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Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
.You can always tell when the Microsoft marketing department comes into full swing. There is something in the news that makes you raise an eyebrow. Tod
[See the full post at: So can you fix line spacing please?]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
I always disable all auto-correct and auto-format options. I know what I want, Office doesn’t.
I’m lazy. Six clicks is six too many. 🙂
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
An easier way to prevent things like HSA from being auto-corrected is to highlight it as all UPPERCASE, select spellcheck, and then add it to your dictionary.
I’m retired military and regularly used that trick to prevent Word from auto-correcting the various acronyms we used.
As for the bullet/numbered list thing…
Yeah, whoever set up the algorithm it uses should be forced to always use those lists for everything they type in Word until they figure out it doesn’t really work and fix it!
Despite ‘don’t correct all caps words’ being ticked, it would appear that that applies only to 4 or more letters, not three. E.g. TEH is corrected to THE. This would appear to be a bug as I can’t find anywhere it’s set.
However, 6 clicks now to save lots more clicks over time, seems a no brainer to me.
Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell
What drives you insane about Word?
Sections. And the accompanying headers/footers.
Indent. If I press Tab at the beginning of a line to indent it, I expect it to do so when the sentence wraps. Not.
And there are more quirky things. Probably all a matter of learn how to do it or just live with it.
What I don’t like about New Word –
*Interware is either software or hardware that requires the internet to operate.
If you think you have problems, try spell check it from an Australian perspective. I was taught to spell broadly using a UK dictionary but the Macquarie dictionary is the dictionary used in the legal system. There are many differences between US and UK spelling. Microsoft default is the US dictionary. When Windows is configured you get the option to add a dictionary. ‘Add’ is the operative word.
The end result after loading the dictionary for Australia is both US and Australian spelling are marked correct. To some extent, that’s OK. “Both are acceptable these days” I was told by a University professor.
What is not acceptable is mixing. For example use ‘capitalize’ somewhere and ‘capitalise’ elsewhere and both will be marked correct in Word. Many years ago the option existed to accept only Australian spelling (you had to jump through hoops to configure it). That is no longer possible. Now, spelling is a mish-mash. For example, Capitalise is marked incorrect as I type this in my browser but not in Word.
Concise Oxford is a first and foremost a UK dictionary (Oxford University English). They publish different dictionaries for different countries. What they don’t do is publish an Australian version.
Macquarie is the official dictionary for Australia, as used by universities and in law (every Act and every Regulation we have to comply with every day).
It makes little sense to use Concise Oxford in lower schools and not even make students aware Macquarie is the official Australian dictionary.
The comes the Word dictionary, which is used on every word students type. It reinforces American spelling via absence of the wiggly red line on ‘misspelt’ (down under) words. Judging by the quality of spelling, Teachers have given up. Who can blame them!
To really understand an Aussie, you need to find a Strine dictionary. Word doesn’t seem to have the option😀
Group A (but Telemetry disabled Tasks and Registry)
1) Dell Inspiron with Win 11 64 Home permanently in dock due to "sorry spares no longer made".
2) Dell Inspiron with Win 11 64 Home (substantial discount with Pro version available only at full price)
My background is in WordPerfect and 123 so never got into the Office experience. I do have Libre Office for when I need something composed (and it’s pretty clunky IMHO but good enough for what I’m doing). Fortunately for what I do notepad++ or sublime text works well.
You can still use WordPerfect – it still has the Reveal Codes, and you can use Libre Office (free!) for better Word compatibility if you need it. See the review of the 2020 version at https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/corel-wordperfect-office . The review complains about the old-fashioned interface, but I find it a plus – I hate the Ribbon even more than I hate trying to format in Word. A hierarchal menu lets you find things without already knowing where they are.
Frankly, WordPerfect is the major reason I’m not switching to Linux.
Word from Office 2007 and Office 2010 is not so bad (I have little experience with later versions). I don’t know about other Windows-based word processors, but Word has a neat feature where you can take two similar documents and compare them side by side, with the program highlighting the differences. We don’t need this feature often, but when we do it’s a huge time-saver.
One thing I would change about Word is to get rid of the stupid Ribbon and go back to the logically organized drop-down menus of Word 2000 and 2003. I have been using Word 2007 actually for longer than I ever used Word 2000, and to this day I’m still hunting for where the commands are in the Ribbon.
