Glitches and Gotchas
There are many things that bug me. In the coming weeks I'll expose the worst offenders, starting with Office.
Word Formatting: I got to tell you, I've been using Word for nigh onto 20 years, and I still feel too stupid to use it properly. My beef? Unless you had a past life as a desktop publisher, the formatting in incomprehensible. Sure, I can do plenty of fonts, indents and what not. It's the simple stuff that kills me. It's the basics. Formatting should be the easiest thing in the world. But when building a document from multiple sources, Word is inscrutable. I cut and paste and import a lot. Writers and editors send me files, and I add reader e-mail to blogs and columns. As much as you try to reformat, Word hangs onto the old styles like grim death, which Word sometimes makes me desire.
Often after several iterations, the old fonts and spacing will suddenly reappear, sometimes in the word doc, sometimes when you paste it into Outlook. I'm on Office 2007, and many is the time that Word refused to let me turn a double or 1.5 space doc into single space. Word 2003 had an undo formatting feature. Word 2007 either doesn't have it or it is hidden better than Jimmy Hoffa. I searched Word Help and it was no help.
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/15/2011 at 1:18 PM