Technical Questions

[tamaranth]

1. Why is Microsoft Word (2002 flavour) so unreliable? Why does it continually corrupt a 100K-word document, pasted in from text format and then marked up with comments, amendments etc? Is it the same problem that causes random annotations to appear when I paste from webmail to Word?

2. Were I to regress to an earlier version, which would you recommend? How much pain will I have to endure to properly uninstall this version?

3. Why, exactly, has Internet Explorer crashed the last three times I've attempted to post this post?

Comments

[drplokta]

I've always felt that Word 97 was the pinnacle of Word, and that it's been all downhill from there.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Yes: even back then they had revision-tracking and merge changes, didn't they? Shall dig around for installation CD.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

The new version of word is full of labour-saving features that get on my tits. And i fear that we might be getting it at work soon, dammit.


I believe your problem is one of bad IT-Karma, due to the evil of your last job.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I would like the labour-saving features ever so much more if they actually did save me any labour, as opposed to making me work harder. It would be easier to do mark-up by hand!

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

Well indeed. Like bloody predictive text.

Mind you, I'm a purist - I have a deep all-abiding hatred of all forms of auto formatting, as they NEVER behave the way they're supposed to. I particularly hate using the backspace key and suddenly half the document shoots across the screen, changes font, colour and god knows what else. It may take longer to format something by hand, but at least I know what the damned thing is doing, and how to stop it when it does something annoying.

[reddragdiva]

You just know that for stability and sanity I'm going to recommend OpenOffice.org 2 beta.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Sanity?! Moi?

If OpenOffice.org 2 beta can do all the things I need to do to Word documents (word-count chunks of text, save attributed comments and amendments, etc), and save them in such a way that they are indistinguishable from Word documents (except, let's say, for all those peculiar markups and glitches) then I'll check it out.

I don't use Word for my own projects (that's what Notetab's for), but when someone sends me a novel all nicely formatted and annotated, it seems churlish to paste it into text-only ...

[reddragdiva]

I dunno if it can, but if it can it's worth a spin. (I believe it was OOo 1.1.something on the laptop you got from me?) Mostly what you lose by trying it is a hugely fat download. So fat that I actually installed BitTorrent because the Sun download site was so slow.

[miramon.livejournal.com]

You know, given that my experience of Word 2002 is that it's been reasonably stable (even when doing fairly taxing things with it), and given that IE has been crashing on you, I would be more inclined to blame a corrupt Windows installation than anything else.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's the Windows installation -- every other Microsoft program is behaving, and IE's usually fine: three crashes in a row is extremely unusual. This install of Word (which I believe came with the PC) has always been dodgy -- takes ages to load, picky about cutting and pasting -- and certainly less reliable than other versions I've used.