The Computer Help Catechism

Dad?

Yes?

Can you help me with the computer?

What's wrong?... Oh, spinning beachball of death I see.... What are you trying to do?

Print.

Print a document from Microsoft Word?

Uh-huh.

Did you save it before you tried to print?

I'm not sure.

What's the first rule of using Microsoft Word?

That it does not like me. That it is not my friend?

And so before doing anything major to your document, you?

Save.

Before you print?

Save.

Before you print preview?

Save.

Before you globally change margins?

Save.

Before you reformat all the paragraphs?

Save.

Before you save?

Save--there's something wrong there, Dad.

OK. I'm going to have to kill Word. Let's hope you saved your document...

Comments

[nate]

a mantra from my days in public accounting:

save early, save often

[Eli Rabett]

A true story from Word 1.0 and the Osborn lugable. We had a new post-doc (~1983) who had to type up a manuscript for a journal. She was settling down in front of the IBM Selectric, when we said, hey, we have this snappy new thing called a PC and a "Word Processor" that is much better. You can easily make corrections and then print it out. Use that. Sat her down, taught her how to type stuff in, etc ~10 AM. 5 PM she gets up, snaps the thing off and says "Done". Where did you save the file we ask. "Save?" she says. "What's that?".

There are at least three people still alive who can testify to the story. She killed the rest.

[tom]

More rules:

aim autosaves to a different physical disk every 10 minutes (so when the GUIlocks up you can wait to kill MSword and get the recovery file).

turn off quick saves.

at the first sign of trouble in a document, open a new empty document, ctrl-a ctrl-c in the iffy document to copy all, then ctrl-v to paste in the empty document. That gets your content into a document without the corrupted header/metadata (the cause of many document problems).

OpenOffice is quite useful for rescuing MSexcel spreadsheets, but OO hasn't helped me with MSword documents (I haven't tried ctrl-a ctrl-v copying from dying MSword into an empty OO document, but it might work).

Don't get me started about winXP not quite handling the 4GB of memory it supposedly is limited to...

If ESRI didn't make visualBasic the replacement for avenue, I could have a blissfully MS-free machine for all of my work!

[A. Zarkov]

Yesterday I heard my daughter scream from downstairs. I bolted downstairs thinking perhaps an intruder had entered the house. No it was the work of MS Word and a Wintel laptop. She is hard at work on a term project for law school and had suddenly gotten the infamous “blue screen.” “You did back it up!” “No.” “You do a save at least every ten minutes?” “No, but I do save frequently.” The good news is she only lost 20 minutes of work. Well Monday I powered up my new PowerMac G5, and Tuesday I installed MS office. Of course I had a problem with Word right away. It seems the MacOS X comes with a trial version of Word installed, so that’s why it wouldn’t work when I double clicked on a Word Document file. You have to delete the trial version of course. I guess I missed that important little fact when I read the installation instructions. Dealing with MS is worse than dealing with Ming.

[Jacques Distler]

"Well Monday I powered up my new PowerMac G5, and Tuesday I installed MS office. Of course I had a problem with Word right away..."

Well, there's your (and Brad's) problem, right there.

Why would you want to gunk-up a perfectly nice computer by installing Microsoft software on it?

Aside from crashing a lot, is there anything alternative non-Microsoft software can't do ... *better*?

[piotr]

Wysiwyg is a disease.

In a saner world, how can printing or changing margins be a reason to loose a document? One program edits, second formats, the third prints and they give wide bearth to each other. Yes, you can program one key to do all necessary operations in one shot, but the operations themselves are clearly defined and they do not interfere with each other. Not to mention that none of them is capable of damaging your window system or operating system.

In Latex or troff, things like "global change of margins" or "reformatting all paragraphs" may require you to look up something in documentation, but after that is no more difficult than affing a comma.

[s9]

"Wysiwyg is a disease."

I've been complaining about the pathogenic nature of human-to-computer interfaces since we migrated from Teletype to "glass". My *father* has been complaining since we replaced the front panel lights with LED's. I laugh at your puny whinging about WYSIWYG.

Grace Hopper invented the compiler in the hopes That The Programmer May Return To Being A Mathematician. Of all the wrecked dreams in technology history, this one pains me the most.

