I joined a project last summer. It took months for them to sort out the various system accesses I need. Some, we just gave up on.
Found out yesterday that there’s yet ANOTHER thing I need to have access to - and the concern is that if I request it, someone will determine that not only am I really not supposed to have it, but they’ll figure out that my longer-tenured colleagues shouldn’t have had that access either. Meaning NOBODY can do their jobs.
It’s a beautiful Friday afternoon, and I’m stuck inside working on a cursed Word document. I don’t know how people even do the things they do in Word. I think they must close their eyes, hold their breath, and wave the mouse around wildly until something happens, because none of this makes any damn sense. I’m really amazed by some of the things people do in Word. I would love it if people would give me something I can work with, so I don’t have to create a whole new document.
The thing about Word is, so much of it is so damn non-intuitive, and also, Word does so many crazy things on its own initiative to try to outsmart you. It’s like the One Ring Of Power, an evil presence with a will of its own.
I took an actual class in Word once, years ago, with an actual textbook full of practice exercises, and I learned how to use much of what Word does. It was like a night-and-day difference. I could actually do all kinds of nifty Word stuff, and even stay in control of it! (ETA: That was before the ribbon-style menus. Once they came out with that, I am back to being a hopeless Word novice again.)
This contrasts so much with WordPerfect. Back in the WordPerfect days, I easily became a fairly skilled user rather quickly, just from using it. I didn’t need a user manual, nor a textbook, let alone a class in it. I did have some quick cheat-sheets, IIRC. Word is so different from that.
I spent this morning cursing the ancestors, descendants and close relatives along with the actual developers of Word while doing my monthly status report.
Add item to bullet list for each meeting attended last month. Should be simple, right?
Finish current bullet point, hit enter, start next bullet point. Paste in title of meeting.
Everything is fine up until ‘paste’. Bullet jumps to far left of page and there’s no way in hell to get it to line up where it previously was.
No. pasting text only changes nothing. Putting everything in and then adjusting alignment doesn’t work.
Hey Clippy! I’ve got a task for you! Find the Word developers and stab their eyes!
Yeah, that kind of shit. Inserting stuff, pasting things, importing text from an external file. I had the worst fucking time doing stuff like that with Word. It always trashed the formatting, often extending far beyond the actual stuff I had inserted. Like you say.
But I learned how all the formatting information is stored in Word when I took that class. It turns out, when you press ENTER at the END of a paragraph, it doesn’t simply put a single ASCII “Carriage Return” byte. It puts a whole block of hidden secret code, there at the END of the paragraph, containing the formatting information for the paragraph.
Once I understood that the formatting information for a paragraph is stored at the END of the paragraph, it became a lot easier to at least understand what was going on, and what one needs to do to fix it.
There are a number of things you need to do for Word to be even semi-behaved.
Do not use the Normal style. You’re only asking for trouble. Partly because anything you do to Normal is going to affect every single document you create from then on that uses the Normal (which is the default) template. And if you open an old document, it’ll get updated, too.
Next, use the Styles. Never, ever, EVER use anything from the Font or Paragraph groups. And I do mean NEVER. (Did you hear me say never? Damn straight. NEVER.) Especially use them for the numbering and bullet lists. See the thing is, the gallery will only ever show you nine of those, but if you ever start fiddling with indents and margins and bullet styles, it’ll start creating more, which may or may not show up in the gallery. If a style doesn’t exist that does what you need, create it and then use it. Use styles. Never, ever, ever, NEVER EVER use the font and paragraph groups to format ANYTHING. EVER.
If all else fails, copy everything in the document except for the very last paragraph symbol and paste it as plain text into a new document. You’ll have to reformat, but this time you’ll pay attention to using styles, right?
I’ve found that formatting from the end of the document back to the beginning seems to avoid a lot of the issues with list problems.
If you ever copy something from another Office document, make sure you paste as PLAIN TEXT. Don’t paste with the source formatting. Don’t paste with the target formatting. Plain Text, then format it. Using styles. If you’re not sure how to do that, paste it into a text editor first and then copy the text without any formatting.
Did I mention using styles? Use styles for everything. For paragraph formatting, for character formatting, for table formatting, for list formatting (including the numbering).
Seriously, the easiest way to avoid issues and corruption is to only paste plain text and to use styles.
I mean, if you’re just doing a short letter or memo, have at it. But anything longer or more complex, USE STYLES.
This has been a screed written by Morgyn, technical writer, occasional user of Word and Word template developer, who loathes Word with a FIERY PASSION. (And use styles for everything. Seriously.)
