Rant Thread

[balthazar]

WORD, as a document program, completely sucks ass. Simplest edits are either impossible or completely convoluted.

No wonder microsoft stock has been unable to 'get off the pot' since the 1999 tech bubble.

[Robert Hall]

Unfortunately, Word has been the corporate standard for so long....for the last 15 years I've had to use it everywhere I've worked for the most part... my current company (which is all Mac-based) uses Google Docs, but I usually use Open Office to create Word docs for clients. I use Open Office at home, it's pretty compatible w/ Word.

The best document program I've ever used was LaTeX when I was in grad school back in the '90s, it's painful to use and incredibly complex but very powerful...you would write the markup in a plain text file like programming directives and compile it to produce a document, tedious but it forced discipline and rigor...

Edited January 11, 2013 by Cubical-aka-Moltar

[balthazar]

I just went thru the tutorial for Word 2008, and yep; it's as stupid as I thought after messing around with it and consulting my son (who was taught it in school) & annoying my wife (who's used a different version via work for years but has the patience of a lightning bolt). Can't do anything beyond moronic bricks of text, bulleted lists & placed graphics.

My wife yells at me for using an ancient program (Adobe's PageMaker) but this is STILL a fantastic document program for anyone who recognizes the value of a designed, professional-quality document. Want to move a placed jpg in Word? All other text blocks are floating against it - move it and other items shift, too. Want to nudge the item a few clicks into a different position or align it with another item? Nope, sorry. Want to condense or expand type? You, sir, are very funny.

PageMaker: click on jpg, use arrow keys to move it a point /click, or grab it and move it across the page. Not a single other item moves. Expand/condense, rotate/whatever type at will. Rules under type? We'd be glad to, sir, happy to be of asssistance. Welcome to the 21st Century (actually, I see PM came out in 1985, my version is circa '99). Too bad development/support dried up and we're stuck with the Utter Slop that is Word.

BTW- Excell (totally different intent) is likewise incredibly clunky & non-intuitive.

[David]

<p>UGH, Pagemaker drives me nuts. I love word and Excell.</p>

[balthazar]

I am realizing I have more than a few rants. Here's another.

I have & prefer my flip phone. I don't care/need a phone to have more features than phone, text, calculator, alarm, calendar & pics. Thank you.

With a flip, you need to open it to see what you're aiming at to shoot a pic. Why, then, do they all have buttons on the outside that will take a pic with the phone closed?? I like to keep the phone in my pocket, but if there's ANYTHING else in the same pocket, invariably it presses up against the phone, and I get 22 ink-black pics of the inside of my pocket. Annoying.

[SAmadei]

When Aldus Pagemaker came out in '85 it was awful, as it was too much program for the CPU/memory/HD back then. Even 3.0 was pretty bad... but our top 2~3 systems made it workable. When 4.0 came out about 1991, it finally worked right and didn't crash every 8 minutes.

Then in 1993, I suddenly got so bored with desktop publishing and never touched Pagemaker again.

[balthazar]

After getting snotty with both my son & wife RE them trying to show me how to make WORD work, and utterly failing to remotely come close to the PageMaker version of the job invoice I designed a few years ago, I used the original to give to a client. I did graphic design professionally for 11 years, so I have a bit of experience here. Ironically, he twice complimented the professional appearance of my (PageMaker) invoice.

[David]

After getting snotty with both my son & wife RE them trying to show me how to make WORD work, and utterly failing to remotely come close to the PageMaker version of the job invoice I designed a few years ago, I used the original to give to a client. I did graphic design professionally for 11 years, so I have a bit of experience here. Ironically, he twice complimented the professional appearance of my (PageMaker) invoice.

Very cool, my son is a graphic designer and loves the Adobe software and swears by it. I really think that depending on what you grew up with tends to make an impact on what you find easy and user friendly.

[GMTruckGuy74]

My recent pet peeve is the world BLESH.... as in "God blesh you." I make it a point to say "bless" when someone sneezes. Too many people say the word "blesh" nowadays (is it even an official word?). It's like nails on a chalkboard to me