Grrrrr!

[lostcarpark]

Microsoft Word has just pissed me off. I noticed the table of contents in the document was out of date, so I right-clicked it to update. Crash!

I tried opening the document again, and was told it's in use by another user (despite being on my local drive). No sign of the recovery options. I'm about to reboot, which should get rid of the in use error, and maybe, just maybe, bring back the auto-recover version. But my hopes aren't high. I've probably lost about two hours work.

Please don't tell me how fab and groovy OpenOffice is. I know already, but I really can't install it at work. I expect it would work fine, but if there was ever a problem with one of my documents, the immediate response would be "why aren't you using the group standard?"

Comments

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

Not in the version we have at work (97), nor the version I have here (2002). It only offers "Save AutoRecover info every X minutes." This does not save the actual document, it saves some arcane tokens to some secret location on my hard disk, and if there's a crash it's supposed to magicly reappear when I restart. When it works, it's lovely, but if you restart and no AutoRecover document appears you're up the swanny.

I generally agree about Word being my favourite word processer. I like the overall feel of it, and it does have some really useful features. But there are an awful lot of things that they've added to try to make life easier, which often end up being just annoying. Like the tab thing. How is that supposed to help me? Especially if I export my document and all the tabs disappear because they're not real tabs, only pretend ones. I wouldn't mind if it was consistent, or if I could remember where to turn that particular feature off.

Sorry, don't mean to rant!

[lproven.livejournal.com]

[!] They're removed it, then. You can probably get a macro to re-enable the real thing; the only autosave in Excel 'til XP or something was a macro.

You are on the latest service release plus hotfixes, aren't you? SP2a for O97, SP3a + HFs for O2K. If not, I have no sympathy at all.

The vast majority of WP users don't know how to set tab stops and indents and properly /use/ these features. They just bang in tabs as if they were on a fucking Selectric typewriter. Word /attempts/ to smartly automate this. It sometimes gets it wrong. The failure, really, is that users were too dumb to learn to do it right, requiring this clumsy kludge in the app to address the problem.

[A former professional trainer on how to do WP and DTP writes]

It's not really Word's fault, except that using tabs and rulers needs to be MUCH easier, and that's a hard one to crack. I seldom ever use them myself, and I *do* know how.

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know how to use styles properly, but much of the time I prefer to have a proper tab at the start of a paragraph than an indent. That way the style won't get accidently changed, losing it. It also gets a bit messy having one style for the first paragraph, and another for continuing paragraphs. Fine for a long document, but not worth the hassle for something quick.

I can understand the motivation for wanting to fix up common user errors. However, the problem with this is that the user often doesn't see what's going on, and they fight even harder against it. The other problem is when if detects we're doing something "the wrong way", when in fact we're doing something entirely different, and have very good reasons for wanting it to be that way. So while the intention may be good, in practice it really doesn't help.

I know I have service packs installed at home. Can't be sure about work.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Altho' indents can be part of styles, tabs aren't a style thing, they're a table and section layout thing.

Yes, you're right, sometimes people do fight it; in many cases, though, they just relax and let it happen, as one of those pointless mysterious things computers do.

Patches at work: conceded.