Just this week I discovered that you can change the default Blinding White(TM) background of Word 2010 to a light blue similar to Word 2007, and that improved my assessment of that version considerably. Wonder if the same can be done with the 2016 or 2019 versions.
With LiberOffice Writer you can put as many spaces as you want.
I use Word to compile research notes and write. On my internet-facing computer I upgraded from Word 2003 to 2010 a few years ago, while 2010 was still being supported. I use it only occasionally. On my non-internet computer, where I do most of my work, I am still using Word 2003. I am very comfortable with it. Word 2010 was not an improvement except in some minor respects, such as the ability to save directly to PDF.
I offer the following as an example of the improvements Microsoft could have made if it paid attention to creating user benefits instead of the change-for-the-sake-of-change we have seen. When I write, I have a nasty habit of using the same word twice or more often within a paragraph or two. These repetitions hide in plain sight. Rooting them out is an exercise in frustration.
What we need is a feature that would highlight all instances where the same words are used within XXX words of each other. This is not the same thing as the existing feature that allows Word to highlight all instances of a given word. You don’t know what the repetitive words are before running the search. The program should come with a default list of excluded words like “the.” The user should be able to customize this list and revert to the default if desired. The program should have a default value for “XXX,” which can also be customized. Pressing Enter would take you from each highlighted repetition to the next. Maybe something could be done with color-coding the highlighting so a particular group of repetitions stands out from others in the vicinity.
I have yet to see an editing program that offers this feature, and a specialized program should not be required. Microsoft could have done it long ago.
I hate Word. I am an engineer and technical writer. I have spent much of my life doing highly formatted documents. I have authored 2 professional papers that required the use of a bizarre template. I do things like write 300-page environmental permit applications. Bullet and numbered lists make me pound my fist on the desk. Importing spreadsheet data into tables makes me squint.
Susan, you are correct. Once my 300 page document is composed, it takes me another week to get the page layout correct. Then it takes another few days to ensure that the PDF version is identical to the print version when viewed in various readers.
Sigh. This was so much easier when I used WordPerfect.
The transition from WP to Classic Word and then New Word, and now InterWord is not complete. IMHO users still don’t understand the basic change in paradigm from WP to Word (any version).
WP was a ‘do until told to stop or do something else or in addition’ paradigm. It used a mechanical typewriter paradigm. Thus, if you look at the reveal codes you’d observe something like ‘caps on……….caps off’. That told the text editor to use uppercase between the on and off codes. You could nest an almost infinite number of instructions (codes) in WP, if you could keep track of them – thus the reveal codes mode.
Word (the windows versions) on the other hand used the object-oriented paradigm of ‘select and do’. Thus in Word for Windows, you selected an object (text, graphics, etc.) and told Word what to do to it – Bold, Italicize, Copy, delete, indent, etc..
WP was conceived in the DOS era and had to have WYSIWYG bolted on – and WP struggled with that process, taking so long that they opened the door for Word for Windows. We all know how that turned out.
Word for Windows was a reworked version of Word for DOS (the first computer program I bought from a store – version 5.0!) that had WYSIWYG baked in from the beginning. I used Word for Windows 1.0 on Windows 2.01 (a run-time version of windows that predated Win 3.0) beginning in 1989.
I wish more people understood the difference in paradigms – it might make their transition from WP to Word easier. But it is a good thing that WP for Windows exists, is viable, and might be a solution for your computing needs. Choice is GOOD.
Regrettably, I’d contend that WordPerfect is not viable–indeed, it no longer exists in any meaningful way. Although WordPerfect and its sister applications remain available for sale, Corel ceased almost all WP-related development after the early 2000s. Subsequent “releases” have consisted of essentially nothing beyond refreshed packaging, along with–perhaps–a token feature tweak. Corel no longer even bothers to develop patches for any version.
Corel’s got quite the cow pie cash cow, and it’s delighted to charge hundreds of dollars for the privilege of access. (Hey, somebody’s gotta pay for the slick site, right?)
To me, a recurring theme in the various complaints about Word is Microsoft’s relative aggressiveness of trying to anticipate what you’re going to do (and often forcing you into their preferences of how they expect things to be done). And for good measure, where their automation too often guesses wrong. I think I could better tolerate all that if there was a WordPerfect-like capacity of Reveal Codes to see what is actually being done, and the ability to make corrections.
