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'I Hate Word', with Hassan i Sabbah


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'I Hate Word', with Hassan i Sabbah
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Hassan i Sabbah
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: london and københavn
 
2005-09-16, 04:31

Hello.

It's been, what?, a good six months since I started an 'I hate Word' thread. I just want to violate posting guidelines a moment with a small rant, some of which will be in capitals, to say that I HATE WORD BECAUSE IT IS A BUGGY, COUNTER-INTUITIVE PIECE OF NONSENSE THAT IT IS STILL DEVELOPING BRAND NEW WAYS TO PISS ME OFF.

The formatting pallette. All of a sudden, I can't move it. I can't get rid of it with its button. None of the other buttons do anything anymore.

That's all. No scope for discussion here, we've done alternatives to Word backwards and forwards, just wanted to remind my public that I hate Word and Word apparently hates me too.

gibberish

Last edited by Hassan i Sabbah : 2005-09-16 at 04:32.
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mattf
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Devonshire - nearly twinned with Narnia
 
2005-09-16, 06:56

I saw an advert in the Metro today, for Microsoft Office (you might have seen them, they have people in offices dressed up as dinosaurs.... *shrug*). At the bottom one dinosaur was asking "We have Office 97. Is that good enough?" and another dinosaur replies "Not nearly close".

How close Microsoft came to telling the truth and yet they focused on one particular version of Office....

I too, detest Word with a passion. It is an unfathomable piece of shit and I dread having to use it, especially when being asked to produce technical documentation complete with screen shots.... But that's for another time.....
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beardedmacuser
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2005-09-16, 07:01

Please please please... a proper version of OpenOffice for OS X! On Linux, UNIX and Windows it is by far my office suite of choice. So much nicer than MS Office.
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Brad
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2005-09-16, 07:06

Hear, hear!

I absolutely hate Microsoft Word. Its very rare that I loathe a piece of software like this. I don't even hate Microsoft Windows; at least Windows is fairly predictable and consistent. Word, on the other hand, has the terrible habit of applying seemingly random styles where there should be none, applying the wrong style, reflowing tables so they get chopped onto a ridiculous number of pages, resizing table columns to the least optimal sizes... and those are just some of the major problems I've had with it in the past week, not to mention all the UI problems like you mentioned, Hassan.



I think if anything is deserving of a hate thread, it's Microsoft Word.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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staph
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2005-09-16, 07:56

Yup, I hate Word too.

So much so that I've taken to writing up my word on Mellel on my Mac, and then converting it to RTF for document management and the approval process. I don't even know where to start with the things I hate about it, but I suppose the most obvious one is the ridiculously ugly text engine. It sucks.
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DMBand0026
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Join Date: May 2004
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2005-09-16, 10:21

I'm going to have to echo most everyone's sentiments here and say that if I never had to use MS word again, I wouldn't.

Quote:
I HATE WORD BECAUSE IT IS A BUGGY, COUNTER-INTUITIVE PIECE OF NONSENSE THAT IT IS STILL DEVELOPING BRAND NEW WAYS TO PISS ME OFF.
I couldn't agree more. I can't believe how much work I manage to not get done when I'm using Word because I'm trying so hard to make Word work correctly and stop trying to be "intuitive" and "productive" for me when really all it's doing is royally dicking up my formatting that I set up because Microsoft apparently thinks every single one of its customers is completely retarded and therefore can't format a paper or a list correctly so they have Word do it (incorrectly) for you. And once Word has decided to format something one way, you better just strap yourself in for the ride because changing it is akin in difficulty to getting an American newborn to speak Japanese. Ugh!

Come waste your time with me
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torifile
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2005-09-16, 10:26

Normally, I'd jump on this bandwagon, because Lord knows Word and I don't get along at all. But I've recently FIGURED OUT how to work with styles in Word. It's not perfect like Pages (and I only learned because of Pages) but I finally found something in the bloat that made live easier! I know I may be cast out as a pariah now but I thought I'd share. Don't hate me!

If it's not red and showing substantial musculature, you're wearing it wrong.

Last edited by torifile : 2005-09-16 at 10:27.
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awilso
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2005-09-16, 13:52

You only need to import a word document into Wordperfect to see all the code that drives people crazy.

I took a 4meg file into Word perfrect the other day and stripped out all the duplicte coding and reduced the file to 2.7meg. Every time you format in word it re-applies code on top of code, untill it forgets where it is.

Personally I still think that Wordperfect 5.1 was the best word processor on the planet and has suffered from underinvestment.

The force is strong in this one
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drewprops
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Join Date: May 2004
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2005-09-19, 16:25

I never knew exactly what was going on until I recently tried editing an HTML document in Word (it was a desperate time). I'd written the code cleanly in HTML with CSS markup but by the time it got into Word that bitch had added all sorts of additional selector tags that I *DID NOT NEED*.

Thankfully I remembered that WordPad existed and got the heck out of Word ASAP.

