Mindful Musings


3/14/2004

Microsoft Word sucks dirty donkey balls!!!

Filed under: — Mark @ 2:56 pm

Microsoft Word fucking sucks ass!! I am so sick and tired of trying to coax this fucking program to do simple word processing tasks. I cannot believe that microsoft word makes it so difficult to have different page number formats for different pages, and does not fucking allow the modification of footnote formats beyond a certain point!! There is simply now way to have different footnote formats. Period. You COULD break down your 200 page document into itty bitty (and buggy) sections to TRY to change the page numbering schema, but good luck when you do that (and save everything) because your document might suddenly become 400 pages long without any warning!!

I cannot believe that a billion dollar company like Microsoft, putting out “top of the line word processing software” makes such a shitty product and everyone continues to use the damn thing!!

I dont like Latex that much either and now that I have come this far in writing my thesis, I really cannot turn back. A word of advice to all that are trying to write some serious documentation (anything greater than 20 pages) using Microsoft Word, Fucking Forget It Start using some other word processor right from the beginning and you will be saved a LOT of frustration later on!!

Things I hate about Microsoft Word (not listing everything, that would take up all day!):

    Page number formatting
    Lack of referencing schemas
    Lack of control over “automatic features”
    Twenty thousand temporary copies of your document
    Page break mechanism
    The built-in drawing package
    The lack of a good equation editor
    Lack of contemporary formatting ideologies
    The twenty thousand “viewing modes”
    Exceptionally bad inter-Microsoft Office collaboration
    HUGE file sizes (my 200 page thesis is 3 MB!!)
    I HATE the auto-correct feature!!
    Auto-page formatting is sucky!
    Heck, Auto-EVERYTHING is sucky

Among other things…

I am SO getting rid of Word when I am done with my thesis

59 Comments »

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  1. learn from matt and get openoffice… :)

    Comment by Sushubh 3/15/2004 @ 7:49 pm

  2. Mark,
    You go to the washroom, young man, RIGHT NOW. I want you to put a fresh bar of soap into your mouth and BITE DOWN and hold it for 20 minutes.
    ROFLMFAO.

    Would it be safe to say that you are somewhat pissed? Damn, I LOVE Word, especially when doing QA work and having it auto-fix everything that I do, except that I don’t WANT it fixed. LOL. I think you just need a course on how to use the software, then you’ll feel better. Yes, that’s it, you just don’t know how to use it properly….LMFAO! :D

    Peace, bro! Talk to you soon. And quit the fucking swearing, okay? ;)

    Comment by craig 3/16/2004 @ 1:11 am

  3. Yeah, Word is a very frustrating environment if you plan on using it for anything other than very simple WP and type setting. Don’t even get me started on the crap it outputs that claims to be HTML… never trust a format that can’t be opened in a text editor:)

    Comment by Brentg 3/17/2004 @ 8:39 am

  4. I agree with you.

    Think about TeX (http://www.tug.org/). It is unusual for beginners but very comfortable after a week of using.

    Another advantage is that TeX is free. LaTeX 2e is very very good application of TeX

    Comment by zexo 3/23/2004 @ 12:50 am

  5. Take a course? I have just finished tearing out my hair during talks with our Word expert after finding that simple stuff I need – different fonts on even & odd pages, for example, or continuing columns onto the next page NOT onto the next column – just can’t be done.
    She said that there’s not much point going on a course, becuase they all turn into Group (or was that Gripe) Therapy sessions

    Comment by Chris 9/1/2004 @ 5:48 am

  6. Word and just about everything in the Office collection is horrible.

    Our consultant put everything in the Word format. I am forced to work daily with nearly 300 of these badly formatted documents. And the stinking pop up windows will not leave well enough alone.

    It gets in the way of everything I do. No, I do not want to revert to the last saved copy, do I look like a complete craphead? No, I do not want help setting up a list, I just want the control I expected when I fell for the ads and promises about how great the world will become and nonsense like “where do you want to go today?” I’ll tell you where I want to go- ‘strangle every preppy fuck microsoft marketing jerk who brags about all the stock options he got from fooling the IT guys. Word is ugly and is a huge retarded mess.

    Comment by Steve G 1/27/2005 @ 3:57 pm

  7. Welcome to the dogpile on Word! I’m actually finding this thread a nice, cathardic way to relax myself. I have just tried to do (yet again) another task that I’ve been doing for the past ten years and finding that Word’s not quite in the mood for it today. Good god, you’d think after ten solid years they might get something right.

