An unclean soul is loosed upon the realm of the living
January 6th, 2010
As part of our intelligence gathering, we monitor the twitter feeds on MSWord. What is so utterly surprising is the level of 'pure hate' some people feel for the thing. Just to put my point across, here are some of the random tweets I gathered in a random 8 hour period:
- @lolife: Microsoft Word sucks, it sucks bad and we are all fools to use it when better alternatives exist. AGREED!
- @kittenpie: Why does MSWord ignore obvious typos and correct things that are as you want them? GRRR.
- @ironsoap: A man cannot hate anything in the world as much as I hate Microsoft Word.
- @marxsbeard: Microsoft Word hates Robert Burns!
- @tightrolltony: I love how Microsoft Word does whatever the FUCK it wants to!! GRRRRRRR!
- @chrisd7: thinks that Microsoft Word is baroque in the extreme
- @theklan: Microsoft word is an utter pile of crap. Who's idea was that then? #crashingpieceoftosh
And my favorite:
- @stevenhoy: Each and every time I fire up Microsoft Word an unclean soul is loosed upon the realm of the living.
Why these extreme feelings for some silly software program? After all, the thing does what it is supposed to do. I must admit I grew up with PDP's and VAXes. These things just 'worked', they did what they were supposed to do. Then I started working with Microsoft software and got convinced computers and software have a soul and a mind of their own. And sometimes these things just work against you.
Just kidding
Office in general and Word in particular are major engineering projects. And they are engineered by one of the biggest software teams in the world. Don't believe for a minute that these guys put 'hate' features in the product.
Another thing: most people in the software business are convinced you only make a good version of the product when you are at version 3. Office is on version 12! That is four times good.
The real reason
People are just painfully confronted with themselves. The tool is like a mirror: treat it badly, mess it up big time, brutalize it and it will do the same thing with your document. Spend some time to learn its vast array of features, see what other people do, open the help file, and you will see the thing starts to work with you, not against you.
The way out
Here are my suggestions:
- Try to learn some of its baroque list of features
- Spend time on learning about Word Styles
- Turn off automatic spell checking if that feature upsets you
- In case of total panic, copy your text from word in notepad, and then copy it in a brand new word document. This makes all styling mistakes go away and simply keeps the basic text.
Of course, we know this may be a very controversial post. So we'd like to learn what you think of this....
Reply from Steven I got through Twitter
@stevenhoy: You're welcome! Read the post—interesting. I must have brutalized this tool something terrible in a previous life
You posted under The Way Out: In case of total panic, copy your text from word in notepad, and then copy it in a brand new word document. This makes all styling mistakes go away and simply keeps the basic text.
A much simpler way is to simply highlight/copy the text you want, open a new blank Word doc and paste as Unformatted Text.
Using the mouse: highlight desired text; right click > Copy;
In blank doc: Home ribbon > Paste > Paste Special >
"Unformatted Text" > OK
Keyboard shortcuts: highlight desired text; CTRL + C;
Open blank doc: ALT + E + S
Select "Unformatted Text" > OK
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