Re. Tools: Word/Weird?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Kari Kristine Gulbrandsen wondered <<why does everybody hate Word?  Granted,
I have run into some problems with it-- but nothing that I couldn't work
around or do differently.>>

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with the software, quite apart from
the knee-jerk reaction to distrust anything produced by Microsoft. A large
part of the problem is that Word is such a fine tool for writing, and it's
deeply frustrating to encounter all the glitches that periodically rise up
and bite us. And some people have had disastrous problems with the software:
corrupted files, lost work, hours of overtime to recapture damaged files,
missed deadlines, and all the related stresses. Were I the guy running
Microsoft, I'd spend the next year in a 12-step program until I learned to
resist the urge to add new features, and I'd atone for giving in so often to
this urge by making a triage list of the existing features that need to be
fixed. Consider one well-known example: it's obscene that something as basic
as the autonumbering feature still doesn't work right. This has been a known
bug for something like 3 years, if not longer, and the arrogance of devoting
programmer hours to adding something like that idiotic help assistant (the
dancing paper clip and its kin) while ignoring something that affects most
writers daily isn't guaranteed to make people like you or your product. Then
there's the <oxymoron> online help </oxymoron>...

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer