That’s the very same experience I had as an admin supervisor for a Navy unit. I got everyone to turn off all the automatic bs and also make everything visible. Productivity soared. People that used to hate word processing practically became addicted to it.
So, the question that came up in my mind then and is still unanswered: Who is the Word default set-up designed for?
The best guess is that it was designed by the marketing department to show off all the really gosh-wow features. Since hardly anyone uses the G-W features, those of us who want to use it to, you know, write composed text have to rebuild it.
I think it was MS Word Annoyances that best covered the whole situation and the process for turning Word into a real tool. The author pointed out that a top-level, default button was assigned to “Adjust Snaking Columns” - an act which, performed on the right bit of demo text, can cause shivers down a prospective buyer’s spine but which might have been used in the real world by ten people at two-year intervals.
And I don’t know or know of ANYONE who EVER bought Word because of a hands-on demonstration, so the whole “torch mode” demo setup is a ridiculous shuck anyway. MS should have been including a “click here to set up Word in a useful manner” macro since about Word 97. Or at least stopped shipping it with this dickweed default setup, with every linguistic AutoTune enabled.
Seems like things have come full circle with the trend towards minimalist word processors like Writeroom, Writer, Ommwriter etc.
Going with Word to comply with the de facto standard would be a good idea, if Microsoft actually complied with the standards that it established. I’ve seen at least as many incompatibility problems between different versions of Word as with Word and something else, or multiple non-Word word processors. Granted, this is largely due to the vast market penetration of Word, but still, it’s hard to tolerate any compatibility issues within a single product line.
If standards compliance is important to you, I would recommend just sticking entirely with Google Docs. They do follow their own rules, and I expect that to the extent that there are incompatibilities with Word, it’s going to be Google that eventually wins out, not Microsoft.
All true, and nearly as frustrating as trying to keep document integrity with a variety of different tools in the loop. A few years back, we had a company need for many people to work on reports in a somewhat uncontrolled loop, and one of them was using one of the buggier iterations of Word/Mac. Whoever got the file next had to spend a huge amount of time fixing it. (There were many problems in that situation that might have been fixable under some circumstances.)
I don’t think this is any more of a solution than requiring Word - it’s just a different set of strictures with as many potential problems.
I don’t particularly LIKE MS Word and never have; I use it because with skilled setup it’s a damned good tool - there is nothing else I know of that has as many useful features that can be accessed in ways up to very complex macros. I have used it as a very powerful and configurable document reformatter (in a Ventura Publisher to FrameMaker conversion project, for example.) I also use it because nearly every client, every subcontractor and every person in the business-y world uses it, and for all the occasional compatibility problems simple documents are widely compatible. When something genuinely better comes along and is widely used enough to expect people to have access to it, if not be using it as their primary tool, I’ll move to that.
(I am not, for the record, in the crowd that admires Google, Google apps, or web/cloud based tools very much. I sincerely expect the Google Apps crowd to Get Theirs in an extremely painful fashion one day.)
Since the OP is looking for personal experiences, this is best suited to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Then again, the simplest (and most common) documents are just fine for using a plain text editor. There are some documents that are complex enough to require a word processor but simple enough to not run into compatibility issues, but that’s a relatively thin line to walk.
And don’t need to share presentations with Windows users. (Last I checked, there wasn’t a single Windows software that could display Keynote files, let alone open it for import/editing.)
Maybe/sort of.
I’ve had spreadsheets in Google Docs that got screwed up so I couldn’t access them for a few days (I tried from multiple computers/browsers), and one where it just completely lost a graph I had made (and updated several times, over the course of a few months).
Google isn’t any more immune to bugs in their products than Microsoft is. And both of them regularly patch things to fix bugs people find.