    Note to MS: Fewer dancing paperclips, more FUNCTIONING FUCKING SOFTWARE.

    Comment by Matt Warren 1/31/2005 @ 7:00 pm

  8. I loathe Word so much; it is the single largest source of stress in my day. And yet I process documents for a living for clients who can use nothing else. Today I spent 2 hours fixing all the seemingly random changes to the margins the software seems to think are necessary; completely mindless work.

    I remember when word processors first started to really take off there was this very quaint discussin in the press about how this could be an opportunity to move away from the “innefficient” QWERT keyboard. It is quaint now in comparison to the disruption of flow that results from having to take your hand on the keyboard and manipulate a mouse onto some tiny little icon…

    I hate this product so much, and I hate the company that designed it and uses its evil powers to force us all to waste our lives hating it. I would pay $200 for a word processing program that had the exact same interface as Wordperfect 5.1 but was able to save (and read) all the new formats. I would never ever ever ever ever use Word again.

    I hope Google does something web based so we can stop wasting our energy on this terrible, terrible, God-awful piece of crap software….

    Thank you. I feel better now.

    Comment by C Jones 2/21/2005 @ 8:48 am

  9. I never realised how unpopular Word really is until I had a problem and googled for “microsoft word fucking sucks” and found this page. After spending all night writing and editing a dissertation using word and MathType, it turns to me and says that it can’t save it. well, thanks for nothing. Any suggestions for software to which I can transfer a 50 page document with text,graphics and equations that wont crash every 10 mins?

    Comment by Dave 3/24/2005 @ 10:28 pm

  10. AFter using MS Word and finally getting fed up again! I did a search and wasn’t surprised to find so many links with MS Word sucks on google. I got something to add: “MS WORD SUCKS

    Comment by Fred Tobias 4/4/2005 @ 8:39 am

  11. I too am finding this thread cathartic. It is a breath of fresh air to find other people thoroughly fed up with a product that has been crammed down our throats. I used to use Lotus for spreadsheet work and loved it. Then Excel came to dominate the market and I was forced to “re-locate.” I hate the Office line of products and the Autocorrect crap. First thing I do is go into options and turn off the customized menus (I would like to see all the commands available please), turn off autocorrect, turn off the fucking paper clip assistant that asks me if I need help typing a letter! No, I don’t need your help for any of that crap! I think it’s the intrusiveness that really gets to all of us with this software. I spend more time trying to get it to stop “helping” me than I do getting work done. And don’t get me started on Microsoft’s version of grammar!! There, now I feel better too! Ha!

    Comment by Christopher 4/14/2005 @ 6:31 pm

  12. Although it is a breath of fresh air to hear that there are people out there who understand the pointless of the majority of functions that I can only describe as utter muppets developing – WHY O WHY is nothing being done about the programme being totally crap? I understand that some of the ‘stuff’ that the programme does was probably technically hard – so why fooking bother – coz most of it doesn’t help anyone?! I have got recurring problem – example I’ve got a 4 page document with an image on each page BUT I can only see the images when I am scrolled out to about 20% – what bleeding use is this to me??? Do you know, I may as well have done 100 sit ups the amount I have to tense my stomach muscles with frustration over the years that I have been using the programe – think I may internally combust at any point soon if I can’t fucking edit these images… soz for the swearing sure you understand tho.

    Wish I could boycot the programme but can’t so rah!

    Comment by Kim U 5/23/2005 @ 7:56 am

  13. Glad to see I have company. Routine tasks I did 10 years ago in wp5 & dos, now become the most cumbersome, difficult (dare I say “impossible”) time consuming pain in the &&%%. I cannot stand this stupid program. Latest example-all I want is a db for merge. DB looks ok in all views except what I need-print where it only shows and prints 1 of 4 pages. Just a major waste of time and energy Word sucks-it found yet a new way of messing me up.

    Comment by Paul 6/1/2005 @ 10:46 am

  14. I tried making a resume in Word today. I hate everything about this program. When I move something I want it to stay where I fking put it. But nooooo it has to mess up the whole damn document and end up on another page. Autoformat is retarded. Whats up with the stupid menus? I don’t want to have to click the little damn arrow to see the whole menu. Arghh burns microsoft office