2nd ETA: Yes, I know it’s out of order. Deal. Word does not, by default, show you all the styles it has predefined. You have to go into the Styles options and tell it that you want to see ALL the styles, not just the recommended ones. Sort as you please, but I find alphabetical most useful because otherwise Word, as is its wont, will sort it how it thinks you ought to be using them.
ETA: Read Shauna Kelly’s explanation of how to set up lists. It’s a little out of date ('cause she died), but it was written after the Ribbon became a thing and it’s still my go-to reference when I’m forced to use Word for anything I want to lock down.
Also, keep in mind Word is a Word Processing app, NOT a Page Layout app. If I do my writing and spellchecking in Word (oh, and everyone else’s proofing and changes), THEN paste it into InDesign and do my designing there, it goes lickety-split. Seriously, takes less than half the time by the time I’m all done.
I was chatting with a guy at a big printing company and he was cursing Microsoft products:
Whenever I hear ‘Ok, I’m sending you the brochure… I laid it out in Word.’ … then I feel like an air traffic controller when he hears 'Uhh, actually, this is NOT a 747, we’re an ultralight cobbled together from a kit.’ None of us go to lunch til we open up their brochure and try to get the fonts to fit, and move everything back to where it should be.
Not me but a friend. Needed to prove identity and legal residency so what’s better than that all-in-one ID … a passport. NOPE! They also needed to bring their birth certificate which of course they didn’t bring with them. No one could say why a passport wasn’t sufficient other than on the form the drone was reading said the applicant needed birth certificate AND (social security card OR passport)
Except when the style you want chooses to make a section hidden click-on-the-arrow-to-make-your-work-visible and you can’t get rid of it.
Does Word even still HAVE a key that you can use to reveal all of the formatting codes? That’s one of the things I missed the most when they transitioned to that god-awful ribbon thingy.
That Expand/Collapse is built in to Word’s predefined heading styles, and there’s no way to remove it from the predefined headings. You can stop it from collapsing automatically, but if you click on it and your section collapses, the only way to get it back is to click again and expand it. If you right-click in any of the predefined headings, you get a context menu that lets you expand or collapse all headings in the document. [Warning: Video at link; however, also text instructions.]
You have to set which formatting symbols you want to see in File > Options > Display, and then you can toggle it from the ribbon with the pilcrow key ¶.
Was your friend starting work at a new company? Because it sounds like they wanted to complete the Form I-9 as required by law to verify that they’re authorized to work in the United States. There is a list of documents an employee may use for I-9 purposes, but it is illegal for an employer to dictate which of those documents an employee uses. A US passport establishes both identity and authorization to work in the United States. If the I-9 was what they were completing that passport should have been good enough.
No it was not an I-9 since he’s been working there for 3 years now. It was to check the box for the annual “You provided identification to prove who you are who you say you are.” for clearances viz. you’re allowed to go here in the plant but not there. And no, not Secret vs Top-Secret clearance.
Okay. I’ve never heard of an employer requiring their employees to verify identity on an annual basis and it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.
This may seem petty, but I’m getting sick and fucking tired of having to lock up my pens and pencils at work when I leave for the day. I came in this morning to find that a nice (but not horribly expensive) drafting pencil has now disappeared. I suspect it’s someone in my department, but I don’t want to be that person who puts up flyers and sends out emails over missing office supplies. 
I usually use InDesign, but this is something that other people need to be able to edit, so I’m stuck doing it in Word. They’ll probably send it back to me when it needs to be edited anyway. 
I’m watching the Senate hearings and working on this damn thing, and I’m honestly not sure which is worse. I created a new document, and it’s still doing absolutely ludicrous things. And I’m pretty good with Word. I’m not an expert, but I can usually figure out how to trick it into doing what I want it to do. I just want this to be over.
I used to be a draftsman. You get attached to your tools, and that would really piss me off.
My boss and department head used to steal my pens. It was annoying, but I didn’t pay for them, so I couldn’t complain about it. But then my boss stole my nice chunky highlighter that I paid for with my own money. I’m still not over it. It’s not right to feel like you have to lock your supplies up so they won’t disappear.
Try the word-pc email list. Lots of knowledgeable people on it.
Email address to request joining: word-pc-subscribe-request@liverpool.ac.uk
You don’t have to have a subject or anything in the body of the email.
They also have a very useful archive, but you have to be a list member to access it:
https://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/word-pc.html
Too late for you, but I’m pretty sure you could lay it out in InDesign, then export it as an “Editable PDF”.
Last project I did was in InDesign, but only after ALL the changes had been made and signed off on it. Silly moi, one manager suddenly had a ton of changes as it was about to go to the printer. Even though they were minor changes that I could’ve made in ten minutes, she insisted on retyping entire pages. So I had her do her “rewrites” in Word, and I pasted them into the document.
eta: … and corrected the same typos she’d made the first time.