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Why is Microsoft Word??? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

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As a sweaty loser, all my adult life if I had to emit a document I either used LaTeX or Pandoc (which also uses LaTeX). LaTeX is its own can of worms (strange syntax, unwelcoming for newcomers, not easy to install, etc.) but if it's weird, it's weird in a way that I can wrap my head around.

For a group project we are using Microsoft Word, the online version, because I don't have it in me to extol the virtues of LaTeX or Typst to non-tech people. We are using the online version because of the collaboration thing also because no one wants to buy Office.

It's such a strange piece of software. Like what I am trying to do right now is this: semantically designate headings and subheadings to automatically number them and generate a table of content. But it just won't work and I have no idea why because it doesn't say anything.

When I am trying to number headings manually, it sees and understands what my intention it and turns into a numbered list, changes the number to "1.". To work around this I have to add "a6." then remove the "a".

I am sure that Word veterans are horrified that I am doing everything wrong. I am accept your accusations with humility and grace. But I just want to be done with.

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[–] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, Word is brain dead. It’s from a time when WYSIWYG was the hot buzzword for desktop publishing. It’s not a bad idea per se, but without access to the raw files it’s really hard to fix problems when things get sideways.

The best advice for instances like this is to copy all the content into a text file, nuke the original file, and start over. This is probably going to happen multiple times because Word inserted some garbage into the doc in the background and there isn’t a way to see, or remove, what exactly Word did.

There may be a way to get access to the marked up files now, but I not sure how to do that. I’ve stayed as far away from word processors as possible for the last decade.