[Kevin Lyda]

Stop rewarding companies that make crap software. And think about using community developed alternatives: http://www.openoffice.org/

[Chris Brown]

Why not give Sun's Star Office Suite a try for $69.95? Or "Open Office" for free.

[jim]

I write in emacs and transfer the result to word for formatting and printing. I don't know that wysiwyg is a disease (seeing the thing formatted helps catch some extra typos), but it's a hindrance, a distraction rather, when I'm trying to come up with the right words. And this procedure automatically creates a "text-complete" archived version. Perhaps as a result of this procedure, I've never experienced the spinning beach ball using word.

[Chris]

I use OpenOffice on my work computer and MS Office on my laptop (running Windows XP). Sure, Open Office is pretty nice for something that is free, but it doesn't compare to the Microsoft version for speed, ease of use, or number of features, especially when you go beyond simple word processing.

The "Blue Screen" is usually a result of either hardware problems or some ill-behaved legacy background application (which current Microsoft products usually aren't) doing something funky. Of course it's always more convenient to blame Microsoft instead of the cute little background picture changer/BonziBuddy/spyware/etc. that comes from who-knows-where that is running in the background. My first question to anyone who has stability issues with their computer is, "Do you really know what applications you're actually running?"

Of course it's not good that an application should crash the whole system, and that's a legitimate gripe. But Windows needs to support legacy software, and it isn't like *nix systems are immune either. I'm aware of at least a few websites that can kill my (fully updated) Firefox on my Linux box, and in some cases cause it to suck so much memory/processor time that the machine is unreachable either by keyboard or remote login. So much for the superiority of "community developed alternatives"...

[Kieran]

It started out as a catechism but ended as a litany.

[Barry]

Early 1980's, in the Army. I was working in the S-1 office at night, so that I could use their Laneer (sp?) word processor; which was lusted after by every officer in the battalion. I spend several hours on some documents, and am cleaning up. I find out that 'delete file' is not the same as 'delete page'.

[a different chris]

Ok, my funny -now- story from way back in the early days of notebooks:

Had a notebook with some early version of Word on it. Set autosave of course because those days notebooks liked to just pretty much shut off without much warning. And hibernation was something mother nature did.

The other thing you did in those days was use RAMDRIVE. For a compiler (I think) I had something like "SET TEMP=D:" so the compiler used the ramdrive for it's intermediate files.

Happy as a clam for like 6 months. Then I upgraded Word.

Which very cleverly saw the "SET TEMP" and changed my hand-set autosave location to D:.

Well, you can guess the rest. And yes, it was a very important document and I spent like 3 hours on it. And another 1/2 trying to figure out WTH happened to my autosave, which it was periodically assuring me it was doing.

[nate]

when i was in high school, we didn't have fancy color monitors, hard drives, and Word integrated in a suite of MS products. now, we he had flashing green monitors, gigantic floppy disks, and much more limited options. And we liked it.

sincerely,
grumpy old man

[nate]

some edits... see revised:

When I was in high school, we didn't have fancy color monitors, hard drives, and Word integrated in a suite of MS products. No, we had flashing green monitors, gigantic floppy disks, and much more limited options. And we liked it.

Sincerely,
grumpy old man

[liberal]

piotr wrote, "Wysiwyg is a disease.

"In a saner world, how can printing or changing margins be a reason to loose a document? One program edits, second formats, the third prints and they give wide bearth to each other."

Right on, bro'.

This Wysiwyg nonsense of mixing up logical and physical markup is just nuts.

[WatchfulBabbler]

MacOS X comes with a very nice word processor in the form of vi. If you can't do it in vt100, did you really need to do it at all?

[Alex Merz]

I've pretty much killed off Word for academic writing, and its evil spawn EndNote as well. (On the Mac platform, Word and EndNote are synergystically buggy.) The last NIH grant proposal that I submitted was done in Mellel, with Bookends used for reference management. A vast improvement in simplicity of workflow, quietness of interface, speed and reliability. At the very least, ditch EndNote for Bookends. Bookends has a *wonderful* engine for importing EndNote, AND it can extrude open-format BibTex files, AND it works with Mellel, Nissus, and Word, AND it's cheaper than EndNote, AND it lacks EndNote's hideous upgrade cycle, which is coupled to Word's.

