Let's rant about Microsoft Word!

C'mon! It'll be fun!

There are so many things I hate about this program! The first reason being that I'm practically forced to use it simply by virtue of the fact that everyone else does! Every document I create, most likely I'm going to email it to someone else. And they have to be able to open it with their Microsoft Word! And I'm a freelancer. If people can't open my documents, they won't be patient. They won't even tell me they can't open the attachment! They'll just move on to the next person.

Sigh. So Word it is, grumble grumble.

I figure I'm not the only one stuck in this predicament. I thought it would be fun to have a big venting session.

I hate Word because:

1. You try to highlight some text and it scrolls so fast, it's hard to grab just a paragraph. It automatically thinks you must want to grab the whole page! So it scrolls fast!

2. If you're trying to highlight part of a word, it thinks it's smarter than you, and you must want to highlight the WHOLE word! It does it for you automatically. For example, if you have the sentence "I feel badly about skipping dinner" and wanted to edit it to simply say "I feel bad" you would highlight right before the -ly in badly, and grab the rest of the sentence, too, and just hit delete, right? Well Word will grab the whole 'badly' word for you, because that's surely what you meant, right? Grrrr.

3. They claim Word Office X is revolutionary! Totally different! Looks like the same old crap to me!

4. That annoying paper-clip assistant. (Or whatever form you choose... still annoying. Worst of all, RARELY helpful, even when I have a question.)

5. Automatically tries to capitalize things for you. This is hell when you must type a list of email addresses. It will keep capitalizing the first letter of every address for you. Then it tries to make a hyperlink, too! At least you can turn this feature off. But really, why would you want a hyperlink in a Word doc? It looks like crap when you print it!

6. Word randomly decides to change fonts and font sizes on you. Who knows why.

OK I'll stop now to take a breather and to let someone else jump in.

Oh my God, no! Tabs and paragraphing drive me up the wall!

Thank you Paul and Trumpet for getting us back on topic. But to answer the Adobe suggestions... the people I send the documents to need to be able to update them in their Microsoft Word. so pdf's wouldn't do.

Even if Acrobat let me save AppleWorks docs as Word docs, which I don't even know if that's possible... I would bet there's translation problems. I usually do some fancy formatting.

Oh and Paul! Welcome to NYC for the summer! Isn't it great living here? Wish I could turn the rain faucet off so we could all enjoy it more.

Well yes, I use TextEdit a lot too. But for doing formatting-intensive stuff like resumes and lists... Word offers more consistency than RTF. Especially when you know everyone else will be using Word.

But for something like an essay that's not locked to page, I agree. TextEdit is great!

Another thing. Barto, I love the humor! It reminds me of something I saw a couple years ago where someone had made some photographic parodies of Word. Like I remember a pulldown menu where one of the options was Take Back Snide Comment to Boss. But the best photo had someone composing a letter that said something like Dear World, I can't take it anymore! And the paperclip said "Looks like you're committing suicide!" and it gave options which I can't remember.

Does anyone know where I could find that?

Addison, that is true. It was nice of Microsoft to make OSX friendly software so quickly. But then, I'm still using my Classic Office software in OS9. I do use IE though, and it's not too bad.

But the only reason people don't complain about having to use it is that it's the only word processor anyone knows how to use anymore! (Talking about the masses here, I know there are other programs out there.)

Scott... yeah SOME of them can be turned off. The hyperlink option. But just about everything else on the list is a permanent annoyance. I agree with you about that stupid random font changing thing. Grrrrrr.