Friday, November 11, 2016

Microsoft Word 2016 Can Suck My Dick

Bonjour Le Skullfuckers!!!

I figured with Revit out of the picture, I should probably turn my ire to my second least favorite software company - Microsoft.  They've obviously sucked a lot of dick for a lot of years, and don't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down (if anything, they are doubling down on it).

This became especially obvious when my wife recently started a Doctorate program, which seems to mostly revolve around writing fucktons of papers. Fortunately for her she is an excellent writer, but technology seems to fucking hate her - exacerbated by the fact that most of it is designed by half-wit morons whose idea of 'user friendly' is hiding extremely important functionality behind a wall of ribbons (sound familiar?)

For her, if something can go wrong with a computer, piece of software, or printer - it will, and at the worst possible time. I could use the exact same shit all day long without fail, but the second she sits down, it's a goddamned miracle when it doesn't catch on fire. She's highly intelligent, and isn't a technophobe, but her experience has left her without a lot of confidence that she won't get screwed over somehow.

The format they have to use for their papers is different than what she is used to, and despite being given a template (that doesn't seem to work correctly - probably because it was made in an older version of Word) and having a book that shows how everything is supposed to look, it still took over an hour last night to get everything formatted correctly - while every strange fucking thing that could come out of the woodwork seemed to be conspiring against her.

Now that we've done it all, I'm going to make this paper into a 'template' (not one to be applied, just one to open up and start a new paper - with all of the headers, numbering, spacing, etc. already in place and ready for editing/writing). Now, I'm no 'Word Guru' (I prefer OpenOffice - both due to it being free - and not a Microsoft product) but I've used it for as long as it has existed - and while I don't tend to use a lot of the formatting functions (preferring to stick to manually formatting) I have had to delve into them more than once.

The first thing we ran into was that she had several sources that were hyperlinks, and they wouldn't break where she wanted them to (they would jump down to the next line - and only THEN would they wrap). They didn't have to stay hyperlinks, but even after turning it off, it would not allow me to break it where I wanted to - forcing me to manually type the part that I wanted to stay on the first line, then delete what I had typed from the rest of the 'link'.

Then - lo and behold, the line spacing was fucked up because it was taking it upon itself to insert a paragraph symbol, and deleting it would cause it to go back to wrapping incorrectly (a little fiddling around and I found that I could put an extra space at the end to make it stay put and keep the line spacing the same.

After I fixed the first link, I figured I would go online and see if anyone had a better way to do it - the first one I ran across was to insert a special character called an 'no width optional break' and it... didn't fucking work.  At all.  I went ahead and fixed the rest manually - and later I ran across a suggestion to use a no-width empty character (I'll try that the next time I get pulled in to assist).

Next was setting up the header(s).  I had actually gone through the process once, so I was fairly confident I could do it again.  Started by using the header that showed up at the top of the page, but of course that's wrong.  Went into 'Insert' and 'Header', and was off to the races.  Right up until I accidentally held down 'shift' for too long and the stupid 'sticky keys' menu popped up - then disappeared and left me unable to type (it would just 'tick tick') requiring a reboot (and then a quick search on how to make that shit go away permanently).

Each issue that I had to fix was stupider than the last (constantly having to fix line spacing and other 'auto-formatting' that needed to take a fucking hike), but I finally beat it - because the one indispensable tool I have is the fact that I'm goddamned relentless when it comes to figuring shit out, which was one of the reasons Revit left such a bad taste in my mouth.  People would get the incorrect impression that I just didn't want to learn something 'different'.  The reality was that it wasn't just 'different' it was FUCKED.

At least with Microsoft products like Windows and Word I can go online and find where other people have had the same problems (and have a 50/50 chance of finding a solution that actually works).  With Revit it was a wasteland of nothingness - especially at first.  But even years later, I would try searching for a solution to an issue and the vast majority of the hits were either out of date (and/or didn't address the problem) or were for places offering 'Revit training' (i.e. - pay us money to show you the useless tutorials that are already available for free online.

I came to the conclusion last night that the only reason that these people get away with putting out shit software with shitty 'features' is that they are safely esconced somewhere that I can't get hold of them and slam their fucking hands into a drawer repeatedly.  It's pretty much the same with everything else - faceless corporations who don't give a fuck about who they screw over, and a populous willing to shrug and say 'it is what it is'.

Fuck that.

And if you think like that - then FUCK YOU.

Sincerely,
S.F.

Next Time: Getting Down To Business

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