    Comment by Ross 6/22/2005 @ 3:45 pm

  15. I hate Word. WP5.1 was a LOT better. Here’s a short list for the POS programmers at Microsoft: AN INDENT KEY. HOW FRICKING HARD CAN IT BE. NUMBERING. LET ME BLOCK SOMETHING BEORE I TYPE IT (once again, look at WP5.1 if you’re totally confused.) TOGGLE FUNCTIONS. IF I HIT A KEY, let me TOGGLE IT BY HITTING IT AGAIN. FOR GOD’S SAKE. BOLDING. LET ME CONTROL WHERE IT ENDS. DON’T JUST GO BOLD ON ME BECAUSE I DELETED A WORD. BOTTOM FRICKING LINE: LET ME TYPE. I used to not have to stare at the screen all day, fingers just flew. THen this FRICKING PIECE OF SHIT CALLED MICROSOFT WORD. Let me capitalize after a colon (:) WITHOUT CHANGING THE REGISTRY. Talk about “production.” I RAISE MY HAND EVERY MEETING PRODUCTIVITY IS MENTIONED AND SAY, WELL, IF WE HAD WP5.1 WE COULD GET TWICE AS MUCH DONE!!..XX WHICH IS MY PETTY LITTLE WAY OF SAYING WHAT I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO SAY: FUCK MICROSOFT WORD!! FUCK IT. It will never change. Bill Gates doesn’t give a goddamn. Let the little peons use a terrible program. 7 keys to re-spellcheck a document, and you have to say “yes.” LIke I hit 6 keys, but I really did not mean it, and of course like rechecking the document would be the END OF THE WORLD, so ask me to FUCKING VERIFY IT. YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT. THIS AND 20 OTHER THINGS I COULD DO BETTER. Me, little me, could do better than Microsoft. IDEA: LET’S ALL SUE MICROSOFT FOR “overuse syndrome” for having to type twice what we normally would, fixing all the SHIT WOrd does wrong and won’t do right and all the typing we have to do because Word can’t do this and can’t do that, etc. I estimated about 30% of my keystrokes are “babysitting” Microsoft Word and doing things it cannot do, that I used to be able to do easily and quickly and efficiently and with far fewer keystrokes on WP5.1, and it had macros that stayed once you created them. FUCK MICROSOFT WORD.

    Comment by lbb 8/4/2005 @ 7:35 pm

  16. I agree whole heartedly with all the above gripes. BUT this, my fellow iritated bretheren, has got to be the biggest pain-in-the-ass-make-you-want-to-hurl-a-Molotov-cocktail-at-Redmond feature of this worthless program. All of your hard-won battles to save global formatting preferences and style templates reside in this little istsy bitsy normal.dot file. SO, when your shite Microsoft OS finally crashes for the nth time, necessitating a reload of your entire system, guess what innocent little file inevitably gets overlooked. You guessed it…normal.dot. Welcome to my personal hell…

    Question: How much time does it take a Microsoft software designer to set his (‘his’ because the fairer sex is way too sensible & pragmatic to continue refining such a flawed software package) global document preferences?
    Answer: Weeks and months of cursing just like the rest of us!

    Comment by Harvey Mushman 8/25/2005 @ 6:21 pm

  17. [...] eian (lostpennboy) wrote,@ 2005-02-10 14:49:00      Current music:life in mono Tasty Today is everyone’s favorite day at work. In fact the entire building is enjoying lunch. Why? Because it’s TACO DAY! The cafeteria on the 16th floor is a safe-haven for both the hungry and lazy. You don’t have to venture out in the cold when you need a snack, just ride the lift. But of all days, TACO DAY is by far the most desirable. The largest taco in the world weighed 750 kg (1,654 lb) and measured 10.95 m (35.9 ft) long and 86 cm (33.8 in) wide. It was made by the city of Mexicali and Cocinex SA de CV, in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, on March 8 2003. ~GWRAfter enjoying meaty goodness I’m back babysitting the undergrads. Because of financial need, their work-study grants allow them to be our work horses. I SOO don’t miss those days of data entry. Although, one of them has a pretty sweet setup…he is ‘cleaning’ the TiVo. (BTW they are a cult) But this translates into ‘watching the daily show recorded from the past two-three months and taking notes about what was discussed.’ Then he copies the show sans commercials to VHS and deletes it off the TiVo. Who wouldn’t want a job where they pay you to watch political humor?So a side project I’m trying to finish is designing the institute’s logo. I’ve started some sketches but I’ll start using some real software soon…all I have right now though is Word. This is one of my fav’s so far but my super thinks its too ‘retro’ and not professional enough. I can just see us all wearing a big round buttonpin of this at the office :)(Post a new comment) Log in now.(Create account, or use OpenID) [...]