It's almost like the guys who coded the app couldn't allow for a standards-compliant document pass through the app without getting some of their own code inserted. If someone could explain a real, unsnarky reason why this would be important then I'm all ears... truly curious. Are the M$ insertions workarounds for bugs in their other applications? In otherwords, would they hijack the HTML code with their own to work around bugs in Explorer that make that app vulnerable to improper display or browser manipulation by black hats? I personally think that it was blind arrogance on the part of the coding team, but I wasn't there to see the reasons they decided to do what they did.

All I'm left with is the acrid taste of Coder Vomit in the back of my mouth. Thanks Microsoft (Windows division).

Steve Jobs ate my cat's watermelon.
Captain Drew on Twitter
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geneman
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2005-09-19, 16:56

I'll agree that we're not dealing with a good program, but I don't think it's all as bad as you try to make it. I've gotten by using MS Word throughout elementary school, HS and most of my university time (I'm trying to switch to TeX now).

Sure there has been frustrations and we've had words, but that happens in all relationships Granted you won't always get things to be *just* the way you want it, but I've always managed to get by (or work around some of the quirks).

While most of you are giving out F's I'll stretch it all the way to a C-

Only hate me a little, ok?
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Kickaha
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2005-09-19, 17:02

We can't hate you for ignorance.

I keed! I keed!

Seriously, Word is just plain a bad UI slapped over a buggy app. But, if it's all you're used to, then there's a good chance you think it's just spiffy.
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BenP
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Join Date: Jun 2005
 
2005-09-19, 19:30

The thing is that most of the alternatives aren't that hot. Pages doesn't have enough features IMO. Right now I'm using Pages anyways. I think I'll try NeoOffice/J, but the UI is so unAqua.
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Mac+
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2005-09-19, 21:07

Word on my system (OS X - 10.3.9 on a Ti550 PB) is a resource hog and is like wading through molasses. It has got to the point that I truly do not want to open up any old files to re-edit because it is a big p-i-t-a.

As for Styles, I am at a loss on how to get new ones to commit the way I want them to. I seem unable to erase some parts of a style from a custom style that I'd like to keep. So, in this respect, I am very envious of your recent success with Styles, torifile.

Brad - I know your love of TextEdit, (I do not have iWork with Pages, so I am yet to try that) but just looking at the app, I miss seeing a formatting palette for paragraphs, text styles and the like. As much as Word frustrates me, I do like the way it handles graphic images, will TextEdit handle wrap around text on images in the same way? (I can't seem to get it to work.)
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Brad
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Join Date: May 2004
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2005-09-19, 21:40

I'll be the first to admit that TextEdit isn't meant to replace Word or Pages (or Nisus or Mellel or AbiWord or AppleWorks) as a full-fledged word processor. It works great for me because most of the time I don't need all the elaborate layout and style options of those apps. I use TextEdit for jotting down notes and for quick-and-dirty typing that often just gets pasted into another document or a web form (like this post!) or some other input device anyway. For example, when I'm at work, I'll often type some twenty or thirty lines of a SQL query into a TextEdit document before pasting it into a command line for execution. TextEdit, as its name implies, fits the task of editing text perfectly in these sitautions.

Whenever I do need to apply styles and such for something more than a quickie RTF document, I usually drop into LaTeX, a logical typesetting language that works kind of like HTML. It's MUCH more reliable and predictable than using Word. The only downside is that there's a learning curve to learning the language. Despite that learning curve, though, I've found that the benefits of LaTeX's unique features and the time and frustration I've saved by not dealing with Word reformatting things incorrectly have far outweighed the "easy" WYSIWYG-ness of Microsoft Word.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Not everyone can pick up languages like LaTeX as easily as I have. If you've ever written HTML, though, LaTeX feels like a natural evolution.

The only documents I edit in Word today are for classes with moronic professors that require students to submit in the archaic doc format. Fortunately, though, most professors have boarded the Clue Train and will accept doc, RTF, and PDF files.

About your reservation regarding formatting palettes, have you looked at the TextEdit ruler-toolbar that's bolted onto the top of regular documents? While it's not as fully-featured as the palettes you see in other applications, there's still some useful functionality in there. The "Styles" menu, for example, can be customized with, well, styles that you can apply to your text. For embedded media, though, I do not believe there are additional options for multiple-line text wrapping.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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ezkcdude
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Join Date: Jan 2005
 
2005-09-19, 22:55

Wouldn't it be nice if Word were just an interface that used LaTex as the processing engine? Anyone remember Klyx? :smokey:
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Brad
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2005-09-19, 23:01

Quote:
Originally Posted by ezkcdude
Wouldn't it be nice if Word were just an interface that used LaTex as the processing engine? Anyone remember Klyx? :smokey:
Well, there's always LyX/Mac, but it's not the prettiest little app.
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ezkcdude
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2005-09-19, 23:12

Thanks, Brad. Looks like there's better OS X support since I last looked.
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Hassan i Sabbah
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Join Date: Jul 2004
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2005-09-20, 07:56

Ooh. What's this?

