Not Hardware, but Software (MS WORD)

[dgs49]

In my day to day existence I prepare mountains of documents. Contracts, memoranda, letters, emails, and so on.

I tend to use the "bullets and numbering" feature of MS WORD a LOT, not only for my own documents, but I frequently have to edit and modify documents that other people have prepared.

I have to say that the paragraph numbering feature is the most fucked up computer function I have ever encountered. It is actually worse than it was in the early days of computers when you would update your database week after week, only to have the same incorrect entries re-appear on the next printout.

The function never remembers how you numbered something last time, it fucks up the margins, the fonts, and the indents. And it gets worse when you are using the "track changes" features. It's like some neurotic programmer in Seattle is intentionally fucking with your brain.

How many iterations have there been of MS WORD, but this feature NEVER improves. I wish there was a way to punish MICROSOFT for this defect in their programming. It is inexcusable.

[Daisy]

There is a way of punishing them.

Don't buy their software.

Buy a Mac or a bare bones machine and put a Linux variant on it, and then run open office instead of MS Office.

Kick em in the ballbags/bank balance.

[Liberty1]

If his situaton is like mine, there are corporate standards for all IT hardware and software. You use what they give you.

[Daisy]

Would your firms offer a "bring your own device" scheme?

Buy your own equipment, with an allowance from your employer. All they need to supply is connectivity to shared storage or a virtual desktop service. Makes life simpler for them as they aren't responsible for anything other than the connectivity. Makes life nicer for you cause you use what you like to use.

It's not for every worker I'll grant you but for day to day office type work, it makes perfect sense.

[Econoline]

Two words: Corel WordPerfect.

Many years ago it used to be THE predominant word processing software; it still exists in spite of Microsoft's efforts to kill it because it's a better product for most uses and vastly superior for some uses--and it sounds like your situation might be one. I still use it, and love it, and I've never really gotten comfortable with MS Word (which I use only when I have to).

WordPerfect versus Word

[Rick]

"Open Office" can also be run on MS platforms...

[BoSoxGal]

My first Mac had a great little word processing program; can't recall what it was named but it was a nice, intuitive program. I used it through grad & law school. Do Macs still have that, Daisy?

[Joe Guy]

Probably 'ClarisWorks'.

Macs now have 'Pages' as a word processing program. It's not anything like MS Word. But it's okay for most word processing and not as bloated and complicated as Word.

[BoSoxGal]

Joe Guy

That's right, ClarisWorks! Neat program.

I don't care much fir MS Word, though after a proper training I was able to find my way around a bit better.

We use WP in my office, though many law offices have converted to the other even though it's not so legal format friendly.

Bill Gates's mediocrity rules the world.

[dgs49]

In the corporate world (in my experience, at least) you can't get away from MS WORD.

Most of the other stuff works very well. Some of it is less intuitive than it could be, but that is understandable.

But to have bugs like this when the product has been around for 30 years, and updated three or four times in ridiculous.

BTW, I have created some fill-in-the-blanks forms in WORD (answer questions on a cover sheet, and your responses are automatically populated into the main form), and it is also a nightmare, with the inserted words often coming out with different fonts from anything else in the document.

[Scooter]

I had a very long and detailed reply about my adventures in list formatting, but then I pressed the wrong key by accident and the whole thing went poof. Bottom line, have you tried creating a list style, or modifying one that's already there, to use for formatting lists? It should help you with most of the stuff you mentioned. However, there are settings in all sorts of places that affect how lists get formatted and how they react to being merged into other documents, especially if someone you are sharing documents with has different settings.

The form control boxes use the same font as your default paragraph style, unless you specify a different one, so if the rest of the document is in a different font, they will not be the same. So you need to either use the same font in the body of the form as your default paragraph style (usually Normal), or else you need to create/select another style with the font you wish to use. Sometimes it still doesn't work, if you based the style on one of a different type (say, using a paragraph style to create a list style); the link between them gets broken in some way that prevents the code from identifying the base style, along with any formatting that is dependent on it.