Saturday 6 January 2007

The worst part is that we spent over £100 on Office, so I feel honour-bound to keep using it

I've talked about this before, but it cannot be said enough; whoever is responsible for making Microsoft Word:

  • Move graphs from wherever you originally put them
  • Decide that a) hard against the very top of the page, b) hard against the very bottom of the page, or c) right on top of the previous graph you placed are all very sensible places to move your graph
  • Steadfastly refuse to let a text box within half a mile of a graph, even if it's patently obvious that you want to group the two together because you did exactly the same thing thirty seconds ago
  • Randomly grey-out the "Print only the even pages" box because it feels like it
  • Make replies to an email dark blue, and make that default impossible to change in any of the templates
  • Decide that one of your documents should actually be a different one, and therefore copy the entire contents of Document A into Document B, deleting the original contents of Document B and insisting that it never existed, while keeping the filesize the same as it was when Document B actually did exist and keeping Document A just the same as it was, therefore necessitating the redoing of about four solid days of work (that actually happened once)
  • Vastly inflate filesizes, to the point where a 50-page text document with a few digital photos, none of which could possibly have been more than about 50 KB, takes up 100MB
  • Decide that not only are page headers and footers exempt from spell checking, but that this exemption should sometimes and without warning suddenly expand to the entire contents of your document, thus negating one of the very few halfway useful functions of the program
  • Despite all of this, hold a frickin' near-monopoly on word processing software
...should be SHOT.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm assuming this is for the purpose of project write up, and if it is, can I point you in the direction of Lyx as a reasonably simple document editor? I used it for my project report last year, and it looked good, and was also quite easy to use once I'd got used to it (I'll admit, it was a bit tricky a first, but a couple of hours play gets you very familiar).

Of course, you may feel that Word needs to be used, but I'll state the obvious, the results won't look as good.

Hope you are well.
God bless, Mark