As for the styles, I’ll just say this: when you’re trying to construct reports that look the same company-wide, it is extremely helpful to have a set of pre-constructed styles for report headers, sub headers, paragraphs, bullets, numbering, appendices etc. etc.
One of the first things I did with Word is construct my own set of styles so that when I open a new document, I can just select a favoured one rather than having to fiddle with font size, paragraph spacing, numbering systems, line spacing, paragraph holding,… There’s a lot of formatting out there and I don’t want to have to reset it all individually when I know how I want it to look.
Actually, It’s not an issue for me any more, as I now use Works instead of Word. It’s more than I need, but it’s what came with my new computer. And a ditto on the point about the paper manuals, especially when you have a computer that comes with the program but no instructions. Very few programs have help files that are actually helpful. Most of the time, I can figure things out faster on my own.
MS Word is like a a senile old man. You have to do things the way MS Word wants you to do it and it won’t change its mind. Then you go back in and make it the way you want while it’s not looking.
In trying to make things easy for the first-time user, MS Word has no learning curve. It doesn’t take into account that the users will eventually get smarter and want to customize things their own way. It assumes all its users will maintain the same level of stupid.
I’ve been using MS Word (reluctantly) for 5 years, and it’s gotten to the point where I no longer wish Bill Gates to burn painfully forever in hell. Like Early Out said, you have to customize. Once I figured out how to set preferences and such, it’s gotten a lot better, but there are two major things I wish MS Word could do: have a means of deleting a page out of a document without having to highlight the entire text of the page and risk losing formatting, and make it to where you can delete continuous section breaks without having them take the place of the previous section break instead.
Oh, in case you didn’t know, showing the paragraph markers really helps. If you get an extra blank page at the end of your report, you get to see why with paragraph markers on.
One of these days I’m gonna break down and take the time to learn C++ or something similar just so I can write my own damn word processor. I’ve yet to find one I really and truly like.
Actually, if you’re not using styles, you’re not using Word properly, period. Direct formatting is a very bad way to work in Word – it increases the chances that you’re going to eventually have data corruption, and generally leads to strange behaviors (like when you backspace and suddenly your text changes in appearance). To really use Word with any degree of effectiveness, one needs to have a working understanding of styles.
Also, the key thing to remember with Word is that it is like a very expensive suit. It usually needs some heavy tailoring. Users shouldn’t be afraid to dig into the program, change and rearrange the menus and rework the toolbars to be more efficient for how they work. In the end, both Word and the user will be a lot happier (and it’s easy to put everything back).
I’d have been all OpenOffice years ago if it wasn’t for one little irregularity…OO still has problems with copy/paste and linking from other 3rd party applications. I heavily use PSpice (graphical electric circuits) and Matchcad to write up homework and lab reports, and OO doesn’t handle pasting in objects or graphics from these very well.
So I’m forced to use Word. And thus begins the pissing off of Gargoyle.
I wish Word would treat pasted graphics and objects as “floating” objects, instead of making them slaves to page alignment, indenting, heading styles, etc. All the freakin’ time I’ll try and adjust a graphic, maybe by adding a space somewhere else in the document or changing a font, and have Word reformat the fuck out of all of the alignment and layout I’ve been carefully trying to maintain because it thinks that my graphic suddenly needs to be thrown onto a different page and embedded in some impossible to correct indentation tree.
Fuck.
And don’t get me started on outlining. Gargoyle wants to add a sub-sub bullet “iii” to the outline? Word pulls a Linda Blair and fuck-formats every outline in my whole document.
I’m with you, there. Word stores a lot of its formatting instructions with page/section/paragraph breaks, so if you delete the break, the formatting sometimes goes with it. Not pretty. That’s what spectrum’s post, above, refers to, and he’s right - the only way to ensure that you don’t get burned by it is to use the styles.
GargoyleWB’s post touches on another issue. Word started out as a word processor, not a desktop publishing package. They’ve tried to add desktop publishing features, but have never really gotten the hang of it. As a result, its handling of graphics and other similar objects is, shall we say, sub-optimal (I’m being kind, here).
I was using Quark XPress on a Mac almost 20 years ago, and it handled graphics way better than Word does today. In fact, we used QX for everything, even routine correspondence - once you’ve ponied up the money for it (it ain’t cheap - just shy of $1000!), you might as well take advantage of all the good stuff it can do for you.
Quark has not aged gracefully. It is perhaps the worst piece of software on the planet. The real future of DTP is Adobe’s InDesign. It’s brilliant, and less-expensive, too.
And yes, Word chokes when you try to do too much page layout with it. It just can’t handle all of it. Even Microsoft’s “layout program,” Publisher, is just a sad joke.
Word 97 uses floating graphics, but for some reason later versions don’t. You may as well delete the graphics before changing font attributes and stuff, then reinsert them afterwards. Or you could do like I’ve been known to do, make the article layout in Illustrator first, save as EPS, then insert into Word.
In Word 2002, you can change the default from inline to floating pretty easily, in Tools>Options. Matters are more complicated in Word 2000 and the solution involves macros described on this MS support page. That’s annoying and shouldn’t be necessary for such a basic operation. Only slightly less annoying is having to right-click on each graphic after insertion, choose Format Picture, and change the selection on the Layout tab.
Annoying, but possible. Easier than watching your graphics jump around.
