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Microsoft Word is not a good piece of software, but everyone uses it, and it's amazing to think about how little effort it would have taken Microsoft over the last few years to actually make it a better piece of software, but, everyone uses it, so fuck it

Instead, they've just made it actively worse, for no clear reason. The new commenting, man -- how is it an enhancement that you have to press a button to explicitly "post" a comment?!

i like how you can only read the first line of a comment, but if you click to expand it, then you can’t see which text in the doc it is referring to. cool update guys 👍🏼

Maybe they mistakenly hired some sleeper agents from Google Docs.

I turned off new commenting ugh. Go to File > Options > General and uncheck the box next to “Enable modern comments.”

My favorite part of this feature is how (at least on a Mac) command-enter is the keyboard shortcut to post a comment, but slip and hit command-period, and the open comment is permed deleted, unrecoverable by “undo.”

A period being, of course, often the last keystroke before one posts a comment

They must have some kind of side deal with a company that makes blood pressure medicine.

My constant fury at MS Word follies is nicely captured by Effin’ Birds:

Oh, God, that explains a few mysteries… (any advice on dealing with a constantly corrupted “Normal” style because everyone sends me mss with text grabbed from PDFs? My outline function routinely creates new and ridiculous format changes, even in ‘clean’ documents.)

OH yes I hate that. I turned it off immediately. File > Options > General and uncheck the box next to “Enable modern comments.” Then close Word down entirely, start it back up, et voilà: classic comments are back.

Utterly enraging.

Not only that, but they aggressively made it worse. Track change with comments is almost unusable now.

my house is Team WordPerfect 4 Ever

Oh, how I wish… The magical land where you could genuinely ‘Reveal Codes’ and nuke the offending items…

wishes can come true! i use WP X9 Corel's Cyber Monday sale is still going i see ... www.wordperfect.com/en/special-o...

They can, but alas, not for Mac users…

I’m old enough to remember word perfect and how it was superior to word.

WordPerfect would still own the field, except they tried to implement Microsoft's "Object Linking and Embedding" feature. It fucked them hard enough that they basically lost an entire release, which meant a couple years revenue, and that's enough to kill any normal corporation.

It turns out to be impossible to make OLE work unless you get a LOT of help from the people on the other side of the connection; most of MSFT's competition died on this hill, the ones that hadn't already when they were compelled to write Windows versions of everything.

Me too! I loved WordPerfect.

I use LibreOffice Writer, but it annoys me that everyone EXPECTS you to use Microsoft Word and requires documents to be submitted in that form.

I never owned a copy until about 10 years ago, surviving on other word processing program because usually I'd print the thing I was writing and then give it to someone. But over time, it because "send the word file" and then it because a cluster fuck. So, I had to buy it.

I'm actually really curious what you would improve? I have inside knowledge, so I know it's getting worked on, plus I have my own quibbles 🤣

I still have fond memories of IBM Lotus Symphony.

I hate how it’s an industry standard in my field. Track Changes was the only thing that made it bearable, and if that’s borked… I’ve long thought that they have no people with actual writing experience on their tech teams.