A brief announcement

[gridlore]

I freaking hate Word. It sucks. Just the simple act of typing a cover letter triggered more stress than I got from being fired in the first place. No, seriously. I was screaming at the screen.

I don't care how thinks my letter should look, stop changing things to fit what some pencil neck at MickeySquash thinks my letter should look like. I do not want my email address hot linked. When I remove something, like that annoying hyperlink, it is not an invitation to reinsert it every time I type on that line.

Thank Ghu for OpenOffice.org. Since the export to .doc is now clean, I'm doing all my work in that from now on.

Thanks to iTunes for what could be a good marching song for the open source movement.

Comments

I know exactly what you mean....

[jarlsberg71.livejournal.com]

with my job, it's not uncommon for me to have to type up a custom manual for the tape ops, 50-70 pages with screen shots, flowcharts, the whole enchilada. Word is the ONLY program they let me use. I would throw my trainee off a bridge to use something like Quark or OOO... The funky way that word is "helping" you keep indents, or numbering bullets, or even the bullet styles (big black dot, little black dot) I honestly have had to delete the doc and start from scratch, I can't copy and paste text from other documents, cause it grabs formatting stuff along with the text. I just want the text...

Sigh...

Re: I know exactly what you mean....

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Use Paste Special off the menus rather than Paste. If you're feeling really ambitious you can even replace the Paste button and the Paste keybind with Paste Special. It's what I've done.

Similarly, Doug, most of the stuff you're talking about can be turned off using the Tools menu's AutoCorrect.

Not excusing it, just explaining how to mitigate the worst of it.

Re: I know exactly what you mean....

[kengr]

I'd paste it into Notepad (or TextPad if they'll let you use it). That'll lose the formatting.

Then you can cut and paste from there.

[cleverthylacine]

You can turn all that shit off.

I'd like to use Open Office but it won't permit me to global-replace special characters and codes, so I have to stay with Word until they get their shite together, cause I'm not hand-picking all the extra hard returns and garbage out of other people's stuff.

[kengr]

Damn few programs will let you do that. But since I try to mostly work in plain text/html (with some RTF for when I'm doing prelim stuff) I can use TextPad. Not only will it replace stuff, if you've got multiple files open, ot'll make a search & replace across *all* of them if you ask it to.

Great when importing other folks stuff.

[cleverthylacine]

WordPad doesn't quite do the trick for converting the stuff for Lightningwar.

Damned few programs will let you do that, it's true. But Word WILL, and as long as Word is the only one that will, I'm gonna be using it. I don't particularly like it, but them's the breaks. And hard returns.

I like being able to convert all the different idiotic combinations of hyphens and spaces people use to denote an em dash into em dashes. To strip AIM names and the space in front of them and replace that with a hard return so I don't have to insert one between each line. And I don't have enough editing time to be able to do it by hand and still miss some.

[kengr]

TextPad, not WordPad. It's annoyware (ie pops up a beg box at startup if you haven't paid for it).

And you can highlight a couple dozen files in windoze explorer, right-click and select textpad, and it'll open *all* of them. Then you can run search and replace (even using regular expressions) and select "apply to all documents" and it'll do it.

I used that to clean up some really annoying web page "chains" I'd downloaded.

http://www.textpad.com/

Only complaint I've got is that I haven't figured out how to set the character set to accept "smart quote" characters (to make editing them out easier)