Running from scissors

In grade school, my teacher would sometimes have us work on "collages". This lesson plan consisted of us kids cutting up old magazines with those crappy blunt-tip scissors and then pasting the pictures onto poster board with delicious library paste. It wasn't much of a lesson plan, I think my teacher saved it for days she was hung over. 

Similarly, I'm pretty sure the Word team was drunk when they implemented cut-and-paste. At the very least, they didn't have the benefit of my grade school teacher to teach them the basic concept. I'll review the concept here in case any of the MS Word development team is reading this little blog (yeah, right). Here's how it works in the real world: 

1. you choose a thing to cut. 

2. you cut the thing.

3. you choose a place to paste the thing

4. you paste the thing

Seems easy enough. Hell, I figured it out in grade school even when I was feeling woozy from eating too much library paste.

Not for Microsoft, though. Here's how cut-and-paste works in Word 2008:

1. you choose a thing to cut

2. you cut the thing (or so you think)

3. you choose a place to paste the thing

4. you paste the thing, but magically, it turns into a different kind of thing!

Yes, that's right. If you cut text from Word and paste it into a different application, Word decides you wanted to paste a picture of the text, not the text itself. Why in the hell would I want that? The mind reels. This is one of the very most basic Mac behaviors. We Mac users have been happily cutting and pasting since 1985. Don't think you're so smart, either, 'cause drag-and-drop does the same thing. Drag some text from a Word doc to the desktop and, ta da, a picture clipping appears. 

Frankly, and this doesn't happen often, I'm at a loss for words. Try as I might, I can't imagine the meeting where they decided violating one of the most basic Mac behaviors and doing something the user can't possibly expect would be the best way to go. Perhaps someone did it as a joke, maybe it was Backwards Day, and the team forgot to fix it?

Maybe the Word development team needs to go back to grade school and bone up on the basics... There are lot of days when I would rather be using crayons myself.

Crow-eating update: in the 12.01 update,  it looks like MS fixed this problem, mostly. I still can't paste text into a Fireworks doc, and drag-and-drop still produces a pictClipping, but now I can cut and paste text into most of the other apps on my machine. "Yay."

What Part of WYSIWYG Doesn't MS Understand?

I'm old enough to remember when the Mac was first released. The most amazing, splendid thing about it was that what you saw on the screen of your computer in 1984 was pretty much exactly what your printer spat out. Never mind that you had to wait a week for an Imagewriter to grind its way through a 10 page document. There were no formatting codes to screw up, no guessing at how monochrome amber monospace text would look when you issued the print command. On the Mac, what you saw on the tiny black and white screen was what you saw on the printed page. That was a revelation. It created a bridge between digital and physical versions of a document. It gave me control and confidence and, best of all, it eliminated hours of farting around trying to get a document to appear the way it should be.

Leave it to Word to bring us back to 1983 and guessing at how print-outs will appear. Today, I printed out a longish (30+ pages) document that I needed to review in detail. To my dismay, Word scaled down each page to about 60% of it's "real" size and shoved it into the upper, left-hand corner of the sheet. Lucky for me (if you count constant exposure to shoddiness "lucky"), I knew what the problem was. Sure enough, the author of the document had left "track changes" turned on. When I opened the document, something changed, possibly there was a slight difference in a font size or something which caused Word to repaginate and then add a helpful comment. That one little comment box caused Word to scale down every page of the print-out so that the comment would have room.

This, of course, completely violates the fundamental Mac wysiwyg principle. On screen, Word makes the sheet wider to accommodate comments (this trips me up sometimes when I wonder why my "centered" paragraph isn't in the center of the sheet). In print, Word scales down the document to make room for the comments, a truly moronic solution to a problem of its own creation. Why don't I get an easy-to-find option to print comments or not? Why can't comments and changes be an overlay that DOESN'T CHANGE THE LAYOUT OF THE DOCUMENT? I'm YELLING because I wonder what percentage of deforestation can be attributed directly to MS's brain-dead print implementations? Could this particular UI failure actually be contributing to global warming? Probably no more so than Bill's giant lake-side McMansion, but still...

Drunken Tables

No, this is not a noodle dish at your local Thai joint. I'm referring instead to the behavior you see when you make formatting changes to text in a table. For the last few versions, Word has been plagued with buggy re-draw behavior. Since the issues have been around over many versions of the app, I can only conclude that MS's consumer testing has revealed that users of Word don't look at the screen when they work. Perhaps they should stop using moles and earthworms for their consumer testing, because re-draw errors drive me, a human, crazy. For some reason, tables are especially prone to these errors.

