MS Word amendment

[cdybedahl]

I have now spent several more hours reading documents about Microsoft Word, its well-known problems and a little of how it works internally. I would like to amend my statement that its behaviour is due to the developers being on crack. Clearly, that explanation is insufficient to explain the lovecraftian insanity that dwells inside Word. This thing must've been made by rabid cappucin monkeys on PCP. Evil rabid cappucin monkeys on PCP from Hell.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

(Katlinel at work)

Mood=Bastard Word has just crashed on me again.

I would suggest that the evil rabid cappucin monkeys on PCP are in fact from several different hells so that they'd have to form a committee in order achieve such a level of lovecraftian insanity.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Word.

Notepad is my Friend. And I will only resort to Word in extreme emergencies.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Get yourself a copy of any one of the several excellent alternatives; unless they've fixed it, which I doubt, notepad has a small maximum file size and can freeze and crash if you cut and paste from below the limit to above it. Wordpad is much better in that respect, though like word sometimes does mysterious things to formatting.

For text editing I use notetab pro, which is primarily a programmers text editor with macro libraries for various types of code; e.g. you select table on the HTML library, it gives you a dialogue for creating a table. It can have dozens of files open simultaneously, doesn't seem to have file size limits, etc. There's a free shareware version, which is complete except for the spelling checker.

Reminds me - I'm buying an iBook this weekend and will need something equivalent for it - any suggestions?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry - got that slightly wrong - the trial version of notetab pro is a 30-day thing, but there's also NoteTab lite which has fewer functions but is free. And you'll find them on
http://www.notetab.com/

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm an old Emacs-head, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about editors... Given that, BBEdit seems to be popular as a programmer's text editor. If you're alright with something less complex, the included TextEdit isn't bad. As for word processing, Pages seems pretty good (although I've only used it for one document so far).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Less complex is probably all I need to start with - I don't tend to do much that needs multiple documents open etc. on the road.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

Notepad.

I use that at work to test handling of memory condition errors. It always reads any file that you give it into memory, however large, so I have it soak up most or all of the memory on the machine and then see if everyone is correctly testing for bad returns from malloc calls.

[minim_calibre]

The one advantage to the drug-addled monkeys from hell creating the thing is that, once you've made the program your bitch, it's very easy to impress the terminally frustrated by making the thing behave.

Actually, then they start expecting you to be able to fix it for them ALWAYS, so perhaps it's not such a great advantage...

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

And how do you reach that state? I've just been reading several long articles by fans and/or employees of Microsoft saying that you can't get Word to behave, due to it's extremely fucked-up design. You can work around a lot of problems if you know how, but there is no way you can get it reliable.

[minim_calibre]

If they're MS employees claiming that, then they're probably editors and tech writers, a group with an extra-special talent for screwing up their settings and blaming the product. (Or devs, who don't actually have to use the thing.) On my last team, I'd say Word worked just fine for us about 99% of the time, with the times it wasn't working usually the result of an unsupported internal tool/plug-in that had been designed for use with the previous version.

I reached that state through working off and on for or at MS for years and years, starting back when they still did all their DTP for the MS Press books in Word. I've used it professionally since 1998, and personally since 1990 or 1991.

(The secret, such as it is, is to turn off almost every "feature" in the product before using it. )

Of course, when you know what you're doing, you also avoid the worst of the bear traps and problems from the start, so it doesn't get a chance to screw with you, thus giving it the illusion of reliability. It's like driving a quirky car: when it's one of your regular vehicles, you don't even think before adjusting your driving style to it.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I quite like Works. If I can't use an email document or wordpad, I'll use works. It does far fewer things on it's own.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

If I had a choice, I'd use Emacs. But now the lunkheads I work for have decided that Thou Shalt Use Word 2003, so I don't have a choice.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was recently forced into having to submit something in Word format. 'Oh, just send it to us as a word attachment' they said. And I muttered vile evil things beneath my breath.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's one case where using Wordpad probably is a good idea - it can write word .doc files if you tell it to, provided you don't want much in the way of formatting.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Oh, excellent. I didn't realise that. Thanks. And yeah, don't need much in the way of formatting. Most of the time formatting just annoys me, bells and whistles.

*potters off to play around with Wordpad some more*

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

As far as I know Wordpad doesn't save any of the clutter that accompanies a real Word file ("deleted" text, macros, your credit card details, etc.) so there's a lot less risk in using it for attachments.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this Calle. I had always wondered how this happens.