For one thing, she shows just how informed she is about these matters by referring to “the unfamiliar, bizarro-world file format RTF” — a format created by Microsoft. If The Exported File Is Reopened In WIt’s become so commonplace for people to hate Word that a counterintuitive Slate post praising it was long overdue, but even by Slate standards Heather Schwedel has done a poor job. Make sure that you are viewing non-printing characters by clicking the Show/Hide button on the toolbar (the button with the paragraph symbol on it).Open With>Google Docs If You Want To Bring The Document Back Into Word Later, You Can Re-export The Document As A. Type This should not be included in the TOC. Press ENTER after the word agreement.Even if you wanted to use lowercase Roman numerals somewhere, whenever you typed “i” Word would helpfully turn it into “I” as soon as you pressed the space bar. When was the last time you read anything that adhered to this style? … To make this into something recognizably human, you need to click your way into the relevant menu (View? Insert? Format?) and change the i, ii, iii, etc., to 1, 2, 3, etc. Because if you care about “fonts and formatting and all such things” Word is the worst possible application to deal with.As Louis Menand wrote some years ago, with the proper emphasis, “ Microsoft Word is a terrible program.”To begin with, the designers of Word apparently believe that the conventional method of endnote numbering is with lowercase Roman numerals—i, ii, iii, etc.You triumphantly click, and find that you are indeed back in Times New Roman but that all your italics have been removed.This kind of disaster — and worse — still happens. You are confident that you can lick this thing: you painstakingly position your cursor in the Endnotes window (not the text!, where irreparable damage may occur) and click Edit, then the powerful Select All you drag the arrow to Normal (praying that your finger doesn’t lose contact with the mouse, in which case the window will disappear, and trying not to wonder what the difference between Normal and Clear Formatting might be) and then, in the little window to the right, to Times New Roman. Word, it seems, has, at some arbitrary point in the proceedings, decided that although you have been typing happily away in Times New Roman, you really want to be in the default font of the original document. Finally, there is the moment when you realize that your notes are starting to appear in 12-pt. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets. Never, btw (which, unlike “poststructuralism,” is a word in Word spellcheck), ask that androgynous paper clip anything.I ended up having to write all my comments in my text editor and then paste them into the comment box. And Word insisted on inserting an entire paragraph every time my fingers hit the keys. I was just typing letters of the alphabet. I wasn’t choosing to paste — I wasn’t even using any special keys (Command, Control, Option).
![]() ![]() ![]() There is nothing Word is the best at. LaTex, for example, is open source and works on any OS.My issue with Word is that it is an all-arounder that has somehow become an industry standard. Jacobs says nothing about Apple or in favor of its software. It's been stamped out of me.Freddie, your comment seems misplaced, because Prof. Reviews of parallels for macIf you want to write a script for Hollywood, Final Draft is the standard. If you want the best notes taking app, Microsoft's OneNote is well regarded and there are many good competitors. For a magazine), use Adobe InDesign. Word 2016 Footnotes Lose Formatting After Opening And Closing How To Use GitIf you want to write a book, Scrivener is well regarded for storing the ideas and bits and bobs. If you just need to collaborate on small amount of text, Google Docs is sufficient. If you want to collaborate on a lot of text, do what programmers do and learn how to use Git. For book publishing, it is standard to use Track Changes to communicate between author and editor. It's not the best for doing business work because it's oriented around paper pages even though no one prints them out anymore and now people keep emailing files back and forth like "2016 Q3 Report Final (Betsey) (Revised John) copy 3.docx" when it should just be a Google Doc.Which leaves publishing. If it were the best for that, it would have a decent citation management system. For example, it's not the best for writing college papers. Etc.So where does that leave Word? What is it the best for? Well clearly, it's not the best for many of the tasks it is commonly used for. With Git, you can step through a document from creation to any moment in its history and compare. Git has its own pretty terrible interface, but for collaboration, nothing comes close. As also mentioned, programmers use Git to collaborate on vast volumes of text that just so happen to also be computer instructions. As discussed, Word has many invisible settings and no "show codes" option a la WordPerfect, so it's very hard for professionals to guess what's going wrong when a document stops work. Back in the mid-to-late 1980s I did contract editing and proofing for Microsoft. Bad as it is, it is the standard submission format.Word has not always been this dreadful. When I wear my 'layout books with InDesign' hat, the submissions are invariably in Word. It staggers the mind.Alas, there are many writers who believe that Word is the proper format to write in for publication. That's why we have this cartoon of a helpful but inept paperclip on our screens." Not in MS Works or similar software for children, but in the real MS Word as part of a suite called "Office". But its use in other contexts to which is unsuited is so widespread that it is really infuriating.Plus, they put a cartoon paperclip in it! Yes, I know they took that out eventually, but for real, there was a 10 year period where every serious office in the world had a little cartoon paperclip on screen at all times, and said "We are a serious business.
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