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

[paal at gis.net]

----- Original Message Follows -----
> 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).

EMACS, Vi [ugh!] TeX... I suspect that PageStream and other DTP programs
that include some word processing allow such things... oh, FrameMaker,
etc. designed for power writing by tech writers and such for writing fat
manuals with differing editions for different versions of products. 

> 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.)

Open Office also doesn't have the equivalent of Word's "normal" modes
which shows page breaks and gives pagination number sort of (Word is too
stupid to be able to let the user have both the absolute page numbering
and the page numbering for dealing with non-numeric pages and page 2a,
2b.. sorts of things... makes it a major PITA for printing out
particular ranges of pages, where there are prefaces, change pages,
etc., that have Roman number pages before the Arabic enumerated pages
start... but Open Office is stupider....)while NOT showing Extraneous
Distracting space of page margins and page -edges- and space between the
bottom edge of one page and the top edge of the next... 
Normally when I am -writing/composing- text, I don't want anything but
the -text- I'm working with on the workspace in front of me... figures
MIGHT be appropriate to show, but NOT page margins and edges and blank
space between that cuts down on the number of lines of text in front of
me and with visually distracting discontinuiting in the lines of text
for, again, top and bottom page margins and page edges and space between
the page edges.  It's extremely irritatign and literally
counterproductive to me....
 
> 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.

It's poor design choices for user interface and feature set...

> 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.