Microsoft Word Grrrrrrrr!

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Just came across this graph. It is so true. I get really sick of fighting Microsoft Word when I'm writing. If I need to write anything creative Word just kills the creative flow of words, with the start stop harassment one way or another. Bullet points are a nightmare. Every time I insert a small gif image it thinks I want to use it for a new bullet point and starts indenting all by itself! I get so annoyed undoing automatic formatting that I forget what I'm writing about. I think there should be a special override option called "F**k off and let me work". Word has got just too damn clever for its own good.

know how you feel I swirte short storys sometimes and f**ken word tells me to due a spell check. now I use Wordpad because it dose not due what word does.

http://www.openoffice.org/

Tools -> AutoCorrect -> "Autoformat" and "Autoformat as you type" tabs. Go wild with removing check marks until it becomes usable.

And I think the "Automatically use suggestions from spell checker" box at the bottom of the Autocorrect tab turns on and off that stupid "I think you misspelled it so I'm going to replace it with something random automatically" thing.

Thanks Freya. I've turned just about everything off now and will see how I get on. Half the problem is not understanding WTF half of the options do anyway and I'm concerned I might turn something off that should be left on.

Auto correction and auto formatting are the bane of my life with Word. Sometimes I write documents that need to contain both British English spelling and American English spelling and Word has lots of fun converting the American spellings automatically to British spellings for me. It is essential to proof read all word documents to make sure it hasn't trashed them one way or another.

I had a minor disaster a few years ago when Microsoft introduced auto correction into Access. A particular data table had an alphanumeric index and so had letters such as a, b, c, d ... z in lowercase. Microsoft knew better and automatically changed the lower case letter 'i' to uppercase 'I' and it didn't come to light until the database crashed out after deployment to several clients. Thank you Microshaft for auto correcting index data!

I grow increasingly frustrated with Microsoft's interference in everything I do (or try to do). I have to use Vista now because my software needs to be Vista compatible, but I loath Vista. Everything takes more mouse clicks to do than it did in XP and they have hidden so much stuff I waste lots of time. They haven't even fixed major bugs that were in XP such as crashing Windows Explorer if you have any large zip files - it tries to treat them as folders and bombs out if the zip contains a few thousand files. Microsoft don't even acknowledge the problem, it is a registry hack to work around it.

I have a love hate relationship with Microsoft. I get sick of all the bugs in their software and having to find work arounds. Some bugs have existed for many years in many incarnations of MS products. Trouble is I earn my living writing software to run on Windows.

Yeah, bullets are a quick way to screw up a document. Sometimes Word gets lost on those things. There may be some settings where you can get word to behave better.

Years ago, I wrote an "Office Assistant" that cussed at you and suggested buying Word Perfect.

I remember when software installation programs first began to think they knew more about your system and how you operate than you do.

I had some problems with an installation of software I had not only been running for several years, but that I had had a small part in developing. The insatllation refused to let me install it for MY machine.

I made some minor changes to the code, recompiled and sent it back to the developer, with a request he test it. It worked just as it had when he sent it to me, except for some words popping up on the screen at strategic moments.

That was fun, but it didn't help the situation. Some software developer in Redmond, or San Jose, or New Dehli still assumes he knows more abot my machine than I do.

GRRRRRR

Pops

It annoys me as well, Microsoft Works 3.0 had a preview mode where no formatting happened and none was displayed. They definitely need to reintroduce it. I write anything creative in my favorite text editor since even OO is just too annoying for my taste.

I miss WordPerfect. They don't make them for Macs anymore.

Microsoft aren't even consistent within their own software. I need to create documents and save them in RTF format for use within some software I'm working on. However, Microsoft have implemented RTF differently in Word and Visual Studio 2008. They are not compatible. This means documents created in Word often do not show correctly in VS2008, especially tables and formatting. So it is a constant "try this and see if it works" approach because Microsoft do not apply their own document standards across their own products. It is so frustrating working around Microsoft's errors and bugs. I spend many hours wrestling with MS bugs and design faults and looking for work-arounds instead of simply being able to work.

You can also edit rtf directly if all else fails, but it is a bit of a head f**k. I agree with chever it I worth using something that at least allows to get more hands on when necessary.

That's why I don't like MS Office. MS Works I don't like either. I think OpenOffice is great, but it's not what I use. I'll put it on computers I build. What I use is Lotus Symphony (another free suite: http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotu ... e.nsf/home).