Word’s behaviour when it comes to deciding what format to apply to pasted text has always been a complete, impenetrable mess that no ordinary user can ever be expected to fathom, which is why, whenever I can, I use the “Paste Without Formatting” command, even though — this is Microsoft Word we are talking about [...]
As regular Betalogue readers know, Microsoft’s Mac software is full not just of bugs, but also of behaviours that do not make sense and fail to comply with the conventions that rule the Mac OS X user interface. The problems even affect things as basic as window management. I’ve already written about the fact that [...]
When you launch Word 2011, the first thing you see is this: Notice anything? Allow me to make it clearer for you: Or: Unless Word 2011 is lucky and its splash screen happens to appear on top of a fairly uniform background, you inevitably get ugly see-through effects that make it look as if the [...]
In my experience, speed and noise are the two trickiest, most subjective aspects of personal computing, especially for power users. Some people can’t hear fan noises, or they don’t notice them, or they don’t care. Others can be driven mad by hums and whines, even if they are not loud at all. As for speed, [...]
How is one supposed to do reliable, professional-quality work in a piece of software crap such as Word 2011? Even with the best intentions, even with the best level of personal discipline and work ethics, it is simply impossible. Why? Because Word’s features are simply completely unreliable. Try the following. Create a blank new document [...]
In the past couple of weeks, I have, once again, been forced by my work to use Microsoft Word 2011 instead of Pages ’09 as my word processor, and I just cannot believe how painful it has been… Microsoft’s developers obviously do not care about quality control or otherwise they would not let so many bugs slip through [...]
One of the most shameful aspects of Microsoft’s quasi-monopoly on office automation is that, even though their office software is the de facto standard and their file formats are used pervasively by hundreds of millions of people, they are unable or unwilling to provide reliable backward file format compatibility in their own office applications. For [...]
There are multiple examples of Microsoft Word 5.1 nostalgia on the web. For various reasons, many Mac users have come to believe that Microsoft Word 5.1 was the last great word processor for the Mac, that it was a near-perfect product and that it’s been all downhill from there. The latest example comes from Forkbombr [...]
It’s not always easy to describe what makes Microsoft Word for Mac OS X such a slow application with a poor level of performance, even on a fairly fast machine. Today, I offer two short video clips shot on my own machine, a 2009 Mac Pro with 16 (!) virtual cores and 12 GB of RAM, [...]
I have lost count of the number of years that we have had to endure Microsoft Word’s lack of support for background window scrolling — i.e. the ability to scroll through a background document window by simply hovering over it with the mouse pointer and using the mouse’s scrolling control, whether it’s a wheel, a ball, [...]
When Word 2011 came out, I wrote about this new bug that caused the application to fail to open any file whose path contained certain “non-standard” characters, including accented letters, forward and backward slashes (/\), more-than and less-than symbols (<>), and so on. Today, I installed the latest Office 2011 update, whose description fails to [...]
It’s that time of the year again. I am putting together a publication for our local university in InDesign CS5, and I have to work with existing Word files that were submitted by the various contributors and then edited by the publication’s editor-in-chief. And when you combine two lousy pieces of software such as Office 2011 [...]
With all the bugs and glitches that I am highlighting in Word 2011, I should probably strive to be a bit more fair and balanced and give Microsoft props when props are due. And I must say that, in Word 2011, they have outdone themselves in the aesthetic department, especially with controls that really look like they [...]
Here’s another new fun thing that Word 2011 throws at you from time to time just to spice up your attempts to use it for what it is intended for, i.e., you know, word processing: Gives new meaning to the phrase “drawing a blank,” does it not? Right here, it’s happening to me with the Ribbon [...]
When you are forced to use Microsoft Word 2011’s in your line of work, as I am, here’s the type of crap that you have to contend with on a daily basis: What is this, you say? It’s simple. It’s a Word document open in Word 2011 with the blinking cursor (insertion point) located before the word [...]