Microsoft is a Bunch of Blithering Idiots!

[jducoeur]

Okay, yes -- we all knew that. But occasionally I am reminded of the fact.

Word 2002 adds a new "formatting" layer on top of the old "styles" system. This "feature", clearly intended to make the user's life easier, just makes it far harder to actually get the formatting that you want in your document. And it took me ten minutes just to figure out how to stop using it and go back to styles (which is much more powerful and, IMO, more intuitive).

This lesson in pointless misfeatures has been brought to you by the number 1 (the average number of new releases MS gives Office every year), and the letter $ (the reason they keep doing so)...

-- Justin
Who doesn't usually indulge in quite so many Kirby-esque "quotes", but this time it seemed apt...

Comments

[tpau]

oooh, you figured out how to do it! what do i do? it drives me nuts, and i havent' been able to disable it. granted i only ried once and gave up after a few minutes...

[jducoeur]

The trick isn't so much turning it off, as rendering it pointless. This is off the top of my head, so I may have the details slightly off, but it was roughly:

-- Open the idiotic Styles and Formatting sidebar.
-- In the little chooser down at the bottom, switch it to "All Styles".
-- Add a couple of paragraphs in the styles I actually want, so they're instantiated.
-- Switch back to "Available Styles".
-- Delete the idiotic "Formattings", so that only the styles I want are left.

That got me back to a functional state that I understood, and it was easy to work from there on. But it's way too much work, and I think you have to do it for each document. So as I said -- blithering idiots...

[tpau]

hmm.. you can also make a document withthese modifications, save it as something useful like MyTemplate.doc and then jsut use it as a start of every new document...

[jducoeur]

Good idea -- I should remember to do that...