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

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app103:
My daughter had similar battles with Word 97 back in the day. She had to save her reports and reboot before printing, otherwise it gave her a BSOD and she would lose whatever wasn't saved.

One time she forgot to do this and it not only gave her a BSOD that forced a reboot and lengthy scandisk check, upon attempting to open the report again to print it, the file was corrupted...she lost the whole thing. She didn't get any sympathy from her teacher and ended up having to pull an all-nighter rewriting it for only 80% of the grade she deserved.

That was when she discovered that AOL email windows are pretty good for formatting reports, as long as you didn't fill in the sendto and subject boxes. That's what she ended up using for the rest of her high school years. (she still hates Word and would rather use Notepad than to ever trust it again)

40hz:
Word 2010 doesn't openly mock me. It ridicules my entire existence - and insults my family to boot!

I thought Office 2003 was a very good release. Especially from a support perspective since they finally seemed to get Outlook fixed to the point where you didn't need to worry about it blowing up on you every three weeks.

I liked 2007 a lot less.

I can't stand 2010.

So I gave up. Now I use Softmaker Office and I'm perfectly happy with it. Especially now that it's multiplatform and comes in a piquant penguin flavor. I like it enough that it's replaced Libre as my 'go to' NIX wordprocessor.

Got the 2008 version for free. Liked it so much I bought the 2010 version, which was offered at very generous discount. (And I bought it despite the fact I already have a license for 10 copies of Office 2010)

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Note: freebie 2008 version still available here.

Stoic Joker:
I have a client that was having issues with Word files (.doc) self destructing after they'd been passed around the office a few times in the process of being finalized. The documents were quite large training event reports that contained several groups of pictures in the frequently over 50 pages of text. Office versions were all 2003 & 2007 (2010 wasn't out yet back then), but no common points were found for who was most guilty (think "Hot Potato") of breaking the document. After so many trips through the office it just went boom on who ever was unlucky enough to make the mistake of hitting save.

As it turns out Word Documents are extremely sensitive to formatting. While it doesn't matter how you choose to format the document ... It is extremely critical that you do it consistently. As it seems that it standard method of dealing with change is to react much as you described.

The client had a meeting, at which it was decided how everybody was going to deal with various formatting type instances ... And the problem has not resurfaced again in well over a year.

So given that you were stuck futzing with fanatical formatting fiats. That's probably what caused the problem.


That was when she discovered that AOL email windows are pretty good for formatting reports, as long as you didn't fill in the sendto and subject boxes. That's what she ended up using for the rest of her high school years. (she still hates Word and would rather use Notepad than to ever trust it again)-app103 (June 20, 2011, 05:21 PM)
--- End quote ---

Well that's a clever (and somewhat frightening) solution. I take it WordPad didn't quite do what she wanted?

app103:
Well that's a clever (and somewhat frightening) solution. I take it WordPad didn't quite do what she wanted?
-Stoic Joker (June 20, 2011, 06:46 PM)
--- End quote ---

Wordpad on Win98 vs the beta of AOL 6.0? No comparison! I know it's hard to believe but AOL's email formatting options were better, easier to use, and more reliable.

cranioscopical:
I can't abide Word. Didn't like its first-ever incarnation, haven't liked it since. Their sales force in the corporate world has a lot for which to answer!

And as for P*werP*int, the world's choice for turning meaningful information into comic books…

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