I am hurt
March 23rd, 2010
What am I to do? Everybody seems to hate my good old friend MSWord. I saved a twitter search on MSWord in my tweetdeck account, so I am confronted with it daily. About 95% of all tweets are about how people hate it. Especially the autocorrect seems to upset users. What I can't understand is why people act so irrational about the attempts Word makes in correcting what it finds.
Sometimes I help people by tweeting them back on some style issue or page numbering thing. Often it is quite useless: people have decided to hate it and some dude tweeting them advice won't change their determination to accuse Bill Gates of all the misery in their lives.
Honestly I feel helpless when the autocorrect feature isn't on. When typing in another language, or when using some other program than Word, there is nobody there to help you.
I would guess the Microsoft usability labs have made their homework. Most likely, the big majority of the user community likes how the thing helps you correcting errors. Big lesson for the marketing guys however, nobody's tweeting on how happy they are with MSWord. Maybe I need to go on a MSWord Good Will Pelgrimige. To honner my 15 year old friendship with the thing.
What about a daily #HappyHappyMSWord tweet? Spread the good vibes. Reassure the lonely writers like me they are not alone. Because honnestly, what other program is there to put all your thoughts through this creative process you call thinking and gets it outlined in bullets, tables, paragraphs and alike? Who wouldn't wish life had this magical ctrl+z to undo what you just said?
I guess there is little hope for those determined to be unhappy. I, for one, am very happy MSWord user. Please reply with what category you belong to.
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....