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Things that annoy me, part one, out of many

Using Microsoft office in a shared working environment

There are many things that I dislike about Microsoft applications, but, here I would like to focus on using Microsoft word in a shared working environment. I am currently working on developing a set of major documents, with colleagues from across the whole of our organisation.

One - excessive ability to customise, I regularly receive documents to tidy up, because other people are incapable of sorting out the formatting. Word allows you to customise a document in approximately 2.6 squillion ways, most users are familiar with bold text, and left aligned text. In the worst case, you end up rewriting the entire document, or recreating it on a blank document with cut and paste, because the formatting is so loused up.

Two - numbered lists, which won’t continue from the above list, because some sort of break has been inserted?

Three - numbered lists, which won’t restart, because ??

Four - random fonts appearing in your document, presumably blank space has been formatted at some stage, so when you stray into it, some completely random font appears.

Five - floating boxes, which float on the page, and won’t flow with the text. Idiots use these as if they were tables, then forward the document to me to amend. You also get borders, but I’ve not got my head round them yet.

Six - spell checking which randomly tells you the German dictionary is unavailable, but if you accept an error by mistake, won’t let you find it again. Even if you save, close and reopen the document.

Seven - track changes - fine in principal, but as soon as people start doing more than minor changes it is completely incomprehensible. You also need to accept all changes, then re-read the text carefully to ensure it still makes sense, as people invariably leave out spaces, or put in extra carriage returns.

Eight - indents, the text randomly deciding to indent. Each row can be all too easily customised with its own indents, and usually is by the time the document reaches you.

Nine - the tab key, only works as a tab when you are not in a table, in a table you need to use a set number of spaces.

Ten - text that is spaced over the entire line, the last line with only a few words, is also spaced out over the entire line. Not much fun fixing this for twenty pages.

Eleven - background shading, boxes, etc., who has time to fix these. There is highlighting, I quite like it, but no one else knows how to get rid of it, especially if they don’t use it.

Twelve - section breaks in the text, always a pain. The only time I think they are worth using, is when you need to change the page alignment for printing. However invariably a pain to use.

Twelve - minor peeve, the blank page which invariably appears at the end.

Thirteen - excessive size of document. We generally send word documents to each other with revisions, they are so large, that after a few days, our e-mail locks out, and we have to delete them.

Fourteen - documents all look the same and ask to be saved, even when you have not amended them. Someone sends you an updated version by e-mail, you don’t want to amend it, but you just need to open it. You have a copy of the original document open already, which you have been working on. Someone phones you, which version is the one you don’t want to save changes to, which one is, both ask you to save changes, and have the same file name in the title bar.

Fifteen - lack on inbuilt version control, sure undo and redo are fine, but with a major document you might not notice problems that quickly.

Sixteen - selected text will be deleted if you press any key by mistake, you need to use undo, to retrieve. A major pain when you are juggling six documents, three phone calls, two people speaking to you, and have to reformat half your document.

Seventeen - no two applications look at all alike, everyone customises them differently, so when they want to know how you did something, you cannot say, see that button on the top right, press that.

Eighteen - the embedded tables allow really dreadful spreadsheet functionality, but if you embed a spreadsheet they are too awful to print.

Nineteen - the compare documents function is not much use. The show formatting option seldom helps you fix errant formatting either. There is a lot which is not technically formatting, and therefore does not appear.

Twenty - the format painter, does not fix loused up bulleted lists, or loused up indented text, etc. etc.

I’ll stop there, as twenty is a nice round number.

I suppose that it would be possible to agree a restricted feature set at the outset of a project, detailing the functionality that people were allowed to use in documents. I have never seen it done, but I don’t see any problems with this being done on an organisation wide basis. It should also apply to standard organisational templates, which often have the most problematic of formatting already inserted.

For the bulk of documents, it would probably be quicker to do the drafting in plain text, or rich text, and only format up into full Word very late in the drafting process, when the formatting becomes more important.

There is a difference here between Word functionality, that is useful and benign, like spell checker, and that which formats text, like the ability to set indents for each line. It would be useful to retain benign functionality, but not useful to have excessive formatting functionality.

It would also be possible to agree better organisational version control. We work with a team from across the organisation, so document filing is difficult, as each section has its own procedures.

I suspect that none of these problems are unique to me, and that certain working procedures could be adopted to lessen the problems, however there must be a gap in the market for software which allows intuitive joint working on documents. At the moment, you feel like you are fighting with Word all the time to get it to do what you want, spending too much time fixing formatting, when you just want to focus on the text.

What’s cool

I don’t think that great functionality needs to be complex, it just needs to be well thought out. You can buy a Swiss Army penknife with so many attachments that it is the ugliest brute of a thing. Alternatively you can just get a fairly basic model that does pretty much all you need. I’m certainly never without one, and use it every day for something or other.

The beauty of the best modern software/applications is in their simplicity and power. Google does not do much, but what it does do is superb. Similarly iTunes, Amazon and the internet, do not actually really do very much. The user has a simply requirement, and the cleverness has gone into making this easier and better.

I am sure that it would be possible to take a similar approach to developing a real killer application for collaborative working in an office environment. Software that is a joy to use, where you feel like the software is behind you, rather than against you.