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I have long maintained that Bill Gates should be forced to produce, all by
himself, no help from anyone, a LONG master document, lotsa complex graphics
(anchored only, please, no cheating and locking them with a paragraph marker,
placing them in a table...., lotsa field codes, unusual pagination (I once did a
master document - you didn't want to be present to hear some of the words coming
out of my mouth - where the chapters were headed 1.1 What, 1.2 When, 1.3 Where,
1.4 Why...and paged 1.2 -1, 1.2 -2, 1.2-1, 1.2-2, etc. - try getting Word to do
THAT automatically!), and list upon numbered list.
Methinks the developers would get a huge list of things to fix...as of right
now, yesterday!
Jo Byrd
"Hart, Geoff" wrote:
Kari Kristine Gulbrandsen wondered <<why does everybody hate Word? Granted, I
have run into some problems with it-- but nothing that I couldn't work around or
do differently.>>
Most of us have a love/hate relationship with the software, quite apart from the
knee-jerk reaction to distrust anything produced by Microsoft. A large part of
the problem is that Word is such a fine tool for writing, and it's
deeply frustrating to encounter all the glitches that periodically rise up and
bite us. And some people have had disastrous problems with the software:
corrupted files, lost work, hours of overtime to recapture damaged files,
missed deadlines, and all the related stresses. Were I the guy running
Microsoft, I'd spend the next year in a 12-step program until I learned to
resist the urge to add new features, and I'd atone for giving in so often to
this urge by making a triage list of the existing features that need to be
fixed. Consider one well-known example: it's obscene that something as basic as
the autonumbering feature still doesn't work right. This has been a known
bug for something like 3 years, if not longer, and the arrogance of devoting
programmer hours to adding something like that idiotic help assistant (the
dancing paper clip and its kin) while ignoring something that affects most
writers daily isn't guaranteed to make people like you or your product. Then
there's the <oxymoron> online help </oxymoron>...