Boy, no kidding. Somewhat controllable through the judicious use of styles and templates (everything I know I learned from the Word MVPs), but the fact is that bullets and numbering have been botched since Word 97. Microsoft claims to have fixed the problem in Word 2002, but if they did, they don’t seem to have documented it anywhere. I love using Word but this sort of thing tries my patience.
Response to two quotes from Early Out, then my rant.
I never “got” styles, have never used them, and never want to use them. I don’t feel guilty or stupid for not using them; I think they are misbegotten shit because…
You got it!
Begin rant
MS Word is truly wins the prize for “Worst Software Used by the Most People.” It is trash. It is a Frankenstein’s monster of word processing and desktop publishing, as Early Out said.
IANAidiot, but I have never gotten the tabs in Word. I used to use DOS WordPerfect and had zero problems. Tabs are always a nightmare in Word.
I write a lot. I want a word processor. I want to write, format the margins and tabs, import simple graphics, have font options, find and replace, cut and paste, and basic stuff like that.
Things I never, ever want to experience:
I hit carriage return and my font changes.
I get wrong letters or numbers in an outline/list and can find no way to make them correct without dismantling the whole list.
I delete a word and the font changes for another part of the document.
I hit tab and an entire, unrelated paragraph is indented.
A long sentence is grammatically correct, but it comes up all green.
For example, “4 July 2004” (without comma) is correct usage, but it gets flagged (Word wants to add the comma–ignorant bullshit).
As far as I can see, MS has only ever made one truly great piece of software: Excel. I have never had problems with it, and the features are excellent and intuitive. Word, PowerPoint, and FrontPage are trashware.
I have MS Office 2000 and I don’t have this problem. As a matter of fact, if I type in 4 Ju…it will fill in the rest for me without a comma. Maybe they corrected it.
You guys should consider yourself lucky that you get MSW in the original language. I suspect they let engineers redo the software for the different language markets, and so grammar rules carry over from English to other languages. Example: In Swedish, things are not capitalized (if that’s a word) to the same extent as in English. Days of week, months, name of language, all are correctly written with small letter. So it’s friday, in Swedish, not Friday.
But W97 auto corrected this, and it couldn’t be changed in settings/options. So they had to make a patch for people to download. When W2K came it, they fixed it. Almost. Now it’s impossible to spell the weekdays with a capital letter, even at the beginning of the sentence.
I think 99% of all users would get by with WordPad and should never touch Word at all. A couple of years ago, when I managed an office and had admin rights to all computers, I simply deleted Word and let the staff use WordPad. We still had a sorry amount of graphic/typographic masturbation, but nowhere near as much as before (OMG111, I can use italics and bold and color to make things nicer.)
I basically don’t use any features I didn’t use with Word 2.0, back in '91. I think they keep adding stuff, so people will feel the need to upgrade, or maybe feel that they get their money’s worth. Also, the more stuff they add, the more manuals can they put in the box, making the consumer feel they’re carrying home something important.
And why would anyone try to do layout with Word?
Let’s not get started with that suckage that is Powerpoint.
No it fucking wasn’t. We had Word 5 on the Macs in my lab, and I had to stay late at night to type papers because I didn’t want to disturb the other folks by shrieking curses at Word. I eventually just gave up and installed a copy of FrameMaker.
Mainly because when my company started, they used MS Word to design tests, and our customers like being able to access our work as Word docs instead of Quark files. Nowadays we ship our work as PDF, but trying to convince my bosses that entire departments should learn how to use something else besides MSW at a cost of $1K per work station is bound to be problematic. Microsoft literally makes you the offer you can’t refuse when they sell their products as one-cost-only for the entire company.
Agreed. Word as always miserable. Word 5 was miserable. Word 4 was miserable. I never saw Word 3 but Word 2 was miserable.
Way too much crap gumming up the menus, with the commands you actually want and need the most often less prominent than the bloatsam, poorly named, and with the wrong (nonstandard) keystroke equivalents. Strange screen-refresh peculiarities. Formatting bugs from the get-go.
The best early-era word processors were WordPerfect 1.0 and Nisus. WP disappeared from the Mac pantheon for awhile during which MacWrite II and WriteNow ruled in the entry-level sleek-and-simple zone and Nisus (later called Nisus Writer) continued to mop the floor with stupid irritating Word. Then WP came back as WordPerfect 3 to coexist with Nisus Writer and the incredibly bloated slow and hideous Word 6.
There have been other truly bad word processors for the Mac (I did not care for FullWrite at all) but most of them died a quick and quiet death. Word, on the other hand, continues to stalk our hallways like the rotting putrescent corpse of something Dead But Which Will Not Die, strangling viable living software packages in its dead grip and cackling “I’m the standard and everyone must use me” in its moist bubbly rotten way.
I still disagree. Word 5 did everything I wanted in a word processor (well, at the time), and was very fast and Mac-like to boot. It was also more compatible with Quark (gag, spit) and PageMaker than MacWrite, which was also excellent, and I wish Apple would revive.
I’m not sure about Word 5 (been over a year since I fired it up), but in later Word versions, this is what I mean about tailoring the program: the only things in the menus in Word are the things you want to have in the menus. It’s staggeringly customizable, and going in there and pulling out things and rearranging them and renaming them is really useful.
For a simple word processor, though, I recommend the upcoming Nisus Writer Express 2. It’ll be pretty feature-complete for most users, and works great. Not that I know. Because I’m certainly NOT a beta tester. Nope. No sir. Not a chance.
Nowadays the worst word processor for the Mac isn’t Word: it’s the writing portion of AppleWorks.
