MS Word Problems [Was: Alternatives to Word/MS Office]

[Alex]

On Monday, Jan 26, 2004, at 01:32 Canada/Eastern, marina wrote:

> I think my problem is that the automatic features I would
> like to turn off are not part of the standard set, accessible from the
> Tools (--> Autocorrect... -->) or Format (--> Autoformat... --> Options
> button) menus. Or if they are, they are described in such a way that I 
> can't find them.

[This is already a different issue. Perhaps it might make things 
easier, marina, if you broke down your posts in separate chunks dealing 
with specific issues.]

You are right about this particular one. Neither 98 nor X are 
well-designed in this respect. But you don't say which features you 
can't find to turn off.

> The main areas where I find Word doesn't let me decide to my 
> (professional
> :-) heart's satisfaction are basically two:
>
> 1. Footnotes: Word seems to get confused when several footnote 
> references
> are present in each page, and I often have to manually edit the text in
> order to leave enough space for footnotes to be inserted at the bottom 
> of
> the right page. [...] Word's behaviour seems to me to be totally 
> random, and
> vary from document to document.[...]

There seems to be a contradiction here. Either (a) Word doesn't let you 
decide, or (b) it gets confused. The former is a turkey (bad design), 
while the latter is a bug (unintentional). FWIW, I've never come across 
this footnote problem. Could you perhaps provide details?

> Formatting errors on footnotes are particularly frequent with
> documents imported from other word processors [...]

That's to be expected. No word processor will do a perfect job of 
importing documents in a foreign format, especially when it comes to a 
complex feature like footnotes.

> 2. Style sheets (or Templates, as Word inappropriately calls them):

I was unable to find any place where Word refers to style sheets as 
templates. Can you provide a specific instance?

> a) I often find bulleted and numbered lists styles all mixed up when I
> re-open a document, with numbered lists appearing with the "bullet 
> style"
> and viceversa.

Again, this would be a bug. I can't recall coming across it. Details? 
(Note that something along these lines occurs when you create a custom 
numbered/bulleted list style based on Word's built-in styles. The 
work-around is to either not base your custom styles on Word's built-in 
ones, or save your custom modifications in a new template -- if that's 
what you describe.)

> When copying and pasting (within Word itself) complex
> documents containing multiple numbered lists, the "pasted" version 
> treats
> all lists as being part of just one big list, numbered sequentially 
> without
> restarting at the beginning of the chosen sections

I think you mean that, if you have lists A, B, and C, and you cut list 
C and paste it after list A, Word will treat it as if it were part of 
list A instead of maintaining its separate identity. Yes, that's a 
"feature", and I wish I knew how to turn it off. The only solution I 
know is to automate Format>Bullets & Numbering>Restart Numbering

> b) I'd like to be able to "boldicise" or "emphasise" portions of text 
> in
> any pre-defined style, without having Word creating new inline styles 
> for
> every occurrence of these bold or italic (emphasised) sections.

I'm not quite sure I follow you. Sounds like you didn't turn off 
AutoFormat as You Type. But I may be mistaken. (Unless you're talking 
about using Word as an HTML editor -- which only the Marquis de Sade 
could recommend...)

> If you are familiar with working with complex, user-defined style 
> sheets in
> Word, you'd know how annoying it is to have to scroll down through 
> dozens
> of (not really necessary) styles before finding the right one for the
> highlighted section.

Again, I'm not quite sure I follow you. You are working with 
"user-defined style sheets" of which dozens are "not really necessary". 
Why did you (or the user) define dozens of unnecessary styles to begin 
with? If they're not necessary, they're not used in the document, so 
list only Styles in use in the Style dialogue. IMHO, the most efficient 
method is to use a consistent and appropriate naming system for your 
styles, and apply them from the keyboard: cmd-shift-S + style_name + 
enter.

f