http://www.thinkfree.com/products/

Anyone used this? Just came out for OS X in the last couple of days.
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Brad
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2005-09-20, 08:00

I tried it several years ago when it was at an earlier version. It's a pretty good suite, but it's a little slow. I haven't tried the latest version 3, though.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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SledgeHammer
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2005-09-20, 22:00

I don't think I've ever made it through a paper without having to swear at Word for some stupid reason. I try to turn off all the automatic correction and formating cap, but I always miss something. And that damn waving computer. I hate that thing. And I can never get it to go away for good. I discovered recently though, that it doesn't have to be a computer. It can a whole host of animated little shits. One of the options is Shakespeare. The Bard would be insulted.
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Kickaha
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2005-09-20, 22:02

I have a friend who has had Word crap out on him, destroying his file, *AND* the backup file, not once, not twice, but three times.

His honor's thesis.

A major presentation for work.

A conference paper.

You think you hate Word? You don't the meaning of it until you talk to this guy.
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DMBand0026
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2005-09-20, 22:05

So Kick...what app are you using for your thesis? How many backups do you have in how many different formats?

I'll knock on wood for you. I'd hurt for you if you lost that thing.

Come waste your time with me
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Brad
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2005-09-20, 22:11

Last I recall, he's using LaTeX, like any good engineering student should.

While I'm pimping TeX/LaTeX, why don't you take a moment to read how it got started? Interesting story.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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Chinney
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2005-09-20, 23:09

Quote:
Originally Posted by awilso
...Personally I still think that Wordperfect 5.1 was the best word processor on the planet and has suffered from underinvestment.
I agree. I've sometimes wished that *they* would release WP 5.1 for OSX - ancient DOS-style interface and all. (I'm only half joking.)

Of course WP crapped out when they released it for Windows, and has never fully recovered. After its disastrous initial Windows releases, it soon became better than Word for Windows - and still is - but not enough better to make up for the market share that it had lost.

When there's an eel in the lake that's as long as a snake that's a moray.

Last edited by Chinney : 2005-09-20 at 23:14.
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Kickaha
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2005-09-21, 00:24

LaTeX it is. 361 pgs as of tonight, and counting. Each chapter and appendix is its own file, there are many, many PDFs (generated from OmniGraffle), and no small number of source files (XML, Python, Otter input), and it handles them all like a pro. The bibliography, tables of contents, lists, etc, are all handled correctly, and all cross-references stay intact. I don't gotta do nuthin' but generate content. I love it. I use TeXShop for the document itself, OmniGraffle to create the diagrams, and BibDesk to take care of the bibliographic entries. That's my Holy Trinity right there.

And... after I had three, count them *three* drives go bad on me simultaneously (primary and two backups), where I lost 18 months of work, I now have it on my laptop and checked into a CVS repository on campus, which is backed up nightly. Nothing short of a regional nuke is going to take it out this time.

Last edited by Kickaha : 2005-09-21 at 00:25.
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geneman
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2005-09-21, 10:57

Just had an interesting error in Word, something along the lines of too many spelling errors to handle, it then turned off spell-checking... the file wasn't even particularly long, about three-four pages I think - all of it was DNA sequence so obviously it didn't make sense, but still it was only a couple of pages (or 11,241 characters to be exact )

(for the record I don't use Word to handle these files normally, this was from a collaborator)
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curiousuburb
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Join Date: May 2004
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2005-09-21, 13:45

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad
Hear, hear!

I absolutely hate Microsoft Word. Its very rare that I loathe a piece of software like this. I don't even hate Microsoft Windows; at least Windows is fairly predictable and consistent. Word, on the other hand... <rant>



I think if anything is deserving of a hate thread, it's Microsoft Word.
I'll see your hate of Word and raise you Microsoft Publisher

Worst. Tool. Ever.

Incompatible with everything, even prior versions of itself.
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curiousuburb
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2005-09-21, 14:03

Quote:
Originally Posted by SledgeHammer
I don't think I've ever made it through a paper without having to swear at Word for some stupid reason. I try to turn off all the automatic correction and formating cap, but I always miss something. And that damn waving computer. I hate that thing. And I can never get it to go away for good. I discovered recently though, that it doesn't have to be a computer. It can a whole host of animated little shits. One of the options is Shakespeare. The Bard would be insulted.
Hey, It looks like you're writing a letter!
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709
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2005-09-21, 14:05

Salmon Days rules.
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kscherer
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2005-09-21, 14:10

Won't it be nice to see iWork '06 ship with a spreadsheet program? I have been using Pages for several months and refuse to use Word anymore. At all! Once Apple has a quality spreadsheet program running, Office can kiss my rosey, red cheekesses!

And I'll see your Word-Publisher and raise you FrontPage! You want a piece of crap? Turn that thing on and it'll smudge your webskills!

- AppleNova is the best Mac-users forum on the internet. We are smart, educated, capable, and helpful. We are also loaded with smart-alecks! :)
- Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. (Mat 5:9)
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