Doug's Mailbag: Word Grumbling
Here's another batch of reader mail concerning the current state of Microsoft Word:
Computer operating systems and applications are a committee.
- The more members of the committee, the worse it works.
- The less control you have over who are committee members, the worse it works.
- If you have Republocrats and Demicans on the committee (pick any parties here), the worse it works.
- If you have members who aren’t affiliated with any 'party,' the worse it works (they need to be 'Microsoft' devotees and not 'anything other than Microsoft' evangelists).
- The more things you have the committee work on, the worse it works.
- The more 'Lobbyists' you have, the worse it works (aka add-ons, tool bars, accelerators, etc.).
- The fewer 'Good ol' Boys' on the committee, the more efficient the committee (I have a customer who still uses 'CardFile' rather than Outlook Contacts).
- The more crowded the committee room, the worse it works (I had a Server 2003 running on a 386 platform with 256MB of memory).
- The fewer locks on the committee room door, the worse it works.
- The longer a committee has been since it was 'formed' (formatted), the worse it works.
If I were you, I'd back up my data, format and re-install. I concur with most of the readers -- Windows 7 and Office 2007/10 are noticeably more reliable.
-Anonymous
I have spent many hours over the years trying to recover Word files for students. I also have spent a few hours converting files because we do not have the latest version of Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
Personally I like to use Softmaker Office. It is much lighter on resources, loads faster and will open most word files successfully.
-Anonymous
I am a heavy user of MS products (particularly Word and Excel) and have no significant failures that were in any way related to MS. I do, however, have significant issues with the Ribbon. I and many of my colleagues feel the Ribbon is the biggest backwards step for MS -- equaled only by the constant rearrangement of the programming environments.
-John
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Posted by Doug Barney on 11/09/2011 at 1:18 PM