    Pingback by lostpennboy: Tasty 8/13/2006 @ 7:20 pm

  18. Microsoft sucks.

    Comment by Ccd 8/27/2006 @ 12:18 am

  19. OMG I miss WordStar or WordPerfect. I feel at home here with the irritated beyond belief Word Sucks crowd. I would love a look at the spaghtetti code that must be Word. On second thought I would surely combust.

    Comment by Pining for Wordstar 11/22/2006 @ 9:58 am

  20. When they came to take away my heavily personalized WordPerfect program to replace it with the more ubiquitous Microsoft Word, I was disgusted.

    But once I dug in and learned its features, I came to understand what a complete piece of crap the program truly was.

    I’ve probably been using it professionally for ten years now. I am one of the only people in my company that can actually get the table formatting to work properly. Why? Because I HATE WITH IMPLACABLE PATIENCE!

    It amazes me that my computer at home can puree and blend huge wave files with accuracy to the millisecond, but can scarcely make text and simple clip art stay on the same page.

    I would shell out $1,000 cash, right now, for a working version of this program. You win this round Microsoft, but my HATE IS ETERNAL.

    Comment by Bridgewerk 2/26/2007 @ 8:50 pm

  21. Like the last person to vent, I’ve been using Microsoft Word since “Word for Windows” (that’s Win 3.x folks). I also was a relatively happy Word Perfect user and thought Microsoft’s “format after you write” approach was baffling. It’s as if they approached the task in such a way as to make it take as long as possible to do as little as possible. With every “update” (much like their OS generally speaking), I require more hardware resources to do less than I was able to do in the prior version. What chaps me endlessly is Microsoft’s insistance on: Times New Roman (if I removed the font file I’ll bet Windows would crash), 1.5 to 2 spaces per line in the document, outline indentation that baffles the mind, the difficulty if not sheer inability to change the defaults, they way the keyboard “works” especially when working in a table (please shoot me)...oh there’s more but I have to head to a meeting. I started using Portable Open Office at home and did okay with it for the first six months. The word processor at least works even if it doesn’t have so many features. Not bad FOR NOTHING. And, it saves in Wurd format so the Wuerd guys can read it. Thanks for the outlet.

    Comment by Mike W 3/14/2007 @ 5:19 pm

  22. The new version of Word is just as bad…Microsoft thinks it can solve problems just by adding more features…that is, putting posters over the holes in the walls. Microsoft does the same with Windows. Computers get faster so Microsoft adds additional, useless shit to take up processing power. Don’t waste any money on the new version of Word or Vista. They are buckets. Now I shall continue trying to delete the 99 appendix headings Word stuck at the end of my document when I only wanted one. Yes…I want to delete you…why wont you delete? I wish I lived in the 19th Century.

    Comment by steve 4/23/2007 @ 11:09 pm

  23. Outlined numbering.
    Am very, very angry.
    Should be so simple.

    Comment by Tim 5/13/2007 @ 4:25 pm

  24. Just found this site after Googling my frustrations on Word. Word HATES US and wants to make sure we know it.

    The pity is that Word 2.0 and Word 6.0 were great. Easy to use, pretty fast, and did what you needed it to do. Now it’s so bloated with capabilities only 6 people in the world will ever need (and they should have just bought PageMaker) that it spends all my computer’s processing power doing un-undoable things to my formatting and making grown men weep with frustration. And Microsoft will never fix it because Office is old news to them.

    Comment by Joe 5/21/2007 @ 4:03 pm

  25. OMG I fscking hate Word with such a passion! This stupid goat dong sucking fscking sh!te ramming program won’t let me change a date in the fscking footer to a date from last week. It constantly updates the fscking date to today as soon as I print, no matter what I do. I hate hate hate hate autoformatting. I almost broke my fscking keyboard I’m so mad at this program. Why, oh why, can’t Microsoft just take open office or word perfect’s source code and replace word’s and throw clippy in there and call it good for office 08? “It looks like I know what you really intend to be doing, you stupid fscking user. Would you like to: *have me crash *go fsck yourself”
    God I Hate Microsoft Word! Thank you so much for this forum. I needed that.

