Why Word sucks
Readers of this blog will know that I’m no big fan of MS Word (or indeed any of the other apps in the Office suite, with the possible exception of Excel) but that my work — editing, tracking changes, exchanging comments, and so forth — make my preferred solution (using Mellel, for example, or some flavor of LaTeX and outputting to PDF) cumbersome or simply impossible. I’m stuck with Word. But it’s increasingly driving me crazy with its stupid behavior. Case in point: I’ve been editing a file all morning that I received from one of our writers. I selected all and changed the formatting to “Normal,” which in my set-up means a 10pt Courier New.
I then changed the language to US English and set it to automatic spell check. All ready for editing! But then I made a huge mistake: I actually edited stuff. In the second-to-last graf I deleted an entire sentence, which prompted that graf to flow into the last one. Booom, the new graf changes to 12pt Times New Roman (a font I hate and never use) with the language selection blown out. I needed five steps — select the graf, change the font and font size, re-apply the language, and tell it to check spelling — just to be able to continue where I had left off. Why? Why???? WHY???????
