{"id":145,"date":"2008-11-13T11:27:44","date_gmt":"2008-11-13T17:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/wp\/?p=145"},"modified":"2009-04-04T13:37:15","modified_gmt":"2009-04-04T19:37:15","slug":"dear-microsoft-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/index.php\/2008\/11\/dear-microsoft-word\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Microsoft Word,"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mac-vs-pc.JPG\"I thought I understood what was going on.
\nI mean, it seemed fairly reasonable. I’m writing this new story, and I’m using a lot of footnotes — a LOT of footnotes — and I’ve never used them before, and for all I know that cross-referencing and so forth might require a lot of behind-the-scenes data-tracking 1<\/sup> to handle — the fact that my 35+ page document was already one and a half megabytes in size… around 1750k… well, it surprised me, I’ll admit, but I assumed it was mostly my fault for using all those footnotes.
\nBut something happened yesterday, Microsoft Word. I was using a different laptop than normal, one on which I had tried to put my copy of Office 7. But it didn’t work — you decided that I’d hit my limit on the number of home computers on which I could install the software THAT I HAVE PURCHASED<\/strong>, so not only is the new Office not working, but the install wiped out the old Office 2000 install that HAD been on there.
\nSo, out of desperation, I grabbed a copy of Open Office 3<\/a> and installed it. It was quick (the entire software suite is the same size as just the Word 7 installation), it was easy, and it was free, but even more importantly it actually let me install it on as many computers as I liked. I’ll admit that I was nervous that if I opened my super-hyper-complicated-footnotey story in Open Office, that I’d lose formatting or the footnotes would all become endnotes or the world would drop to a Blue Screen, or something.
\nBut none of that happened.
\nI shut off Open Office’s inexplicable word-completion option, set hot keys for the two main special functions I needed (“Insert Footnote Here” and “Word Count”), toggled off two settings in the screen appearance, and off I went.
\nWhen I was done, I saved it and emailed myself a copy.
\nDuring the save, Open Office warned me that I might lose some OpenOffice formatting options if I saved to the Microsoft Word format — and that the size of the file itself might be affected. I sighed and confirmed the save, knowing<\/em> that if the venerable Microsoft Word couldn’t squeeze my story down under a meg, the open-source, free Open Office was probably going to hand me a file that was barely small enough to be attached to an email.
\nThe save completed, I attached the file to my email, and checked the file size.
\n103k.
\nLess than 1\/12th of the size it had been before.
\nI reopened the file in Open Office, in a bit of a panic. All my precious words were there. 1<\/sup>
\nI opened it on another machine using Microsoft Word… and the formatting was perfect.
\nIn short, nothing was wrong; my story’s file was just much, much much smaller.
\nI’m sorry to tell you this way, Microsoft Word, but we need to break up.<\/p>\n