Legal Commentary

Word Hell

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

So far, this working vacation is less fun than I had hoped. And the culprit is clear: Microsoft Word.

I am a dyded-in-the-wool WordPerfect guy. I’ve been using WP since version 4.1. Back in the DOS days, I could practically speak macro language. I made the switch to the windows versions somewhat reluctantly, driven to by the need to import/export to HTML, and stayed for the great integration with PDF. (And I never did get fluent in the new macro language, which needs to be compiled and is ust too fussy.)

I basically only ever use Word when a law journal makes me, and if the program has feelings it knows how I feel about it. A couple of days ago I got the first edited version of my latest article back from the journal. They converted it from WordPerfect to word, which they’d warned me they would do. There’s one thing — only one thing — that Word does better than WordPerfect, and that’s the “track changes” feature, so I’m reconciled to the idea, at least in principle.

But the practice! All the converted footnotes are in the normal style; when I make a new footnote, they are in “footnote” style — which in this document doesn’t have superscripts, full justification, or single-spacing. Messes up everything. (In the last document I worked on, new footnotes came out in four-point type. I have no idea why, and the help desk couldn’t fix it.) Similarly, when I drop in inserts from other documents, the formatting in the notes goes all funny. I know there’s supposed to be a way to copy formatting from one place to another, with a little paint brush icon, but it only seems to work erratically for me.

And then there’s the way the cursor jumps about, the constant opening of new windows (e.g. to read a comment) that must be dragged to be closed, and the general frustration of expectatoins built up over many years.

Switching costs are not a myth.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on June 17, 2009 (boomark / email).