Why is MS Word so difficult

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Tue, 19 Dec 2017 11:58:33 +0000, mechanic
wrote:

On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 19:12:24 -0700, Ken Springer wrote:

Despite the Home and Student edition name, IMO, Word is laced with
features the average home user will never, ever need.

But many home users will use some features that other users don't
for instance I used the mail merge tool for distributing letters to
a local civic group but other home users may want different tools
for different uses. MSFT office has plenty of help options for
people who need it, although most business users don't need hand
holding. Obviously overkill for a shopping list but for a CV or
important letter it's the tool of choice. For more layout options
there's MSFT Publisher.

What I myself don't like about his Word is that it's rearranged the
dropdown menus and hides File under that red circle in the upper left
corner. Do the programmers think they are artists "expressing
themselves"? They had a good system and they should stick with it.

I saw the recommendation for my brother to use something else. That
might take some convincing, or it might not. He doesn't ask for help
except about specific problems. Has little or no interest in background
instruction.

Yesterday, after I restored the file, for some reason it woudln't print,
so he came up with the idea of emailing it instead of mailing it. I
tried to show him how to copy and paste it in the email but he was
looking at the printer and clearly wasn't interested.

Today, his wife was going to their lawyer and he wanted a printed copy,
but it wouldn't display. It said some of the parts were missing
(something that wouldnt' happen with Notepad!). Maybe that was the
reason it wouldn't print the day before. I didn't know what to do ???
until I remembered the copy in the email (gmail / Sent) , so I copied
that back to Word. That, something about coming from gmail I guess,
made the whole page except for the letters yellow, but when we printed
it (and this time it printed easily) the whole page was green!!

I tried changing the color but that only affected the text, or maybe the
other color button added tint to the yellow. Finally I found Remove
Formatting. Which turned it white again.

I changed the save interval to 2 minutes and put the recovery folder
parallel to the normal save folder. He;s never used File Explorer but
it will be easier for me next time.

Thanks for the help.

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 20:10:28 +0000, mechanic
wrote:

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 10:57:13 -0600, Char Jackson wrote:

It's entirely possible that someone reading my account of using
Excel to manipulate large text files will groan with agony over
the poor choice of tools,...

If it does the job, no problem. Linux users would reach for 'sed'
and there are ways of using that on Windows eg with Cygwin, or a
Linux virtual machine, or Powershell which has similar features, or
the Windows port he
http://www.thoughtasylum.com/blog/20...n-windows.html

I use bash scripts when I need to do something quick and dirty, since
the network gear that I work on is basically Linux-based. I'm familiar
with the well-known tools, such as sed, grep, awk, tr, loops to ssh to a
list of systems in order to run multiple commands and manipulate the
output, etc.

For me, I would not want to use any of those tools to do what I need to
do on the bigger jobs.

On 12/19/17 9:57 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 07:20:28 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 12:10 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
Excel is almost perfect for manipulating very large text files, such as
configuration files for specific network equipment. Just today, I needed
to make a few thousand transformations on a config file of about 200,000
lines. Excel is amazing at how well it works for that, (using formulas),
and that's before you bring VBA into the picture. With VBA, I don't
think there's anything it can't do to a text file, especially now that
the 65,535-row limit is gone. I use a text editor, Notepad++, for light
editing tasks, but when I'm in the deep end of the pool I reach for
Excel.

How do you make Excel do that? General idea is fine.

For the task yesterday, I dumped the config file, which is plain text,
into Column A of a new spreadsheet. In cell B1, I wrote a formula that
looks for a specific pattern in cell A1. Double click the handle of B1
and the formula is copied all the way down to the last row,
automatically adjusted for row references. At that point, I'm probably
done.

The formula in Col B looks at the contents of the cell in Col A, same
row, and if the pattern is found, makes the required transformations.
The result is automatically placed in Col B. If the pattern isn't found,
place the content from Col A directly into B, without changes. The
result is two configs, sort of a before and after snapshot, that are
automatically laid out beside each other in perfect alignment. If I need
to make additional changes, I just repeat the process in Col C, and so
on. When I'm done, I temporarily hide all of the intermediate columns so
that the source and the final results are next to each other, then I
show the customer the changes and we go from there.

Sounds a lot like doing Search and Replace, or at least similar to.

snip

Pure curiosity, have you ever tried this with other spreadsheets?

I have not. I'd lose VBA, for sure, but I'm not sure what other
compromises I'd have to make. Maybe only a few, or maybe significant.

Couldn't the "competition" add VBA to their product?

One of my pet peeves with most computer users is they are unwilling to
learn a piece of software, so they never discover those "oddities" that
some program will do that you never would have dreamed could be done.