Yesterday,  I was working on a large doc with many tables. Within these tables, I had to re-format a bunch of text to a new style. Every time I re-formatted the text, the display of the row would screw up, providing a sort of double-vision effect that new fraternity pledges might enjoy, but which really doesn't do much for my productivity. I've learned that the only way to fix this (the display issue, I have no idea how to "fix" those who pledge fraternities) is to scroll the section I'm working on up out of sight and then back again, thereby forcing a re-draw. Of course, this means taking my hands off the keyboard and using the mouse, which slows me down a lot. 

So, I would try and work with the messed up display until each formatting change rendered the screen so illegible I could no longer tell what I was selecting. At that point, it looks like the image above. So, work grinds to a halt so I can scroll up and back down again to refresh the display. 

Actually, wouldn't it be great if life worked this way? If you start really screwing something up, instead of having it all snowball and explode in your face, you could just close your eyes and open them again, and everything would be all pickles and puppies again. Sort of like reality is a giant Etch-a-Sketch you can shake and start over. Perhaps I've got MS all wrong, they just want to make our world more beautiful.

Nah.

Wow, you have two monitors?

Today, let's start at the beginning: I double-click the doc on my desktop to start Word and get to work. Because I am a "pro" and need a lot of desktop space so I can do graphics and word-processing at the same time, I use two monitors. They are arranged one atop the other. I easily configure them this way using OS X's monitor setup preference pane.

This arrangement baffles Word. I'm guessing it's because getting a two-monitor setup to work in Windows involves visiting more wizards than Frodo Baggins. As a consequence, it seems the Microsofties are unfamiliar with a two-monitor set-up, otherwise why else would this happen:

No matter what size or location my document windows had when I quit Word, when I re-open them they always protrude about an inch below the top screen. In other words, Word always opens the document window so that it's taller than the main (upper) screen and thus it must be split between the two screens. It's like watching American Idol on two TV screens with Ryan Seacrest's head on one TV and his body on the other. Interesting idea, but not really practical.

With the window cut into two pieces, the display buttons, word count, etc. are on the bottom display, and the rest of the document on the top display. Inevitably, I forget this has happened and I start working with the doc only to come to a screeching halt when my eye flits to the bottom of the screen to check the page number, turn on tracking or whatever. After a millisecond or two of cognitive dissonance, I realize the bottom of my window is chopped off and I reach for the mouse to re-size the window.

So, every time I open a document, the first thing I have to remember to do is re-size the document window so it's all on one screen. Cleverly, Word does this for every document I open, not just the first one. It's just a minor annoyance, but minor annoyances are like fire ants: get enough of them biting all together and you're gonna wish you could move the hell away from Texas. I really enjoy having to think about an application rather than the work I'm trying to do. I'd much rather tinker with software than earn some actual money.

Oh well, re-sizing the window every time you open a doc does give Word a chance to catch up on the repagination it does every time you sneeze or look at the app funny. But that's another post.

Meanwhile, here's a crazy suggestion for MS: when you close a document window, save the state! Go crazy, implement some circa 1992 usability. It might just bring a little relief to your ant-ravaged users. Seriously, these welts are starting to burn...

A World of Hurt

After years of bitching, usually on a daily basis, about the pain MS Word causes me, I've decided to go public. Why? I live in Word. More than any desk, cubicle or office, Word is my work environment and it has been since I was a college student back in the late '80s. 

If Word were an actual, physical workplace, it would be a FEMA trailer with rotting drywall and hundreds of yards of duct tape holding together dangerously unpredictable plumbing and wiring. Yes, that's where I go to work every day.

Every few years, the landlord, MS, shows up and makes a big deal out of sweeping a couple of dead rats out from behind the toilet. They spray-paint the roaches so they match the soiled carpet and then release a bunch of PR hooey about how very wonderful they are for having fixed up the trailer so beautifully.

Usually, the media signs up enthusiastically for this mangy dog and pony show. The reviews of Word 2008 by Macworld and the other members of the mainstream computer press are always puff pieces that put the "sick" in "sycophant." The truth is, like virtually every release before it, Word 2008 is a bad whitewash of a bad app, but no one seems willing to say it in print. 

Well, I am. Having spent the better part of two decades trying to live in the rat-shit palace that is MS Word, I know the place intimately. It's time the world knows where MS is forcing us to work.  Stop by here for a guided tour you won't get in Macworld or anywhere else the long arm of MS PR can reach. If you have an issue with Word, feel free to add a comment or send it to me and I'll document it.

Please leave the light on when you're done visiting. Every time it gets turned off all the roaches come out again.