Friend!

[ellenscult]

Yay! For those of you who know and love him, roninstorm has joined us on lj. That's made me a really happy bunny this morning. So now I'm going to go back to buggy, crashing Word¹...

^{1. I suspect it's the new SnagIt 7.1 Word plugin that's causing it, so I've disabled it, but it did wipe out all my - saved - changes from yesterday afternoon. Word sucks. And blows. At the same time. I'm going to head on over to CafePress to get a 'Word Happens mug. ;)}

Comments

[roninstorm.livejournal.com]

You're not using sections are you?

if (usingWord && sectionCount > 1) throw new RandomDeletionException();

I think that's probably the line of code in Office you need to delete.

:)

[ellenscult]

Not in this particular document - it's the online help output to Word so that I can tidy it up a very little, then send it off for translation. (Not to a translation company - them, I'd just send the original - but to a customer who wants it in French Canadian...)

I didn't know that about sections - I do have them in my manuals, and they've always behaved themselves. Well, as much as they always do, anyway. It's the add-ins that I find conflict horribly. Acrobat's PDF Maker plugins will crash Word if enabled along with the QuickOffice plugin. And it seems that the new SnagIt plugin will just crash Word anyway, as *touchmonitor* Word hasn't crashed so far this morning since I disabled it.

[roninstorm.livejournal.com]

Ah, we always have problems with our manuals with sections, but it could easily be a combination of lack of understanding about Word, a total lack of patience, and trying to do these manuals after midnight. Not me, fortunately!

AbiWord

[a-crow.livejournal.com]

Not sure how much word compatibility you get, but I have started using AbiWord to do the odd bit of rich text.

http://www.abisource.com/download/

Free and only about 5meg, and seems to do most things word does (or at least all the things I used, which is many).

Re: AbiWord

[ellenscult]

Ta muchly for that. I'll have a look at it at home, but I can't use it at work. Mind you, for all my complaining, Word is *incredibly* powerful, and will do more than any other word processor around. But it has lots of bugs, and it can be very difficult to make it behave. Luckily, there are lots of resources online to make it a less painful experience.

Re: AbiWord

[medains.livejournal.com]

It's only better than everything else because they bought all the closest competition and integrated the products, or copied them and had such a distribution base that they could force them out of the market. (Remember the Word2.0->Word6.0 fiasco?)

Anyone know why Microsoft still do 'Visual FoxPro', which essentially competes with 'Access'? They bought Fox software (and coincidentally released Access that year, whilst leaving the FoxPro product with a divide by zero bug unpatched for 4 years).