    Comment by Jon- another user who doesn't really know what he wants to type 5/25/2007 @ 8:49 pm

  26. Using Microsoft word is like using a glue stick to hold together a boat! It sucks!

    Comment by Bill Stupid Gates 6/16/2007 @ 2:00 am

  27. Wow… it’s like all the other posters here are like long-lost friends that went to the same shitty school. I too hate MS word, and found this site by doing a Google search for why MS Word sucks. I find it interesting that the posts started in 2004 and it still hasn’t gotten any better in that time…
    Here are things I hate about Word: Word not letting me delete lines/sections of text. I highlight a line of text, and hit “delete.” This should actually DELETE this line, right? Absolutely not. No matter how many times I hit the button in anger. Why doesn’t this work like it should? Maybe the dancing paperclip is mad that I hid him and doesn’t want to delete that line. I try to delete the line again anyway. I hit the button harder, then hit it 15 more times in frustration, because surely this will help. Then I try using backspace to delete the same line and it screws up all the other formatting around it. Next complaint: when I try to paste in some text I want, sometimes for fun, it pastes text from some other location or re-pastes the old text. I shouldn’t even get started on the margins/tabs, it’s been griped about already and I agree with all of it!
    Thanks to everyone else that posted, it’s good to hear that I’m not alone at my wit’s end! So many things I read and went, “Oh MAN, I f&*%ing hate when it does that, too!” I totally agree with Christopher(4/14/05); and if it’s a really bad Word day, I sound more like lbb (8/4/05). The post about Times New Roman really struck home, as well.

    Comment by KB 7/19/2007 @ 11:44 am

  28. MS Word, needs a manual button. There was an old DOS program out there for basic word processing. If you had two sticks or one finger and a stiff dick you could format any document albiet slowly. It had NO helpers, no automatic format crap, no auto page crap, no half-way through a column document have everything suddenly “SHIFT” right or left, who knows? Did you ever get to the point with a document where, because of cutting and pasting the document became a “time bomb” just waiting to disentegrate in front of you. One wrong move and hours of work melts away in a strange array of “inserted graphics or text boxes, or everything east of the fold goes to capitals? YEEEEKKKKS, I’m tempted to find that old EZ program. I taught my father-in-law how to use it 16 years ago and he has never wanted to upgrade. He writes all sorts of ducuments, that don’t “auto” anything. He is in complete control. “I DON’T LOVE BIG BROTHER” Sisao Tresed

    Comment by Sisao Tresed 8/18/2007 @ 10:40 pm

  29. Does anyone have any idea how to turn off all autoformatting crap? I swear I have been to every options menu in all of windows trying to turn off the word-knows-better-than-you autoformatting to no avail. Oh how I miss the days when the person who bought the computer was expected to know what he/she wanted instead of Redmond, WA controlling what our documents look like. Why don’t you let me paste a picture? It’s simple. Move text out of the way, insert picture. No, I didn’t want a sliver of the picture with a blank outline box covering up the header! AAAAHHHH! I wish I were a hunter/gatherer.

    Comment by Desk Mammal 8/21/2007 @ 5:25 pm

  30. This site is the single most useful site for WORD in the entire internet universe. Sure I need help with formatting shit in Word but a bigger priority is having deal with is this
    MASSIVE-ADRENALINE-BRAIN-EXPLODING-HEART-ATTACK thats urging me to destroy all things Microsoft! Thanks to this site, I’m much more calmer now, my blood pressure is down again and I’m happy knowing I’m not the only one wanting to finger bang my eyeballs thanks to stupid Word. This site helps save lives from suicidal Word users.

    Comment by Pissed off 8/30/2007 @ 3:23 pm

  31. How loud can I scream without the whole office thinking I’ve gone completely mad?
    Why can’t I just put some simple boxes and inserted text into an image without the whole thing moving about the screen as if it had a mind of it’s own? I put it back and then move the box again. Oh look! There’s my picture down on the next page. How clever are you! I’m even talking to it.
    My paranoia is certainly becoming obvious. I must have done something terribly personal to Bill Gates in a past life for my current existence to be plagued like this.

    Comment by Aaaaggghhhhh!!!!!! 9/24/2007 @ 7:52 pm

  32. Office SUCKS! It is intended to force people mind in to thinking like they want, it certailnly not intended to ease
    the word processing… I really hate it.

    Comment by Simone 10/17/2007 @ 6:54 am

  33. The worst of it is, you know you’d be quicker editing the information in Wordpad, and the customer would be able to read it. Without formatting errors. And without you both having to spend a fortune.

    http://linux.sgms-centre.com/advocacy/no-ms-office.php

    Comment by Wumpus 11/1/2007 @ 12:09 pm

  34. Why oh why don’t they use the “find” code when doing “find and replace”???????

    “Find and Replace” won’t find strings which contain “[” or “]” characters, even with wildcards turned off.
    “Find” finds them just dandy.

    Who would implement 2 different search algorithms, only one of which works…? Microsoft, that’s who.

    Comment by Wumpus 11/2/2007 @ 7:40 pm

  35. When rejecting replacements made by another user, I select a block of text and then click the red “X” to reject all changes in range.

