There are so many valid reasons to loathe Microshite – sorry, the Microsoft Corporation [TM] – that a whole book, nay a whole library, could be written with them. So let’s start small. I’m editing a document in that execrable bloatware Word 2004 on a Mac. Word keeps on capitalising the first letter of text I put in a table cell, so I have to backspace and retype it every time. I look in Autocorrect options and there’s no check box for auto-capitalising table cells. Similarly in Preferences. I learn, not from the pisspoor Help file but from a Scroogle search, that if you right-click on a correction you get a popup with the option labelled “Stop auto-capitalizing of table cells”. Ok, I do that, and it eventually kills this ‘feature’. Time cost? The best part of 20 minutes to kill an unwanted feature.
I’d thought I’d killed all the ‘features’ of this piece of shiteware ages ago. I turned off every single Autocorrect and Autoformat option as I’m capable of proofing my own writing, ta very much Steve Ballmer, I don’t want any ’smart quotes’ with proprietary characters which display mankily online (how often do you see online text that’s been copied from Word with ? characters in place of a ’smart quote’ when you view it in a proper browser?), I don’t want my dates superscripted, and I don’t want my arse scratched. What’s especially irritating about so many of these ‘features’, other than that they’re all on by default, is that you have to kill them in two different places.
Word is an example of ‘inimical software’, software which you have to fight with so that you can do what you want to do, not what it wants you to do, and boy have I done some fighting with this appalling piece of crud over the years. Why do I use it if it’s that bad? Because I’ve no real choice as all my employers have used it and it’s become the de facto WP standard (a striking example of bad driving out good). Yes, there is the very fine Open Office, but compatibility with Word is sometimes iffy as Microshite, unsurprisingly, keeps moving the goalposts to scupper its main competitor. The last edition of Word that was any good was Word for Windows 2, the six installation floppies for which I still have and occasionally think of reinstalling (except Windoze eXtra Pathetic probably wouldn’t run it) – it was a nice piece of tight coding with easily enough features for the most demanding writer. Hell, I wrote two books with it, with indices, TOCs, referencing, the works. Loaded quickly, ran smoothly, did what you wanted it to do. Since then it’s been an increasingly grotesque march to baroque bloatware, such that the software, which is just a word processor after all (remember that DisplayWrite, WordPerfect, and Wordstar all fitted onto 5.25″ floppies?), now requires 00s of megabytes of disk space and serious wodges of RAM.
So one of the reasons I hate Microshite is because they produce shite software. And that, of itself, is reason enough, but more will follow…