Much less, the things they could be doing with their system and software
to save them a lot of time. Time, they will never get back.

We each carry a sort of 'toolbox' with us through life, and when
presented with a situation, we check our personal toolbox to see what we
have that can help us out. In theory, you can always add new tools to
that toolbox, but a lot of us get complacent and just keep using the
same old tools. I know that's true for me. It's entirely possible that
someone reading my account of using Excel to manipulate large text files
will groan with agony over the poor choice of tools, but that's what I
have in my toolbox and I've learned to use it pretty well. So far, I
haven't found anyone else in the company who uses Excel in that way, so
I've either discovered something here or I'm completely off the rails.

A simpler way of saying that is, we use the tools we know. :-)


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.11.6
Firefox 53.0.2 (64 bit)
Thunderbird 52.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 12/19/17 10:08 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 07:52:26 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 4:58 AM, mechanic wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 19:12:24 -0700, Ken Springer wrote:

snip

Publisher... I think I'd rather be bitten by a rattlesnake than use
Publisher. I used it at work when it was a standalone program being
sold by MS. Windows for Workgoups days. It was buggy. In order to get
a friend of mine to consider a page layout program for her job, I talked
her into going with me to the local library to take the Publisher 2007
class. The same bugs were still there. :-(

I just asked a colleague who used MS Pub to make flyers, brochures, and
other materials for the Marketing department from 2004 to 2013. She says
she never had a problem with it, it worked fine, and she wasn't aware of
any bugs. She says it had its limitations, so she'd sometimes have to
jump to Corel Draw or Photoshop for a sub-task, but then she'd come back
to Pub to put it all together. I don't doubt that it has bugs, but if
you never trip over them, it's hunky dory, right?

Depending on those subtasks, given the software she mentioned, well,
they may be part of Serif Page Plus.

Trying to remember all the bugs from 1995 is just impossible. The only
one I can remember had to do with fonts.

I wanted the font to have a fill color with a different color outline.
Publisher would not let me do it in one frame, I had to make two frames.
One frame had the color and no border. The 2nd frame had the border
but no fill.

But, when I duplicated the fill frame, and changed from fill to outline,
they were not the same size for the letter. The frames were the same
size, but not the letter. No way would one lay on top of the other and
match, not even close.

I tried duplicating the bug today, and couldn't do it. Either MS did
fix it, or I did the outline font a different way back then.

Has your colleague ever spent any time with something other than
Publisher? Trying similar programs is the only way to find the
shortcomings of any program.


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.11.6
Firefox 53.0.2 (64 bit)
Thunderbird 52.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 21:34:14 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 10:08 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 07:52:26 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 4:58 AM, mechanic wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 19:12:24 -0700, Ken Springer wrote:

snip

Publisher... I think I'd rather be bitten by a rattlesnake than use
Publisher. I used it at work when it was a standalone program being
sold by MS. Windows for Workgoups days. It was buggy. In order to get
a friend of mine to consider a page layout program for her job, I talked
her into going with me to the local library to take the Publisher 2007
class. The same bugs were still there. :-(

I just asked a colleague who used MS Pub to make flyers, brochures, and
other materials for the Marketing department from 2004 to 2013. She says
she never had a problem with it, it worked fine, and she wasn't aware of
any bugs. She says it had its limitations, so she'd sometimes have to
jump to Corel Draw or Photoshop for a sub-task, but then she'd come back
to Pub to put it all together. I don't doubt that it has bugs, but if
you never trip over them, it's hunky dory, right?

Depending on those subtasks, given the software she mentioned, well,
they may be part of Serif Page Plus.

Trying to remember all the bugs from 1995 is just impossible. The only
one I can remember had to do with fonts.

I wanted the font to have a fill color with a different color outline.
Publisher would not let me do it in one frame, I had to make two frames.
One frame had the color and no border. The 2nd frame had the border
but no fill.

But, when I duplicated the fill frame, and changed from fill to outline,
they were not the same size for the letter. The frames were the same
size, but not the letter. No way would one lay on top of the other and
match, not even close.

I tried duplicating the bug today, and couldn't do it. Either MS did
fix it, or I did the outline font a different way back then.

The way you described it, it doesn't sound like a bug. It simply sounds
like a limitation. Do you think it should have worked?

Has your colleague ever spent any time with something other than
Publisher? Trying similar programs is the only way to find the
shortcomings of any program.

To do what she did with Pub? No. It was provided by the company and it
worked perfectly well for her, except when she wanted to create or edit
graphics for her projects, but it's not really a graphics editing
program so she didn't see that as a Pub limitation.

