ZirconBlue
Sole Survivor of L-Town
Too powerful, sometimes. Word has a nasty habit of deciding it know better than me how to format things. I'm sure I do a lot of "bad formatting" just trying to force Word to do what I want.
Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10
- Thread starter TragicMonkey
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Too powerful, sometimes. Word has a nasty habit of deciding it know better than me how to format things. I'm sure I do a lot of "bad formatting" just trying to force Word to do what I want.
catsmate
No longer the 1
- Joined
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- 34,767
This. Or use paste as unformatted text into a decently formatted template.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
That's the common excuse, yes. But Word doesn't do anything without a reason. What seems like "Word decides it knows better" is actually Word being configured in a certain way that produces results that you don't expect. There are ways to reconfigure it. It may require looking a layer deeper than the user is used to.
A few versions ago, I could make Word sing and dance. I still can, largely, but my patience with fixing someone else's mess is finite.
Wudang
BOFH
As usual I provide a link to Charles Stross on Word.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
With a title like that I have little interest in reading it. MS Office is widely used across government and business and if your job involves documentation in any way, it's a good idea to get used to it, even if your preference is for something different.
Privately, of course, you use whatever you want. Personally I use LibreOffice at home. But I still know how to make Word sing and dance.
Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2002
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- 5,363
This isn't a spec, it's a vague aspiration. What are you being paid for if the programmer has to do 99% of the work?
Another one of the my bug bears, programming shouldn’t be designing*, it should be implementing a design.
*Of course programmers should be “designing” things like the logic used, data structures and so on but that should be in the service of the design of the software not designing the software itself.
Working in the games industry it is still a huge battle to get people to understand how much work is needed upfront before the first line of code is produced. That is if you want a project that you can control and make reasonably accurate(ish) time, resource and budget estimates.
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
No one seems capable of creating a document base that is robust and easy to use with good version management.
What seems to happen is numerous documents that don't follow any standard and are scattered in random locations as attachments.
Because it takes work and discipline and has to be enforced. It is seen, often right at the top as “make work” or something unneeded.
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
It's on the computer. And computers do things "automatically", like organising and making unlimited instant backups, maintaining document versioning, and putting everything in its right place.
Wudang
BOFH
In this case it was seen to be important by the senior manager and so needed the special insight of an impulse-driven control freak ie him. Helped by some numpty deciding to turn off direct links.
IBM Hursley had a great home rolled one based partly ontheir home rolled code version control system. Keyword search was excellent and always found latest version.
So true.
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
I managed to convince some users that computers could not read their minds or do stuff they weren't told to do. I described them thus: "Computers do only really simple dumb things, like adding 1 and 1. But they do LOTS of these dumb things really fast. The trick is to tell them which dumb things they must do in the right order to make them look smart to slow people. This is called programming. Get programming wrong and your computer just does lots of dumb things, that's all."
Wudang
BOFH
I compare computers to surly adolescents.
"Can you take the recycling out?"
Mmph
Later find the recycling sack outside the back door.
"So? You said take it out. It's out. You didn't say to put it in the recycling bin"
"Can you take the recycling out?"
Mmph
Later find the recycling sack outside the back door.
"So? You said take it out. It's out. You didn't say to put it in the recycling bin"
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Well, all of my revisions to the SOP document have been accepted. It's nice to see it acknowledged occasionally that I know what I'm talking about. Helps with the impostor syndrome.
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
Good.
Now go find some more of those changes/fixes everyone whines about but nobody does anything about, and fix them too. Get on a roll!
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
My role is being expanded in this area, as part of my personal development plan. So it's definitely going to happen.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
When I took the job I was told I'd just have to pull data out of the database, I wasn't warned that several times a year I'd have to explain to people how time works. I'm not a physicist and all of these people make at least twice what I do, why do I get stuck explaining to them that in the past there was more future than there is now?
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Keep a copy of Hawking's A Brief History of Time on your desk with the relevant sections highlighted with sticky notes. When people come to your desk asking you to do impossible things, open the book to the appropriate section and hand it to them.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Wonderful. A full-on music and dance festival is going off right outside the front door of my office. I'm going to have to navigate through that in order to get to my car and go home.
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