Damn You, Microsoft Word. Damn You. | Hacker News Reader

Damn You, Microsoft Word. Damn You.

blog.amir.rachum.com

15 pointsNurdok13 comments

My biggest Word WTF was when I had edited about a page of text, and went away for a new cup of coffee. When I came back the document was only showing Wingdings-like characters. And when I press the cursor keys it crashed.

After that time I always go into the settings and force it to make proper .bak files.

I've seen the sales people periodically manually save to a separate .rtf because Word crashes and trashes the document and the auto-save so often for them.

After decades and zillions of money, why isn't that piece of software amongst the most solid software there is?

Yeah, I would accept this kind of crap from a new and innovative startup, but Word exists for about 20 years. Jesus.

It's not just Word. Lots of microsoft programs have modal dialogs that lock out other open windows. Outlook is the one that give me the most trouble.

Excel is good at this too (2007). Edit a cell (F2) and then at the same time try open a different spreadsheet..

I hate the UI design idea that some types of common pop-up window should become the sole top-level element across the entire program that creaetd it. It should instead be contained within whatever window/tab it originated. (There might be an exception, but I can't think of one at the moment.)

That is your biggest problem with word?

How is that: I imported a simple Excel diagram, tried to resize it - and Word crashed. No problem, Word creates backups, right? Only problem: When Word opens the backup... it crashes. And suddenly I didn't have any working version of the file anymore...

(git helped me out, thankfully, but I don't know how my parents would have handled that...)

so it's Word's problem you did not bother to hit CTRL-S and save periodically?

You're being down voted because you overlooked the fact that the parent poster is unable to open the document at all. We're not talking lost changes here, we're talking about not being able to open the document at all, so not only did he lose the changes since the last save, but he had to go to a backup (git version) and recover the document from there.

It's easy to belittle something when you don't know the solution.

Go to 'Window' -> 'New Window'

Open as many Windows and Modal Dialogs you want.

And as I can see from all the jokers who agree with your opinion - none of them actually 'tried' to find a solution either.

I believe this trick only works if you know apriori that you want a new window; not after the fact.

What infuriates me is the dual-level modal. You are in a document. You do something that opens a dialog (call it D1), it opens another dialog (D2) for whatever reason. You want to see something behind D1. You CANNOT MOVE IT.

use LaTex

As I pointed out, I prefer LyX (which is a LaTeX graphical frontent).

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