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 21:14:26 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 9:57 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 07:20:28 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 12:10 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
Excel is almost perfect for manipulating very large text files, such as
configuration files for specific network equipment. Just today, I needed
to make a few thousand transformations on a config file of about 200,000
lines. Excel is amazing at how well it works for that, (using formulas),
and that's before you bring VBA into the picture. With VBA, I don't
think there's anything it can't do to a text file, especially now that
the 65,535-row limit is gone. I use a text editor, Notepad++, for light
editing tasks, but when I'm in the deep end of the pool I reach for
Excel.

How do you make Excel do that? General idea is fine.

For the task yesterday, I dumped the config file, which is plain text,
into Column A of a new spreadsheet. In cell B1, I wrote a formula that
looks for a specific pattern in cell A1. Double click the handle of B1
and the formula is copied all the way down to the last row,
automatically adjusted for row references. At that point, I'm probably
done.

The formula in Col B looks at the contents of the cell in Col A, same
row, and if the pattern is found, makes the required transformations.
The result is automatically placed in Col B. If the pattern isn't found,
place the content from Col A directly into B, without changes. The
result is two configs, sort of a before and after snapshot, that are
automatically laid out beside each other in perfect alignment. If I need
to make additional changes, I just repeat the process in Col C, and so
on. When I'm done, I temporarily hide all of the intermediate columns so
that the source and the final results are next to each other, then I
show the customer the changes and we go from there.

Sounds a lot like doing Search and Replace, or at least similar to.

No, it doesn't have much in common with that, but I can see why it would
appear to.

snip

Pure curiosity, have you ever tried this with other spreadsheets?

I have not. I'd lose VBA, for sure, but I'm not sure what other
compromises I'd have to make. Maybe only a few, or maybe significant.

Couldn't the "competition" add VBA to their product?

I don't see how. It's Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications. I've
never seen anyone else license or bundle it.

One of my pet peeves with most computer users is they are unwilling to
learn a piece of software, so they never discover those "oddities" that
some program will do that you never would have dreamed could be done.

Much less, the things they could be doing with their system and software
to save them a lot of time. Time, they will never get back.

We each carry a sort of 'toolbox' with us through life, and when
presented with a situation, we check our personal toolbox to see what we
have that can help us out. In theory, you can always add new tools to
that toolbox, but a lot of us get complacent and just keep using the
same old tools. I know that's true for me. It's entirely possible that
someone reading my account of using Excel to manipulate large text files
will groan with agony over the poor choice of tools, but that's what I
have in my toolbox and I've learned to use it pretty well. So far, I
haven't found anyone else in the company who uses Excel in that way, so
I've either discovered something here or I'm completely off the rails.

A simpler way of saying that is, we use the tools we know. :-)

I thought the context was important.

On 12/19/17 9:56 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 21:34:14 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 10:08 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 07:52:26 -0700, Ken Springer
wrote:

On 12/19/17 4:58 AM, mechanic wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 19:12:24 -0700, Ken Springer wrote:

snip

Publisher... I think I'd rather be bitten by a rattlesnake than use
Publisher. I used it at work when it was a standalone program being
sold by MS. Windows for Workgoups days. It was buggy. In order to get
a friend of mine to consider a page layout program for her job, I talked
her into going with me to the local library to take the Publisher 2007
class. The same bugs were still there. :-(

I just asked a colleague who used MS Pub to make flyers, brochures, and
other materials for the Marketing department from 2004 to 2013. She says
she never had a problem with it, it worked fine, and she wasn't aware of
any bugs. She says it had its limitations, so she'd sometimes have to
jump to Corel Draw or Photoshop for a sub-task, but then she'd come back
to Pub to put it all together. I don't doubt that it has bugs, but if
you never trip over them, it's hunky dory, right?

Depending on those subtasks, given the software she mentioned, well,
they may be part of Serif Page Plus.

Trying to remember all the bugs from 1995 is just impossible. The only
one I can remember had to do with fonts.

I wanted the font to have a fill color with a different color outline.
Publisher would not let me do it in one frame, I had to make two frames.
One frame had the color and no border. The 2nd frame had the border
but no fill.

But, when I duplicated the fill frame, and changed from fill to outline,
they were not the same size for the letter. The frames were the same
size, but not the letter. No way would one lay on top of the other and
match, not even close.

I tried duplicating the bug today, and couldn't do it. Either MS did
fix it, or I did the outline font a different way back then.

The way you described it, it doesn't sound like a bug. It simply sounds
like a limitation. Do you think it should have worked?

True, not being able to have a fill and outline all in a single frame is
a limitation. The bug was when you took a copy of the frame, and
changed the solid letters to outline letters, and the outline was
"bigger" than original was the bug. The outline result should have been
the same size.