The only Microsoft product I use much anymore is XL, and although its plotting capabilities are totally inadequate, it remains superb. But even XL could be abandoned in favor of Gnumeric with few qualms.

[Michael Cain]

"Wysiwyg is a disease."

And one that decreases productivity, as well. I recall a sizeable study done at Bell Labs many years ago involving groups preparing documentation for large systems. One group was trained in troff, the other in the WYSIWYG system of the day. Both prepared a large documentation package (>500 pages). The troff group was about 20% more productive. Their results were also of higher quality measured in terms of consistency of appearance, etc.

As this was not what the department head wanted, the experiment was repeated. Same result. More detailed study revealed that the WYSIWYG group spent 20% of their time worrying about fonts, margins, hyphenation, paragraph indentation and such from the very beginning, even on material that was going to be heavily modified or discarded. There is much to be said for ".P" being the limit to how much you can affect the appearance of a paragraph early on in the process.

I will be convinced that Microsoft is serious about Word being a useful tool when they support basic floating displays...

[Hektor Bim]

Brad, why isn't your daughter writing her papers in LaTeX? LaTeX is your friend, and combined with emacs, it autosaves your files for you. Let's not even get into why you are punishing her with such a bad operating system.

It's sad to see parents hazing their children and continuing the cycle of abuse.

[Emma Anne]

Since my job involves editing and trading documents back and forth several times with a lot of different people, I am stuck with Word (I stuck it out with WordPerfect for as long as I could). But yes, it sucks more.

The thing I hate the most: it does these weird things that you can't see to undo. Like you suddenly can't make your page numbers show up. Or every new page starts with a line in the margin. Where did it come from ? How do I get rid of it? Only the shadow knows.

[notjafo]

I have one word (lowercase w) for you

WordPerfect

[Murray Bowles]

The hard part with Word is knowing to save before you INADVERTENTLY reformat all paragraphs.

[Joe Saturnalia]

I hate MS Word, but I keep using it for two reasons:

1. I need to be able to edit and print my documents on a bunch of different computers, and I can't install LaTeX or Mellel or whatever on all of them.

2. I need to send drafts of various documents to other people, and I can't install LaTeX or Mellel or whatever on their computers. My readers usually stick comments directly in the document, so pdfs aren't going to work, and I can't really tell them to learn emacs/vi/whatever just for me...

[a different chris]

>When I was in high school

Which you walked to and from every day. In a snowstorm. 50 miles. Uphill. Both ways. ;>

My dad went to that school.

[liberal]

Joe Saturnalia wrote, "I need to send drafts of various documents to other people, and I can't install LaTeX or Mellel or whatever on their computers."

A good example of economic rents coming from networking effects. (Not saying I blame you.)

But you could use OpenOffice, and export to RTF or DOC.

[liberal]

Re Mellel: from their website: "Mellel is an advanced, multilingual word processor built for Mac OS X. Designed for scholars and writers, it offers innovative page, paragraph, and character styles, outline, tables, headers and footers, citations and bibliography, tabs, and much more."

Which means it's useless because it's OS-dependent.

[jon livesey]

I joked to a friend the other day that when we are old and grey, there will be such a shortage of skilled nursing home staff that a nice little robot will bring us our coffee and orange juice every morning, and will also install the latest critical patch to Windows 2050 version 1024.256.16.

[Joe Saturnalia]

I'm not too impressed with Open Office. It seems slower and clunkier than Word on the PC I use in the office, and the OS X version(s) are just a disaster. If only Mellel had better .doc/.rtf export/import, I'd probably be ok, but right now it sucks...

[A. Zarkov]

While I generally despise MS products for various general and specific reasons, I personally (unlike my daughter) have not had too much trouble running Word on a PC. I am about to find out how well it works on a PowerMac G5. I also have to admit that MS help line, was actually very helpful in fixing my minor installment problem on the new Mac. The problem was really my fault for not having read the installation instructions carefully enough. The combination of MS Word with MathType and EndNotes has actually proved to be a pretty workable system for me, allowing me to share docs and write joint papers with people. One thing I have found helpful is turning off a lot of the features like AutoCorrect. Following the recommendations from the book “Word Annoyances” avoided a lot of problems.

The MS product I really don’t like is Excel because it often fails to do calculations correctly. One should not use Excel for statistical calculations unless you have some way of independently checking the result. It was the worst of all packages in running a set of NIST benchmark problems. The best is Mathematica. Even MATLAB or Splus will fail on some problems. Try finding the determinant of a Hilbert matrix. At about order 12 MATLAB fails giving a negative number. They might have improved it since I last tried this several years ago.

[s9]

Once again, I will suggest that Pages (part of iWork '05) is worth the price of the package by itself. Keynote is a million times better than Powerpoint too.

Disclosure: I work for the company that makes this software, though I have nothing to do with its development.

[DOR]

Ahh, ancient history... 5-1/4 inch floppy disks ... green screens ... two people trying to print at the same time crashing the system.

At an IT conference (so I’m told; can’t vouch for this) some years back –DOS days – and one of the first voice recognition programs was being showcased. After the presenter explained the thing, and got it up and running, some wag in the front row shouted out “C colon backslash dee eee ell star period star return”.

Word: About 18 years ago, my company decided to switch from one word processing package to another. Those of us who spent most of our time writing hated it – far to cumbersome, takes more key strokes to do the most common tasks, etc, etc – and grumbled a lot.

The Chair came through town and I asked her a simple question:
Me: “Of the people on the committee that selected this word processing package, how many of them spend most of their time writing?”
She: “Um, none.”
Me: “Ahh, that’s what I thought.”

Smart lady: We switched again a year later, and a year after that. Really disrupts productivity.

(If anyone’s keeping score, the progression was XYWrite, Word Star, Word Perfect and Word.)
.

[liberal]

A. Zarkov wrote, "One should not use Excel for statistical calculations unless you have some way of independently checking the result."

I haven't dealt with this, but a statistician at the federal institute where I work, who I have a lot of respect for, said the same thing.

[Ginger Yellow]

Here's my OS X Word bugbear. As soon as OS X starts to chug (which usually means after I haven't reset it for a day) Word crashes when I try to create a new folder in the 'save' dialogue box. Because of the folder structure we have at work, I do this a lot. This gets very, very annoying.I can't use another app either, since our files have to be saved in Word 5.1 for Macs format.

[Matt McIrvin]

Here is what I think: I've never warmed to WYSIWYG word processors because it's distracting to think of the document as physical pieces of paper. The modern word processor pushes that in your face up front; it's better to think of the document as a stream of characters. I prefer to use a plain text editor (BBEdit or emacs) for extended writing.

BUT! Plain text, for all its many advantages, has the great disadvantage that there's no built-in standard for simple inline markup: by which I don't mean anything fancy like font family and color changes, but just bold, italic, superscripts and subscripts, etc. This stuff is not WYSIWYG nonsense; it's more akin to punctuation. It's conceptually part of the stream of text, not part of the document formatting. I'd like to see some direct representation of that stuff while I type; not true WYSIWYG but more like what-you-see-is-what-you-stream.

In short, I've come to realize that what I really want is not WYSIWYG, nor the alpha geek's text editor/ markup language/ postprocessor paradigm, but rather the happy medium achieved by early character-based word processors like Wordstar in the 1980s. And you'll notice that blogging tools typically give you more or less that same set of features.

[mwg]

While I would prefer to use vim, I've had to use Word for several large projects. It's really not too bad, although it tends to crash more on Linux than it does on Windows (surprise, surprise).

[Jonathan W. King]

jim writes:
>
> I write in emacs and transfer the result to word for formatting
> and printing. I don't know that wysiwyg is a disease (seeing
> the thing formatted helps catch some extra typos), but it's a
> hindrance, a distraction rather, when I'm trying to come up
> with the right words

I find that I don't truly need to use emacs _per se_ to write, I do really like to use emacs-style editing commands. And this is what makes Mac OSX the best thing since sliced bread: any program that could support these does support them, since they are built into the Cocoa programming framework.

