On Frustrations with Word

Sometimes I just don’t get Microsoft Word.

It decided, for some reason, that several paragraphs were misspelled.

The entire paragraphs.

Words like “the” were, at least according to Word, misspelled in those two paragraphs.

Everything was underlined in red.

I decided to run a spellcheck on the entire document. Perhaps, I thought, this would kick Word out of its funk.

Instead, things that Word had decided previously were spelled correctly came up as being misspelled. When, in fact, they weren’t.

Technology.

I love it, but sometimes it will drive one to distraction.

It could be that my custom dictionary has become too large.

It is massive. Over 2,000 entries. Including “Chrismahannukwanzukah.”

But I don’t know why that would cause Word to go all weird on words like “ant” or “the.”

Stupid Word.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

5 thoughts on “On Frustrations with Word

  1. Just this afternoon I was telling my fellow editor at Zenith Press that Bill Gates realized that the editing process can sometimes be rather boring, so he decided that Word would just pull totally random shit now and then to keep things interesting.

    Either that, or, because he effectively has no competition due to his market share, he has no financial incentive to ever really try to work the bugs out of his crappy, unpredictable bloatware.

  2. My first thought was, yes, that Word decided they were in a different language.

    The corrections it suggested were English words.

    Word does a lot of things, and it does a lot of things really well, but sometimes, it’s like a monkey on crack.

  3. I wonder if we can find out who Word’s dealer it, it must be pretty good stuff!

    Given the fun I was having with Internet Explorer yesterday, I think it might be a group thing inside Microsoft.

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