might want to subscribe to the Word-PC list, which is where I found out about that little feature.

5

And ironically enough, if Hilarity N. Suze had pressed Ctrl+Alt+minus, that would have inserted the em dash in the first place :slight_smile:

6

Er, see, I need to delete the last section of a document. Well, I do. That is, that section isn’t needed anymore. So I delete it, and… the new ‘last’ section of the document has screwed up headers and footers. The headers and footers now say “copy from previous section,” when that wasn’t my intention AT ALL.

And I’ve learned to watch out for this, oh yes: if I double-click the header on top of a page in order to start editing it, I’ll not assume that the header now up for edit is the header for the section I was last editing – I’ll check, I will.

And I won’t be surprized much by weird unrequested font changes or paragraph styles that won’t apply properly and stay applied and numbered lists that won’t always allow resetting the first number of the list and numbered lists that will automatically indent themselves in fashion not at all to my needs, and…

Thank goodness for Notepad.

7

You can try Abiword. It’s free, saves as .doc files, and has tables and everything.

8

I was just going to come in and recommend Abiword. It’s not a perfect piece of software but it’s good enough for me, and it’s not Microsoft so where it does have issues - they’re mostly cosmetic. I do wish it’s dictionary was bigger, I had some word that it didn’t recognize it’s plural.

9

And yet…still not even nearly approaching the level of pain embodied by QuarkXPress. Not even close. God, I hate that bloated bundle of evil.

10

It gets worse. This same Word document, which BTW I cannot convert to something else because like Anaptyxis I have a font issue and the font in question is Chinese, has, several pages later, a numbered outline list.

The numbers go like this:
**
1)
a)
b) [and on through e), assume this or something like this in all cases, I’m just giving the top level]
1)
2)
4)**

In other words two 1s and no 3.

Why? Because this is how Word wants it.

How do I change it to make it right? I don’t know. The MVP site Morgyn mentioned suggests not ever using numbered lists in Word. Okay. But there it is, already. When I delete the automatic list function, everything goes away, but as soon as I put back the formatting to make it come out where it’s supposed to (and this is very important because I don’t want to reprint the whole 400-page document, just pages where there are mistakes), then . . . it’s automatically a numbered list, formatted as before and misnumbered as before.

Why can’t I turn this function off? What secret codes embedded in this !@#$ document are making it number it this way? Arggghhhhh.

11

Good detective work! As soon as I saw that post about Magic Menu Delete I thought Hmmm, bet that’s what I did. “Okay, haven’t been here in awhile…let’s see, em-dash, that was control-alt-something. Control-alt-hyphen? Nope, that didn’t do it, better go to the Insert menu, okay, there it is, Symbol…wait! Oh no! It’s goooonnnnne!” :smack:

So that’s one mystery solved. Others, however, remain.

Morgyn, thanks for the links. Good stuff.

12

I’ve been using Word since version 3 for DOS. Word always stores all the information about a particular paragraph, or section, in the last paragraph mark of the section. So if you delete that, Word scrambles around till it finds the new last paragraph mark and adopts whatever is stored in that, for whatever is left.

Yes, it’s a really, really, dumb way of doing things. But after 20 years I doubt Mr. Bill’s Boys are going to do it any other way.

Make just the paragraph marks visible in your documents and try very hard not to delete one that carries formatting information. Of course, those don’t look any different from any other paragraph marks, so just assume that it’s the very last one that you don’t want to touch.

13

MS Word is a vile steaming dog turd on the lawn of computer software…

It’s gotten much better in the last five years.

14

I’ve always thought of it as an infected maggot-ridden haemarroid in digital form, but maybe you’ve been luckier with it than I have.
“A table in this document has become corrupted”. Really? You don’t say. What a surprise. :mad:

If only this were the Pit I would be able to give you a more accurate summary of my feelings for lovely wonderful MS Word.

15

I had thought so as well. I’m a bit of a power user of the software at work and I love it. Well, until we got updated with 2203 Office edition. Then all of a sudden it doesn’t want to do bullets the same way, and it certainly doesn’t appreciate it when I try to edit docs written in the previous version. It got to the point where I had to redesign the work tools I created in WORD into Excel. Which is fine, for what I do Excel is turning out to be a pretty spiffy alternative.

16

I never thought it could happen, but I now love Office 98 because I hate the 2003 edition so very, very much.

We are changing over here at the office soon, and I am not looking forward to it. Whatever is wrong with 98, I will happily and joyously embrace it, as long as I don’t have to face the evils of 2003. I cannot fully express my derision for 2003, even in the Pit, I have never felt a hate this strongly.

Perhaps it’s all a big conspiracy to make us realize how much we appreciate Office 98.

17

You are on the alpha program, I take it. Hopefully they will remove most of the bugs and quirks in the remaining 197 years.

Remember, it’s not about how you want to work, it’s about how Microsoft think you ought to work. Prepare to be re-educated.

18

What version of Word are you using? In 2003, you could right-click on the second 1) and select “Continue numbering”. Or you could but the caret on the line and then go to the toolbar and select Format > Bullets and Numbering. (Of course, if you have something messed up in your template, all bets are off.)

19

Well, I don’t know the answer to that, but I have found that for numbered lists, if you insert all of one level of the outline at once, it can handle it better. So, for example, enter (cut/paste or whatever) all of the first level items of the list, which in this case would be the ones you want to have numbers and EXCLUDING all of the sub categories, in this case the a, b,…, e items. Then go back and add the subcategories under each main category. (Insert the A item first though so you can tab it in and make Word understand that you want a subcategory and then paste in the B-E items.) It usually works when you do this. If that’s not clear (which it really isn’t), my email’s in the profile and I can try to explain it better.

One of my coworker’s issues with Word is that he uses his middle name but leaves his first initial when he writes anything official. So like A. John Smith. Well, whenever Word sees the A., it thinks that you’re starting a list and so it indents it and makes the next row start with B. I’ve got that function turned off on my computer, but he’s on a Citrix network and can’t turn it off. Yup that gets annoying every time you type your name!

20

Being a Microsoft apologist, I will probably be tarred and feathered for this.

But having supported Word for about 15 months, I can honestly say that if it doesn’t do what you want, you’re not doing it right.

To get the em-dash, type alt-0151. It’s in the character map. Easy.

To figure out what’s going on with the page numbers, look to your section break. I can almost guarantee that’s where your problem is.

As mentioned before, if your headers and footers changed, it’s because you deleted the last paragraph mark.

For the numbering problem, you’re probably not doing the subheadings with a tab. You using spaces instead? Naughty naughty.

There’s ALWAYS a way to do what you want, and it’s usually simpler than you think.

I’ll show myself out.