Anyone else detest Microsoft Word?

Post Reply New Topic

The longer I use it the more it annoys me and raises my blood pressure, sometimes to the point I end up effing and cursing aloud at it.

I just want to write my documents, insert little graphics here and there as relevant. I don't want it trying to second guess what I'm doing all the time and doing things automatically that I then have to manually undo before I can carry on. It really kills the creativity fighting with the software instead of just getting on with what I want to do, not what Word wants to force on me.

I end up going into the options, some of which the purpose of is as clear as pig-shit and end up unticking everything in sight hoping to kill the automatic actions. Microsoft have tried to make it "helpful" and semi-artificially intelligent and in reality they've made it into an annoying, ret*d thug. Grrrr.

There should be a master option:
[tick] Stop f*****g interfering and just let me get on with my document!

/Rant.

Come, Mr. TallyMan, Tally me banana! Heh, heh.

I tried my level best to NOT use Word for my short stories and novella. I tried Wordpad, Libre Office, Corel Suite, and several other word processors. The problem?
1. These other programs spent a lot of time and energy trying to duplicate and beat Word but often come up short mainly in relation to grammar correction.
2. The publishers, magazines, and editors I submit to use Word standards that I have no choice but to adhere to.
3. I use Kingston Office on my android tablet but it's just a stripped down version of MS Office.
4. I use Windows 8. MS Office 2007 works with it, but not 2010. The new Office 2013 is kinda stripped down. I used it briefly but experienced format errors so went back to Office 2007.
5. I used Atlantis word processor for a while. It's strip is similar to Word but lacks grammar check.
6. AbiWord and Open Office were cool alternatives, also. But once you use them, you find the interchange format which I have to use, RTF, leaves format errors from platform to platform. Since all roads seemed to lead to MS Word, I just keep my life simple and use it.

http://www.openoffice.org/

beat me to it, I have that because it was free haha

Used Word Perfect since the DOS days. Still do for some projects. I'm into open source cause it always evolves, so I've dumped Word, IE, Outlook for Open Office and Mozilla stuff

I love Open Office. I don't own MS Office, so don't use it on my main PC, and would not even if I did. At school I even install OO and use it despite MS Office being there. Seriously, f*ck MS Office, waste of $120

word

Any idea how to turn off this particularly annoying "trying to second guess me" feature:

If I have a line of text with a small graphic at the beginning of it, when I've reached the end of the line and press the Enter key to start on the next line, Word (wrongly) guesses that I want to create a bullet list using the small graphic as the bullet point. I don't and never do. However, due to the type of (technical) documents I'm writing this bit of Microsoft helpfulness attacks me frequently and I have to click "Undo" before I can carry on.

There are various other automatic annoyances but this one got me swearing at the computer this evening after I'd fallen foul of it for the nth time.

Another annoyance that hits me randomly: I view each page separately. That is exactly how I like it because I can see how much space is left on each page. However, for some unknown reason, Word sometimes changes the display to join all the pages into one very long page with a black line separating the text on one page from the next. I've forgotten how to undo this automatic bit of unhelpfulness and randomly stab around in the various display/view options to get my desired layout back again. The first time it threw this bit of helpfulness at me it took me several minutes of swearing and cursing and prodding at various options to get the correct view back again. I still don't know why it changed the view anyway.

Have to agree with some of the above posters. I use Open Office too as it does the same thing as MS Office but doesn't cost me anything. Sorry, but on my low income, I can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars on expensive software packages that I will rarely have a use for.

I've queued up OpenOffice to download to my computer. I'm stuck with dial-up here in rural France so I'll likely have to split the download (140 MB) over a day or two. Hope their server supports broken download resuming.

I hate Microsoft Word with a passion. However, I now write all major documents in Latex, so I don't use a word processor at all anymore.

I can understand that. I wrote a few short stories myself a few years ago and used Notepad for the simple reason I could concentrate on the plot and be creative without interruption. Using Word is just too stop / start with all its interference - spelling, grammar, fragment - consider revising, etc. It kept killing my train of thought. So the solution I ended up with was using Notepad to write without interruption, then paste the text into Word for spelling and grammar checking and general clean-up.

I still use Notepad today if I want to write creatively about something without distractions.

I use the Microsoft Works word processor, mainly because I enjoy the dictionary it comes it so very much. It's not that awesome ultimately. Sometimes if you try to post material you've copied from the internet into a document the program will just crash, but I really love that dictionary.

One of the many annoyances I have with Word is that it defaults to pasting text from the internet using the original HTML formatting. 99% of the time I just want to paste plain text and for it to pick up the current font, colour and formatting at the insertion point in the Word document. I have to use the option to "paste-special ... unformatted unicode" buried in the main menu - there isn't even a keyboard shortcut to it.

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Word isn't deep to the point where I understand bullet unformatting or disabling automatic inserts. Sorry.