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For reasons which are completely beyond my control, I've spent half a week writing a document in Word 98.

I have never in my life seen, heard of, or even imagined a more malodorous piece of steaming shit than this little slice of Microsoft. Words fail me, and all that follows is the faintest Platonist shadow-on- a-wall of what is, in my heart, the Ideal Peeve, perfect in its sincerity, bottomless in its depth, and unassailable in its accuracy.

This bloated, pestilent gigabyte-swamping piece of ordure takes up enough computational resources to accurately model the world's weather for the next billion years, and what do you get for it? Something that will format and display text? Don't make me fucking laugh. What you do get is a profusion of bells and whistles thrown in a careless heap, each bauble lovingly designed to make the straight path crooked, the intuitive arcane, the simple impossible.

Take the ``Help'' for example. It's not just help, it's a new friend!

I don't want a new friend, you shit-slurping choad-munching bunch of retards; I've all too many as it is. What I want is something simple where I can find a technical detail with a minimum of fuss and interruption. I don't want animation. I don't want natural-language interpretation. I don't want to be led by the fucking nose. Give me a fucking index and get the hell out of my damn face. If I dismiss a window, I want it gone. I don't want it to wave goodbye, or hesitate, or sneeze. I want it gone.

The document I was working on was very simple. No images, no tables, no nothing. One font, one style, that's it. It would be perfectly simple in other system, even earlier versions of Word, but, oh no, not in this latest magnum opus of the word processing world.

This helpless, hapless, hopeless, buggy piece of offal insisted on changing my fonts every couple of minutes for no reason. Random chunks of text, at random times. And bullet points, don't talk to me about fucking bullet points. It's a little known fact that in the bullet-point mode of Word 98 every single button on every single toolbar is the ``Fuck Me Over Now'' button. I've got bullet points going left, I've got 'em going right, and down and up, I've got 'em changing indentation, and style, you name it.

You'd think in 20 or so megabytes of RAM there'd be room for one scenario in which it doesn't actively do anything wrong, but for that you'll have to wait for Word 2023, which will have a user interface like a retarded version of ``I have no mouth, and I must scream.''

And don't try telling me that one need only configure the options to avoid these problems; I'm not a fucking moron. I quickly configured the preferences so as to minimize all this bullshit, at which point Word promptly changed them back. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you don't want fast saves, then fuck off, you're gunna have 'em. Don't want your grammar constantly corrected by some shitty little subprogram that doesn't know the first goddamn thing about grammar? Tough shit. Empty your wallet and move off to the side.

How did this come about? It can't be incompetence, at least not the usual mundane sort one is constantly immersed in simply by having to share a planet with a bunch of fucking primates. This is either some transcendent type of incompetence, or active malevolence.

My money's on malevolence. This software was obviously created by a company who's motto is ``We're Microsoft, and you, the customer, aren't worth fuck to us.'' It matters not one iota what their official motto is, watch the hands, not the mouth. Well, Microsoft, your time will come. It may not be Linux that does you in, it may not be the DoJ, it may not be this decade, but you're going to go the way of the dodo, and I for one will cavort naked on your grave, pissing effusively on your memory, and screaming, ``Animate this, you bastards!'' to the sky.

But in the here-and-now, I shall finish this document with the quiet dignity with which I have always comported myself, and then I shall un-install Word, and swear a terrible oath that I would rather daub dung on paper with a stick than write a document using a Microsoft product.

Stofsk wrote:Open Office > Word.

What's more, it's free too! A free worp processor that's actually better than something you'd have to shell out big bucks for? Yeah, crazy world.

RedImperator wrote:Shit on Word. I used WordPerfect back when I was on a Winblows box, and now I use EMACS for basic word processing and Pages for when I need to get fancy. As long as what you're using can save as an RTF or plain ASCII text for the benefit of the poor schlubs who have nothing but Word, there's no need for the shitting thing.

Lagmonster wrote:I've learned that while it has its shortcomings, there are ways to wrangle it into doing what you want. For example, once you get the hang of the style editor, you can pretty much kill off its bizarre habits of re-formatting itself. The 'randomly changing fonts' and such, for example, can be kicked in the can by going Edit-Select All/Edit-Clear-Format.

Wicked Pilot wrote:MS Office could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. Am I still the only peron alive that uses WordPerfect?

Wicked Pilot wrote:MS Office could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. Am I still the only peron alive that uses WordPerfect?

RedImperator wrote:Shit on Word. I used WordPerfect back when I was on a Winblows box, and now I use EMACS for basic word processing and Pages for when I need to get fancy. As long as what you're using can save as an RTF or plain ASCII text for the benefit of the poor schlubs who have nothing but Word, there's no need for the shitting thing.

EDIT: When I was in a corporate environment and stuck with Word, I wound up developing a few workarounds to avoid some of that program's more retarded features. The table function actually works pretty much as advertised, so I made a lot of tables with 0 point lines instead of fucking around with Word's counterintuitive and stupid tab, indent, and bullet settings.

Pezzoni wrote:I recently used Word for a 400 page piece of project documentation, and it handled it fine, bar the occasional tantrum over font sizes in the style editor (when I say 12pt, I don't mean mark it as 12pt and display it as 16pt, shitcock).

phongn wrote: I've heard nightmares about people trying to use Word for big projects and it generally crapping out - has Microsoft finally fixed those problems? (Most people use FrameMaker or one of the TeX derivates for that)