    Sometimes it will reject all changes (which I want and expect).
    Sometimes it will just reject the deletions, leaving the replacement text in place too.
    When this happens I have to click it again to get the correct result.

    Just this simple bug is going to cost me most of the rest of this afternoon, because it means I have to manually check everything that Word is supposed to be doing automatically.

    Comment by Wumpus 11/7/2007 @ 11:32 am

  36. Forgot to mention – I’m only having to use the review stuff at all because the Microsoft utility for finding changes between 2 files is so crap.
    I want to FIND THE DIFFERENCES between 2 documents. JUST the differences.

    I don’t want to produce some hybridized bastard of the two, which may (or may not) contain the changes I want, inextricably merged with the existing changes from one (or the other) of the documents, in a format which is completely unreadable to anything but Word.

    Comment by Wumpus 11/7/2007 @ 12:06 pm

  37. I sooo hate word… The F***ing page formatting

    Comment by Thomas 11/12/2007 @ 9:47 pm

  38. Aren’t headers and footers fun in Word? Ever wanna kill someone? Talk about a flawed program!

    Comment by Julie Dillon 11/14/2007 @ 2:00 pm

  39. I’m a lowly end-user who loved WordPerfect but finally got used to Word. I dislike the newest version, installed on some pcs at work. The Normal.doc does irritate me, but generally I’m fine with it. I would like to be able to, without importing a table from Excel, use all the commands from excel on the table inserted by the “insert table” button in MS Word. Sounds like most of you here either know a LOT MORE than I do or are total idiots. I’m learning on the “know a lot more than I do” side!

    Comment by SC 12/28/2007 @ 5:42 pm

  40. damn im with ya man….word sucks donkey balls…just got a new laptop with vista and what a fcukin joke…cant take print screens…ctrl v no longer works….keeps saying insufficient memory and basically every damn basic thing you want to do with a word processor it doesnt let you….
    bill gates u can lick my hairy balls your are pain in my arse! How about sort out the simple stuff instead of ripping people off…i now have to spend about 5 fcukin hours working through solutions to the get this piece of shite working….MICROSOFT MUST BE LATIN FOR A PILE OF WANK

    Comment by mistamad 2/8/2008 @ 9:45 am

  41. Google search led me here after frustrated attempts at selecting text in outline view. Why does word insist on highlighting more than you select? Drives me nuts. It’s the biggest piece of crap program ever written. I’m so desparate I’ve started using notepad instead.

    Comment by SD 2/27/2008 @ 4:17 pm

  42. It is 3:00am and I am struggling to produce a single diagram (made by boxes and lines) in a technical document in MS word. The problem is the boxes have their own mind, they keep wrapping around the text i am inserting although I specifically choose not to (Format text box). So this late and unfortunate hour I am thinking about:
    1) why such a simple task with other software (openoffice, xfig, visio etc.) is easy but not with MS Office
    2) why the administrative people in the institute I am working keep asking for word documents
    3) why a company like MS that invests millions and hires some of the best in computing, cannot produce something that works as it says on the box.

    The answers are:
    1) MS office sucks. It is a useless word processing software especially for technical writing such as the exam paper i am creating for my students and articles in journals. I’ve done the same work with openoffice and things went easier and smoother. Also converting to MS word is not difficult since the converting tool as well as a number of macros (available on the net) can create a perfect MS copy for the mindless advocates of microsoft.
    2) Well, if nobody tells the administration to change, they simply do not change. It is the people who plan the IT in our institute that should take the decision and finally change to another software
    3) Because MS only cares about market domination not making something useful. As long Bill Gates and the rest of the of the board are the richest and most powerful people in the world, MS office is just fine. Well, for them at least …

    Comment by kk 2/28/2008 @ 11:53 pm

  43. Thank you all for your passionate rants about Microsoft Word. I haven’t laughed this hard in quite some time. :-D I think the thing that kills me most about Word, is all the AUTO-formatting. I get so frustrated with the extra spacing after lines that I didn’t ask for, auto-numbering, auto-bulleting, auto-indenting, etc.—it drives me insane! I think my biggest beef is with the difficulty of selecting a line of text – it always wants to select past the punctuation including the hidden characters which I don’t want to select. If I freaking wanted that crap selected too, I’d select it you motherf’ers – AHAAHAAAAAAA!! If my fingers typing on a key, or the click of my mouse do not perform an action, then don’t freaking do it for me! Quit trying to read my damn mind. Who is the genius who thought of this approach and continues to force us to suffer with it? This cannot last forever. Sooner or later, a better product will come out. Microsoft today reminds me of US automakers in the 70’s. They got so big and fat from their earlier success and world domination that they just started producing a bunch of crap that really didn’t work that well. They do make some cool stuff, but most of their products do not work as advertised and are unreliable. How unfortunate for America. We’ve already lost all of our manufacturing overseas. What happens if we lose software production as well? I hope that Microsoft pulls their head out of their ass.

    Comment by Danny K 6/7/2008 @ 5:38 pm

  44. Word sucks mega big time. Write a letter to Mom? It’s OK. For technical documentation it’s absolutely worthless. Whomever came up with that stupid template dependency idea should be shot. Send a document you define elsewhere and the dumb-ass template has to go with it. Hell, I just spent a half-hour searching for Normal.DOT (normal???) to try and (hopefully) fix some formatting cancer that invaded the document. Auto-formatting nannies, wrong keystroke and your whole document changes and you’ll spend 8 hours figuring out what went wrong, mysterious indent changes, heading auto-numbering is a pain in the ass to change, not to mention doing a simple paragraph format change. The best documentation tool I ever used is FrameMaker (OK, so you can’t, drag-and-drop, BFD). Easy to learn (easier than Word), no bells and whistles… no damned template dependencies, you control your document, the program doesn’t control you. Now Microsoft has turned Visio into a bloated useless piece of crap and charges a fortune for it. Excel and PowerPoint are cool, but I would personally fire the ENTIRE Word team from the marketing twits on down. Keep the developers, it’s not their fault. OK, I feel better now. Back to my work… (BTW- I Googled “Microsoft Word crap” and found this great venting forum).

    Comment by Big Al 6/22/2008 @ 10:41 pm

  45. Word is s**t. I have to use it every day. But salvation is at hand. Whenever I can I use WordPerfect: a word processing program that leaves the user in control.

    Comment by AugustaB 7/1/2008 @ 3:18 pm

  46. Well would you mind sharing another word processor??

    Comment by Eternal blaze 8/14/2008 @ 8:48 pm

  47. I was delighted to find some kindred spirits. After spending an hour and a half trying to print 6 copies of the same envelope, I gave up and wrote them out by hand. I don’t do envelopes often and this rotten word processing program reminds me why whenever I try to do them. I remember WordPerfect used to show you a picture of an envelope – you typed what you wanted on it, where you wanted it and told it how many copies to print. If you were typing a letter, it would format the envelope for you with your address in the upper left hand corner. And this was more than 15 years ago. It was a wonderful, intuitive and user friendly word processor. I am going to buy another copy – I hope they haven’t screwed it up since the Word revolution. May I never be saddled with Word again.

    Comment by Patricia Stilwell 8/18/2008 @ 1:18 pm

  48. Everything written here is true. Word is a multi-storey tower block built part on sand and part on swamp. Instead of going back years ago and creating a stable platform to build on they piled on more and more supposed features and functions. In a Kafkaesque way they tried to make it easier to use and it became harder to use. It is now a bloated unstable piece of software that is outperfomed by an original Guggenheim press. I am a Technical Author. I would estimate that a third of my working life has been spent trying to fix this truly, truly awful application. It has cost the world dear.

    Comment by John C 8/28/2008 @ 1:33 am

  49. Word totally deleted my university assignment off my harddrive when i tried saving it at 2am AND it was due that day! ended up freaking out so badly!
    ended up staying up heaps later just to start and complete the assignment. something about WRL1419 prevented me from saving.

    Comment by Jade 9/12/2008 @ 9:00 am

  50. OMG you are right on the money. I just switched to Office 2007 and the nightmares have returned. I had to see if it was just me but it’s not. I think Word was originally a bonus MS threw in for Excel because Word was a PoS. Now we have to pay for the abuse. I can’t wait for the day when someone put MS out of our misery. I wonder how much resources are wasted by millions on the OS and Office crap MS puts out.

