I've got to agree with this! I was mostly an AppleWorks user until I took
this job, last June. MS Office is used in the office here, and I am
expected to help support it, so I bought MSO2k1.
People are constantly saying 'how do I get the page numbering to start on
the second page, but with the number 1?!?' or something like that, which is
simple to do in AppleWorks. Mind you, I like Word for many purposes, and it
has some definite strengths over AppleWorks.
Here's a dumb one from yesterday:
I made a spreadsheet full of addresses in Excel, imported from another
source. I sorted the spreadsheet by a certain criterion, so that I could
divide the addresses into two groups, and then made a separate worksheet tab
(in the same Excel file) for each of these groups and copied the data into
them. Now I made a Word doc in order to mail-merge in the spreadsheet data
for making labels. It worked fine for the first group: I could choose the
data source, and Word asked me which tab of the Excel file to use. When
printing the second set of labels, Word would not ask me which tab to use
for it, so I got stuck with the same data as before. It thought it was
being smart, saving me time. In fact, I had to Quit Word and re-start it,
in order to force it to ask me which tab to use for the second mail-merge.
This is not a time saver. It's just something that makes you say, "What do
you expect? It's Microsoft."
Yeah, I know - AppleWorks would not have allowed me to have multiples in a
single spreadsheet file in the first place. My point is that the MS program
decided to second-guess what I wanted, and would not allow me to tell it
what I really wanted unless I lobotomized it by quitting the program and
re-starting.
By the way: it works the same way on Windows as on Mac. Give them big
points for consistency.
On 3/6/01 12:29 AM, "Russell Carr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Its not just AutoCorrect.
> I've had word go off and do its own thing whenever it wants to many times.
> Things that have work a zillion times before all of a sudden won't. Styles
> and formats change between saves. Features won't perform the way you want,
> and instead, Word insists on doing things in its own God Awful way. Right
> now I'm trying to figure out how to correct a Section Break that has somehow
> set itself to start on a odd page. -- The problem is that the thing won't
> delete. (And its cross platform. The Section Break problem is on a NT
> machine.)
>
> Around work we can tell who is using Word by the bursts of cursing emitting
> from the cubicles.
>
> Russell Carr
>
>
> on 3/5/01 6:20 PM, Dennis Cheung at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> Have you tried turning off a lot of those AutoCorrect things?
>>
>> On 3/5/01 3:04 PM, "Sherman Wilcox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>> I wish Microsoft would give us a word processor that would let us process
>>> words, easily and powerfully deal with structured documents (styles,
>>> multi-chapter docs, etc.) and NOT try to think for me. I find myself
>>> spending as much time yelling at Word, trying to figure out how to undo
>>> something it has done (usually paragraph numbering schemes) not exactly
>> the
>>> way I want, as I do being productive and creative.
>
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