05 October 2006

Word Annoyances

Word, I'm sure, is a fine product for many folks. Commenting and revision tracking is cool enough. However, it has some quirks that drive me bonkers. What's doubly troubling is that I've as of yet been able to find any way to circumvent said behavior by thinking.

I'm in the throes of writing requirements for some software we're going to be pushing out. We've got some boilerplate subsections for features, and it's a hassle to write the titles and set them to their proper formatting, etc. I'm sure that there is a quick and easy method for writing a macro to insert this very stuff, but wouldn't it be easier to just copy-and-paste the boilerplate? You would think so (in the near term).

But no.

For some reason, the numbering on the last subsection would disappear after the copy and paste. If you copy that last section and pasted it after its parent section, you'd get numbers. Moreover, there wasn't any way to get that pasted text (AFAICT) to have the proper number. That is, I could remove the formatting, then reset the formatting and no number. There is no way to meaningfully get at the numbering interface with a few point and clicks. Fug.

The fix was intuitively obvious. I copied the subsection preceding the troublesome bit and pasted it after the same. I renamed the pasted section to that of the troublesome one and deleted Nemesis's text. It worked. Feh.

Don't even get me started on "page setup" going AWOL...

2 comments:

Jason said...

I think Word should;ve been marketed as Microsoft Nuisance, it is literally rubbish. Don't they ever test it on people other than Word experts, who have grown to accept every tic and navigate them like prize maze-running lab rats. Recently, I was in a horrible horrible hostel in Antigua, Guatemala, and the rooms (7 to a room) in bunk beds, had a lock and a key. Only, the key was on a chain, so you could lock your door, but anybody else could just as easily unlock it.

The point is, the woman seemed to have hard-wired herself to no longer appreciate the complete pointlessness of this lock/key setup (she just kept repeating, "There's the lock, there's the key") - AND - (here is my conclusion) - she would be an ideal product tester for Microsoft.

g said...

Sometimes I wonder if it isn't all just a dream.