Microsoft Word

A personal story (Daniel K. Schneider 16

05, 6 November 2008 (UTC)).

I (Daniel K. Schneider) rarely use Microsoft Word and when I have to I find it extremely difficult to produce moderately good looking text, e.g. of the kind that would be expected in a self-published textbook. In addition, Word does things to me I didn't ask for, e.g. create new styles, change language, indent captions to the left, renumber items.

With a program like Adobe FrameMaker I can quite easily achieve what I want (in the past I also managed with formatting software). A real word processor does not try to do things it is not told to do. Also, I don't know anyone who even has a moderately good working knowledge to do things efficiently with this product. Therefore I will try to make an effort to write down a few tricks I might learn. I am particularly interested in:

• Having word executing my orders without helping me
• Creating larger text elements efficiently, e.g. vignettes with title, paragraphs of various forms and appropriate numbering, or figures that include a title, automatic number of the caption...
• Producing a document that is not too ugly (like most of the Word documents I must bear to look at).

Btw. I got the same problems with Open Office. Actually I like it even less, their double style management feature is utter crap. But their drawing program is great (and you can import these to either Word or FrameMaker).

I started to write down a few tips for both Word version that I use:

• Microsoft Word 2003
• Microsoft Word 2007