    Comment by R T 10/9/2008 @ 9:19 pm

  51. Thank heavens for this site….

    I thought the old versions of MS Word had sunk the lowest hell-hole pit of spewter in the Universe, and then Office 2007 came along….
    Why do Microsoft think I want to use a copyright sign when Im labelling things (a), (b), (c), its c you morons, not copyright – Im doing a list!! I write reports, with lists, I dont need to copyright anything. Hey, if I need to put a symbol in, Ill go to the symbols section!
    Why, when I copy some text from another word document, then paste it into the other, should the pasted text end up in a COMPLETELY different format to the original?! Why!?
    How does indenting now work?? Have you deliberately sabotaged being able to indent things and actually get things to go where the users wants them to go?
    Why did Microsoft change all the menus?? Wheres the Options menu gone!? Where is anything!?
    Headers and style… holy crap, how complicated is this now I want some simple headers that can then relay back to a contents page, you did it fine before, why mess things up!?
    Ever tried putting images onto a page, and then maybe lining them up, or even getting them to be the same size? Putting images into tables??! Why should it be this hard, and still not work after an afternoon of torture!!
    And dont even get me started on page numbering… why should it be so difficult I just want to put some numbers at the bottom of the document, that is all, not design a new type of satellite, just some numbering.
    I SHOULDNT HAVE TO SPEND A YEAR OF MY LIFE LEARNING HOW TO DO THINGS ON THIS VERSION OF THE SOFTWARE THAT I COULD NEARLY DO NORMALLY ON PREVIOUS VERSIONS.
    Please, anyone, even Steve Jobs, come up with a new mainstream Word Processor… someone… anyone…

    Comment by Paul 11/5/2008 @ 7:58 pm

  52. Word 2007 sucks camel balls. After learning the all non-intuitive bullshit on previous versions here is a new version with new bullshit to learn that as far as i can see adds no value. Plus it saves document in another extension that people w/o the newest word version cant open WTF? Microsoft has created a annoyance that everyone has to deal with on a daily basis. Like the US political system needs another party the world needs someone to replace MS.

    Comment by steve 11/12/2008 @ 7:11 pm

  53. I had to use this shitty program today & actually commented to a colleague that this was the crappest piece of software I have ever used when we decide to search for comments & found this site. Why can’t they (MS) just let the program do what YOU want it to do & not guess what it thinks you may be wanting to do. Fortunately I don’t need to use it too often. I use a text editor to do all the typimg & then cut & paste into word & then apply formatting – That seems to be the least messy way of getting it dto do what you want.

    Comment by Anthony 11/13/2008 @ 5:22 am

  54. Learn HTML. I do all my world processing in HTML. HTML allows you complete control over your document. Free yourself from the shackles of commercial world processing dependence. open office is another POS - messed up my data – i loast data beacuse of it. so ther iyou have it HTML is the dolsution.

    Comment by BlahBlah 11/24/2008 @ 3:44 pm

  55. Hear! Hear! I hate it too!! Microsoft ALWAYS thinks they know best for you! Same as government. And of course they don’t. They know what you’re trying to type and how you’re trying to format it better than you do and you cannot correct the mistakes it consistently makes. I have the worst trouble with this and it’s not just Word, everything they make does this. I try to turn off EVERY auto-screw-up ‘feature’ but it still tries to do everything for me and of course it NEVER gets ANYTHING right!! I guess I need to give OpenOffice a try.

    Comment by Programmer 12/12/2008 @ 6:17 pm

  56. Whenever Word starts to annoy me I just Google “word sucks”, read rants like these and feel better. Thanks guys! :) Working with numbered lists annoys me the most – they don’t indent right and things really get jacked up when you try and apply any formatting to any of the line items.

    lbb said “DONâ??T JUST GO BOLD ON ME BECAUSE I DELETED A WORD…”. I’m sure we’ve all seen this and I think it gives clues as to what Word’s problem really is. Behind the scenes it must use special characters to indicate where each piece of text formatting begins and ends… kind of like opening and closing tags in HTML. Word docs become a “time bomb” after a lot of editing because you end up with the Word file equivalent of unclosed or overlapping HTML tags. So basically it has the same sort of problems that FrontPage has.

    Comment by Dave 12/17/2008 @ 2:54 pm

  57. Ive been using MS Word, Microsoft Word Perfect, and Open Office 2.4 at my school and NONE of the files ive saved work with any of the programs unless ive saved them in Open Office 2.4 if i use any of the Microsoft Word programs to open the files i get a critical error and the server im on shuts down, am i experiencing a technicall problem or has microsoft allowed such virus’s to enter the school computer? We use Nod32 here and never had a crash untill we implemented the newer microsoft. Were running Acer computer with pentium 4 processers if you guys have any information on ways to open my previous files (Open Office 2.4 or 3.0 didnt work)from Microsoft Word and Word Perfect please contact me at Khronic420@live.com with any help you can give this is VERY important its my final essay of 2500 words on history (Which I’d hate to have to do again) so if you could help that would be very much appreciated

    Comment by JamesH 1/6/2009 @ 4:33 pm

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