Sometimes I'll bang text out in emacs and do what you say, but if I know the thing is going to need light formatting and not much more, I'll usually fire up TextEdit, which in *recent* versions of Mac OS X is a really good program. Much simpler than Word, with a much smaller memory footprint, does an okay job of importing and a good job of exporting .doc. And it has emacs-style editing keys. :-) Of course, as soon as you need an equation in there, you just conver the whole thing to LaTeX. In any case, I estimate that 95% of all undergraduate writing could be done more quickly and easily in TextEdit than word, and over 90% would be doable in a decent web app word processor, if we had one yet.

Given that you use OSX, some people have suggested that you use Pages for word processing. I'm not quite sure I can make that recommendation. Pages currently turns out to be the finest program on earth for making up short flyers, brochures, newsletters, and (really and truly!) scientific posters. I did my last Neurosciences poster in Pages, and the result was phenomenally good is much less time than clunking around with Powerpoint ever was. But for just writing a 5-page paper...I don't see the advantage of Pages. It is a much simpler interface than Word, but the program itself is a bit buggy and slow on most lower-end Macs. Next year's version might be a big step up; Keynote 2.0 certainly was a big improvement over Keynote 1.0.

[Jonathan W. King]

jim writes:
>
> I write in emacs and transfer the result to word for formatting
> and printing. I don't know that wysiwyg is a disease (seeing
> the thing formatted helps catch some extra typos), but it's a
> hindrance, a distraction rather, when I'm trying to come up
> with the right words

I find that I don't truly need to use emacs _per se_ to write, I do really like to use emacs-style editing commands. And this is what makes Mac OSX the best thing since sliced bread: any program that could support these does support them, since they are built into the Cocoa programming framework.

Sometimes I'll bang text out in emacs and do what you say, but if I know the thing is going to need light formatting and not much more, I'll usually fire up TextEdit, which in *recent* versions of Mac OS X is a really good program. Much simpler than Word, with a much smaller memory footprint, does an okay job of importing and a good job of exporting .doc. And it has emacs-style editing keys. :-) Of course, as soon as you need an equation in there, you just conver the whole thing to LaTeX. In any case, I estimate that 95% of all undergraduate writing could be done more quickly and easily in TextEdit than word, and over 90% would be doable in a decent web app word processor, if we had one yet.

Given that you use OSX, some people have suggested that you use Pages for word processing. I'm not quite sure I can make that recommendation. Pages currently turns out to be the finest program on earth for making up short flyers, brochures, newsletters, and (really and truly!) scientific posters. I did my last Neurosciences poster in Pages, and the result was phenomenally good is much less time than clunking around with Powerpoint ever was. But for just writing a 5-page paper...I don't see the advantage of Pages. It is a much simpler interface than Word, but the program itself is a bit buggy and slow on most lower-end Macs. Next year's version might be a big step up; Keynote 2.0 certainly was a big improvement over Keynote 1.0.

[Matt McIrvin]

Though I have AbiWord somewhere on this machine, which is a relatively full-featured free word processor, I also find myself reaching for OS X TextEdit to produce simple printed documents.

For a simple-to-use formatting postprocessor that produces HTML, somebody on my LJ just mentioned John Gruber's wonderful Markdown language, which I've used to create Web pages in the past. The idea is that it takes something as close as possible to the informal conventions used in plain ASCII email (paragraphs separated by blank lines, headings underlined with rows of dashes, *italics* and such), and translates those into HTML tags in what is hoped to be a reasonable fashion. It's similar in some ways to MediaWiki wikitext, though somewhat more intuitive to my mind, especially with regard to lists. It works pretty well and is both a command-line program and a Mac BBEdit plug-in.

[jeem]

Mac users should check out Tex-Edit. It's a shareware (not disabled if not registered) scriptable, styled text editor. It won't export .doc files or do equations, but it is otherwise superb!

http://www.tex-edit.com/

[otis cooper]

I like the dad to daughter issue above. It reminds us of several customers that used our computer repair dvds. Folks are simply scared to death to open their computer and fix the thing.

Our Computer Repair On Video site is where you can go should you do have a PC crash, or any other pc problem for that matter.