[LMB] AKICOTL: OT: Word help, pretty please???

[Azalais Aranxta]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Elizabeth McCoy wrote:

> Word can be very useful, but the way they load the defaults? It
> only becomes useful once it has been beaten down and told to
> call me "Mistress."

Word is very frustrating.  Very.  Unfortunately, it's also the
only program that I know of that does some of the things I need
it to do.  I tried switching to Open Office, but I found that you
can't make Open Office globally replace 'codes' (things like hard
returns, line breaks, standardised forms of dashes and
ellipses).

This meant that my editing time for Lightning War jumped by 300%,
because I had to spend about an hour per page hand-coding those
things.  I NEED to be able to insert those codes with the push of
a button if I'm editing roleplay logs that are four pages long
minimum, usually more like 12, and sometimes up to 30 pages.  I
don't get paid for this and if it takes me that long I won't have
time to do it and work for a living :)

(Open Office also decided FOR me that if I wanted certain
background colours in my spreadsheets, it was going to pick the
text colour that went with them, not me, resulting in several
unreadable spreadsheets.  I have ADD and dyscalculia--I use
colours in my spreadsheets so that all the data in one place
doesn't confuse me visually.)

So Open Office was removed from my machine, and Word and Excel
came back.  If I need to type something that'll go into ASCII and
hence can't have curly quotes, I do it in WordPad, because I
actually prefer the look of curly quotes, but I know they make
ASCII editors (for instance, Pine, which I use to do most of my
email) crazy.

I hate Micro$oft and I'd like to use open source software--but
not if it takes me three times as long and I can't make the
results work for me visually.

I am a Word power user, though, and I don't mind answering
questions about it--although I have no intention of going near
Windows Vista until I can get Firefox and all my plugins,
particularly LJLogin, to work with it, so I won't know anything
about that.  Even I won't use Internet Explorer.

~malfoy :)

****************************************************************
Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy)
ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness

"I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it
think we all bow down." --Christopher Morley