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When your word processor begins openly mocking you, it's time to call it a day

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cthorpe:
My wife and I spent 7 hours today fighting with Microsoft Word 2010 as we attempted to get her dissertation into the specific, random-ass, ever-changing format that her university requires for final submission and publication.

Word's more impressive moves included:


* Deciding to liberally and randomly sprinkle sub- and super-script formatting throughout her endnotes.

* The "section break jumble" every single time we saved the document.

* Completely corrupting half the references section with random garbage after a save.

* Insisting that we use quadruple space on one single page of the document.

* Regularly ignoring specified pages when printing small portions to attempt to fix pagination issues caused by Word.

* Turing on Windows' built in Text-to-Speech just in time to capture a bevy of full-on, modernist, William-Faulkner-would-be-proud stream of consciousness profanity.  Oddly enough, it got most of the more colorful words right and failed miserably on everything else.

* BSODing both my desktop and her laptop when trying to use the built in Save to PDF function.

* When not BSODing, telling us "File Not Found" when trying to use the built in Save to PDF function.

* Generating over 300 pages of margin to margin garbage text when using the full version of Adobe Acrobat 9 to create the required PDF.

* Replacing her name with my name in the document metadata when we tried to use no less than 3 other PDF generators.


Seriously, Word, what the hell?  What did we do to deserve that?  I defend you - you and Excel and Powerpoint and even Windows.  And this is how you repay us?

F'n Ingrate!

mouser:
Well that at least made me chuckle.. i can sympathize.. Microsoft Word often seems to have a mind of it's own.

Just think of it as part of a final exam.. If you can survive formatting it in MS Word, then you are ready to graduate.

skwire:
Turing on Windows' built in Text-to-Speech-cthorpe (June 20, 2011, 12:49 AM)
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There's your problem; where Turing's involved, the app may as well be sentient.   :P

cthorpe:
In the end, the beast was tamed, and I managed to wrestle a well-formatted pdf out of it.  It did require completely uninstalling Office 2010 from her laptop and reinstalling 2007, but it is done.

Now it is up to the thesis and dissertation office to approve it, or to send back absurd demands for ridiculous formatting corrections.  No doubt at least one of the corrections will involve converting every third line to Comic Sans or replacing her footers with ASCII drawings that are actually a flip-book depicting a young woman who is so close to her PhD, only to have her diploma snatched away by a cruel man in a funny hat.

I swear, the folks in that office must have had the worst time possible in grad school, as they clearly get their jollies out of tormenting every PhD candidate that goes through the system.

Jibz:
In the end, the beast was tamed, and I managed to wrestle a well-formatted pdf out of it.  It did require completely uninstalling Office 2010 from her laptop and reinstalling 2007, but it is done.-cthorpe (June 20, 2011, 01:08 AM)
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So, basically the doc format is so obscure that even Microsoft can't read it? :D

My sympathies, I've had some fights with Word in the past involving inserting blank lines in obscure point sizes to get sections to not jump around randomly.

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