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by James Robertson.
Original Post: MS Word rant #86
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My daughter was finishing off a book report the other day, and she wanted to make it look nicer than hand written - so with trepidation, we fired up Word. Getting all the text entered was the easy part. Then came layout options. I've been creating very simple documents in Word for years, so it's been awhile since I screwed with page margins - I think the last time I looked was Word For Windows 2.0, back when Word was a decent tool that enabled productivity, instead of the time sucking piece of donkey dung it's become. Is there a menu for adjusting page level properties? Heck no, the margins are hidden under paragraph formatting. To apply margins to an entire page, I have to select all paragraphs and then apply the margins. I suppose it's nice to have that control at the paragraph level - but how flipping hard would it be to provide a menu option for adjusting page wide settings, and have them applied to all paragraphs? I'm sure this is documented, but that's not the point - it was not easy to find - I really wasn't thinking of looking in the Format -- Paragraph menu area for page level settings. This is one of the reasons that every post on the greatness of Longhorn by Scoble sets my teeth on edge. Every release of Word since Word for Windows 2.0 has been worse. That's right, worse. 2.0 was easy to use, the bullets went where I wanted them, the menus made sense, I could figure out how to set page margins - it was all better. Why am I not excited about the coming of LongHorn? Maybe because I expect the incidence of suckage to increase. It's not just Word, either. One of the things in XP that drives me bats is the blasted pop up from the tray that periodically tells me that I have unused icons on the desktop. NO I DON'T - I put the damn icons there for a frelling reason. I'm sure there's a setting to get rid of that damned notice, but who was the utter idiot in Redmond who thought it was a good idea in the first place? This is the kind of thing I mean by the increase of suckage. Here's another - every so often, a random app I have open - and it's been all different ones - seems to be unable to restore itself unless it's maximized - as if the window had somehow wandered offscreen. What's up with that?
I'm telling you, the Linux desktop or the Mac desktop is looking better and better every day. And the "gosh gee golly" noise about Longhorn isn't improving my mood on this. Fix the suckage, and shut the heck up on the wonders of an OS I won't see for two years.
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