More on Word

Some pieces of software are unbelievable: as soon as you start noticing how nice are certain features, you discover that some other parts are so incredibly broken that you would want to put the whole thing in the thrash.

As is customary, I received the template to format my article, which was an IEEE standard. Nice. I opened it in Word 2007 for Mac (and the template should be compatible with that) and I removed the contents of the template (as advised on the template itself) and filled with my own text. Shit happens.

For no good reason, the styles built in the template were imported utterly broken. For example the base font size was plainly wrong, some styles did not use the “keep together with next paragraph” thing and so on. Essentially, I had to manually check the styles I used with ones in the unmodified template in order to fix things. And I was able to, however, it took time.

Then I sent the file to my advisor (as a word file, since perhaps he would like to modify some parts). And he told me I was not following the standards, for example because the image labels did not start with “Figure x.”; I found this quite strange, since I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the text was auto-inserted choosing the style (I think as a kind of numerated list style). I checked my file and the figure x. was still there. So I opened the document with word for Windows. And the Figure x. was missing.

Apparently Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2007 for Windows are not compatible at all. The question is: how many things are going to be fucked up? If I got a lot of nice features which I can’t use because otherwise I can’t share files with colleagues, then the whole point of using Word instead of Latex (and especially the “revisions” feature, which is very useful) is lost.

As a nice side note, I discovered the bibliography IEEE style I downloaded to “auto-manage” the bibliography is utterly broken. First, the references like [4] have italic numbers and the standard I have to follow has not… perhaps there are multiple standards, but then… how to discover the right file?

Second the bibliography itself is formatted as a huge double column table, which is completely unusable in 2-column mode. Other styles (such as the ones built-in with Word) do not format the references, so essentially applying the “references” style to the unformatted references simply solves the problem. But not with the style I have to use. And I don’t understand why word does not come with such widely used styles and I have to download broken third party implementations. The solution was to format the references by hand. Besides, Papers “import into Word” feature also gave me some problems, as every single link contained the pdf url, even if that is not standard. I don’t understand if it’s Papers fault, Word fault or the style fault. Well… doing things by hand, I solved the problem.

I still don’t understand the part “Word is user friendly”.