I currently do a lot of work in Word 2019, and am mostly accustomed to things (even in tolerating the Ribbon, and competence, if not expertise in handling of styles), but I know that when I was doing my Master’s thesis in Word 2000, the formatting got so bollixed up that I ended up exporting the entire document to text, so that I could start over on the formatting.
Styles are probably the most powerful aspect of Word (any version) and might also be the least appreciated if not known.
One of the key shortcomings of Word, IMHO, is the inability to perform a general or partial reset of the built in styles.
Susan, it is likely that you made a permanent change to your normal or paragraph style that is causing your problem. Maybe not.
What could have occurred is that at some time you changed the line spacing and somehow updated the style to include that new spacing. One of the factors that you can set in each style is the style of the paragraph that follows once you press the return key. Thus, if you changed the style that follows your current style, even if you change the current paragraph, the next time you press enter you’ll get the permanent style applied to the next paragraph.
See the attached file for the specific dialog in one of the current versions of New Word.word-screenshot
For those who do not like the ribbon menu in MS office — Try this little addon —
https://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
I use MS office 2007 where I do some voluntary work but I dislike it greatly.
At home I used OpenOffice for years and now LibreOffice.
M.B. Helwig
mbhelwig
God, where to begin… Word has grown to be a hopeless, bloated mess. If only MS had never attempted to change it from being a pretty good word processor into the crappy publishing app that it is.
Show me a large, complicated Word document with formatting issues, and I’ll show you one that crashes the app when you try to fix them.
I once, years ago in the late 90s, figured out that Word’s default templates are where you want to put a lot of your effort, plus tweaks to dozens if not hundreds of settings. After doing that, all my documents just started out and formatted the way I wanted. What a pleasure!
I remember it took me some weeks to figure out just how to set everything up. At that time I was no less than a Word God, I understood all the subtleties and connections between things. When I would type a heading, not only did it do what I wanted, but when I hit Enter even the NEXT lines were coming out right. Headers and footers automatically gave me page numbers, company boilerplate about confidentiality, even the document filename and version saved. I could whip up a professional memo or report in seconds. It was a golden time.
Trouble was, at some point years later, after having changed computers, operating systems, and/or Word versions, all that work on .dot file and Word setup just became non-functional somehow. Perhaps I just didn’t have enough time at the time to resurrect all that knowledge of where things are supposed to be kept.
Now I’m in the boat with you, Susan. I know it can be better. I even have a few ongoing documents where I’ve saved styles where it IS better. But that magical time when Word Just Worked is gone for me. I don’t even get auto-signatures on my Outlook eMails any more. I know the settings are there. But real work demands my time, and the settings again go un-tweaked.
Microsoft might say that my real problem is that I don’t have a Microsoft Account, one login for all with which all wonderful things would be consolidated, and just shared between my systems. Unfortunately, that’s not it at all. I’ve had two or three machines in the past decade. It’s on the very same machine with the very same login, because of all the wheeling out of new versions and the incessant required installs of Windows that the continuity was lost. And it’s just too much of a pain to go back and find all those tweaks and customizations again.
Before you accuse me of mismanagement, I have every bit of data I have ever created with a computer. Granted, some of it is on punch cards and mag tapes I really have no way of reading now, but that which goes back to when Windows was new is still right here, on my disks. I don’t lose data. Microsoft loses data and continuity of care, and it’s up to us to keep re-tweaking our preferred settings and re-crafting Windows into something useful. For a time that was fun; I even wrote books about it. Now it’s just getting tiring.
How did we get to a place where the people who make operating systems have no idea how to use an operating system?
-Noel
A separate anecdote:
Yesterday I needed to update a company document shared via Sharepoint. Usually I just open the file and edit. Trouble was, as my noon deadline for publishing the updates grew near, when I would open it all I would see was essentially a blank “New Document 1”.
Turned out that deep in my stack of dozens if not hundreds of open applications across 4 monitors, I already had the document open; in a Word session behind everything else. Such is the nature and complexity of work.
Did word pop a message saying “can’t open another copy”? Did it just open another copy (it is a shared document, after all, where multiple people CAN actually open it at the same time)?
No. Just a blank document. Maximum stress (because of imagining the whole document is now lost).
-Noel
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