Has your colleague ever spent any time with something other than
Publisher? Trying similar programs is the only way to find the
shortcomings of any program.

To do what she did with Pub? No. It was provided by the company and it
worked perfectly well for her, except when she wanted to create or edit
graphics for her projects, but it's not really a graphics editing
program so she didn't see that as a Pub limitation.

Page Plus has basic vector and bitmapped editing built in, I believe.



--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.11.6
Firefox 53.0.2 (64 bit)
Thunderbird 52.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 12/17/2017 6:06 PM, Auric__ wrote:
micky wrote:

I'm trying to help my brother, who uses win10 and was writing a long
letter in Word and a small window opened up and he clicked on it, and
his letter disappeared.

Let me guess. He wrote the entire letter without saving it once, right?
That's not a "Microsoft" problem, that's a "your brother" problem.

And what was the "small window" anyway? I can't think of anything that would
randomly pop up where clicking it would hide Word.

So with Teamviewer, I'm trying to help him get it back...

Well, we gave up and he tried to close the computer and it gave a
message that 2 documents were open, and one was the important one, and
he called me again and I brought it up, named it, and saved it.

But doesn't MS make this harder than it should be?

Not deliberately, I would think.

He wouldn't think of this but I opened options and saw that recovery
backups are saved in
C:\users\mybrother\appdata\roaming\word, or something like that.

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word

But when I tried to find this directory, there was no appdata under
mybrother. Now I'm sort of slow so it didnt' occur to me that that's
one of the hidden filies... it is, isn't it? Why do they hide a
directory that hold application data, including text files that someone
like my brother was working on.

The AppData folder is usually hidden, yes. Open Explorer and paste the path
in the address bar and it will take you straight there, if it exists,
regardless of whether it's hidden or not.

And since MS wrote both the OS and Word, doesn't it know that directory
is often hidden and why doesn't it make it easier to find a lost file
like this?

I believe Microsoft assumes that the average user doesn't know the first
thing about the computer beyond what's presented to them via the desktop and
the start menu.

Even gmail, not one of the easiest thigns to use, has a folder called
Drafts.

My brother is 77 yo. but that's not the problem. He's as smart as he
ever was but has never related well to computers. It seems to me that
MS makes it harder than ever.

You have to save the document as you're working on it. I tend to save things
basically every time I make any changes at all.


Don't know if it's still there or not --- but hidden away is a small
program called "Write" (used to be called "word pad"). It's a fine
little word processor. Also hidden away is "Calculator" -- a fine
scientific calculator,or by toggle a simple calculator.

Mathedman wrote:

Don't know if it's still there or not --- but hidden away is a small
program called "Write" (used to be called "word pad"). It's a fine
little word processor.

Write has been included with Windows since Windows 1.0 (1985), while Wordpad
dates to Windows 1995. Write is extremely minimal, providing only the most
basic editing functionality.

If you look in the Windows directory on a modern system, you'll still find
write.exe, but on a 32- or 64-bit system it just launches Wordpad.

Also hidden away is "Calculator" -- a fine
scientific calculator,or by toggle a simple calculator.

Also included since the very beginnings of Windows.

--
Oh look, I'm not dead.

On Thu, 21 Dec 2017 02:42:29 -0000 (UTC), Auric__ wrote:

Mathedman wrote:

Don't know if it's still there or not --- but hidden away is a small
program called "Write" (used to be called "word pad"). It's a fine
little word processor.

Write has been included with Windows since Windows 1.0 (1985), while Wordpad
dates to Windows 1995. Write is extremely minimal, providing only the most
basic editing functionality.

If you look in the Windows directory on a modern system, you'll still find
write.exe, but on a 32- or 64-bit system it just launches Wordpad.

Interestingly, write.exe appears as an application in the file
browser (but only a few kBytes) but appears to open Wordpad.

On Thu, 21 Dec 2017 02:42:29 -0000 (UTC), "Auric__"
wrote:

Mathedman wrote:

Don't know if it's still there or not --- but hidden away is a small
program called "Write" (used to be called "word pad"). It's a fine
little word processor.

Write has been included with Windows since Windows 1.0 (1985), while Wordpad
dates to Windows 1995. Write is extremely minimal, providing only the most
basic editing functionality.

If you look in the Windows directory on a modern system, you'll still find
write.exe, but on a 32- or 64-bit system it just launches Wordpad.

Funny enough, Wordpad would probably have been a fairly sophisticated
word processor in 1985 even though it's a complete joke nowadays.

Also hidden away is "Calculator" -- a fine
scientific calculator,or by toggle a simple calculator.

Also included since the very beginnings of Windows.

What a gift!