Microsoft Word - the work of the devil

[Tricky Dicky]

Word can be a pain, it tries to be too clever and fails. Excel is superb, I love it and use it for many things

 

[W.C.]

Absolutely. Only software that comes close to iTunes for awfulness is Powerpoint (he says, conscious that he's going to spend several hours today writing a PP presentation that should take 30 mins)

I recently got an iPhone for the first time. In the past I had an iPod and managed to wittle down my exposure to iTunes to opening it and dragging and dropping what I wanted on my iPod. Like a complete idiot (or maybe that should be iDiot) I completely forgot that having an iPhone will mean more.......iTunes. It's so shit.

 

[perseus]

What would you still suggest as an alternative?

Microsoft Publisher is more intuitive for letters with pictures and headings. For the occasional letter this is OK.

Not so good for long documents, articles etc. Edit Plus was like Wordpad with a spell checker. I used to have this before the last hard disc crash.

 

[Greg Bobkin]

Seriously, is this the most unintuitive piece of shit to grace a computer anywhere ever?

It takes 3 hours to write a document, and then another 13 hours to get the formatting right. Well, sort of right - you get close enough and just give up for fear of regressing back to an absolute mess.

Like playing football on Boxing Day - it shouldn't be this difficult, should it?

I'm genuinely amazed you don't use Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

 

[Seagull27]

Learn LaTeX. It'll take three months, but then you'll be able to do anything, and I mean anything, like parallel Greek-English-Coptic Bibles.

This. SO so much easier once you get the hang of it.

 

[Washboard Didgets]

THIS. All day long.

 

[Washboard Didgets]

You're right - Word sucks. Use InDesign.

It's just words and formatting - and formatting on InDesign is a PIECE OF PISS.

And THIS. (which is what I originally meant to quote!)

But the original thread title warrants the first THIS, so I'll leave it there.

 

[Dover]

From this I have one question, which to me is rather important.

I can get a genuine MS Office for my iMac. Do I use this or, download the Apple variant, Pages? The MS Office is a genuine version.

I aslo understand, as I will be completing a 300 word essay for the Nursing School at Brighton Uni, they can only scan MS docs, and do not accept any other word processor.

 

[Dover]

From this I have one question, which to me is rather important.

I can get a genuine MS Office for my iMac. Do I use this or, download the Apple variant, Pages? The MS Office is a genuine version.

I aslo understand, as I will be completing a 3000 word essay for the Nursing School at Brighton Uni, they can only scan MS docs, and do not accept any other word processor.

 

[perseus]

What I tend to do for long articles with pictures is to compose them into a web designer and cut and paste them into Word from a browser. Then adjust the pictures. For words only Word is simple enough to use if not very nice. I liked the old DOS word processors like Locoscript in the last century and never adapted to Word.

I have used Edit Plus for Windows. Not at the moment: I have lost the program somewhere with a hard disc crash.

 

[Cian]

Microsoft Publisher is more intuitive for letters with pictures and headings. For the occasional letter this is OK.

Not so good for long documents, articles etc. Edit Plus was like Wordpad with a spell checker. I used to have this before the last hard disc crash.

Also completely useless if you need to send a document that someone else needs to edit.

I refuse to use any Word version than 2003, it was just about acceptable. The newer ones are not.

 

[perseus]

Also completely useless if you need to send a document that someone else needs to edit.

I refuse to use any Word version than 2003, it was just about acceptable. The newer ones are not.

I am sticking to Microsoft Office 2003 by choice.

I tend to specifiy the job and then work out the best program to do it.

For articles and word heavy work, Word is OK.

It is putting the pictures in and doing fancy stuff that makes it awkward. I tend to prepare reports (with pictures) in a web design program (I still use Netscape Composer). For writing letters I might use Publisher as first choice as I can use a prepared letter heading. I expect that can be cut and paste into other Microsoft documents as I wish.

I have lost my old copy of Dreamweaver with a hard disc crash. Does anybody know of a shareware global editor for web page alterations?

 

[Tomnorthi]

Pages > Word.

 

[Brightonfan1983]

From this I have one question, which to me is rather important.

I can get a genuine MS Office for my iMac. Do I use this or, download the Apple variant, Pages? The MS Office is a genuine version.

I aslo understand, as I will be completing a 300 word essay for the Nursing School at Brighton Uni, they can only scan MS docs, and do not accept any other word processor.

I have to use both, and the issues arrive when sending Pages to someone with Windows. You can save Pages as if it was a Word doc but some formatting will be lost. I've discovered that saving any emailable Word/Pages document as a PDF, and sending that version onwards, is the answer.

Unless the recipient needs to edit it, in which case you're buggered.

 

[jgmcdee]

Use InDesign if you care about formatting and want a Word-like interface.

Use LaTeX if you want something that will work out formatting for you (and end up with a good-looking result) and you don't mind writing your documents in vi.

 

[RexCathedra]

Use InDesign if you care about formatting and want a Word-like interface.

Use LaTeX if you want something that will work out formatting for you (and end up with a good-looking result) and you don't mind writing your documents in vi.

I'd use vi only in the absence of any alternative. It's a dinosaur, and if it's burned into your fingers from when you learned it in 1982, so be it.

Any text editor -- i use TextWrangler, but BBEdit or Text Mate, or -- God help us -- EMACS will do.

Hell, you can write the document in Word, and save it as a .txt file.