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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

MS-Word is a piece of s**t!

Warning: This is a rant post! I write it to vent my anger rather than for your amusement.

I am working on this book, you know. You would know if you have checked out my other blog - http://operationdesertmountain.blogspot.com. And of course, nobody uses pen and paper for such things these days, at least I don't, so I write in Word and save it. Then I edit it and save it as a new version. So, tonight I was working on version 0.4 and making changes to it.

Word has some peculiar issues. One of them is that after I have been editing for an hour or so, it would say that it could not save the file, ran out of memory or out of space or some such crap. I learned computers in India without the luxury of a battery backup behind the computers I used to use, so I have this excellent habit of pressing Control-S about every 2 seconds. So, now that I know about this stupid behaviour from Word, all I do is, I close the file without saving, open it again and resume working. I never lose more than a minute's worth of work.

But tonight...as I was working on 0.4 when the problem occurred, Word said Problem, I closed the file, it asked me to save, I said no, then it asked me to save a ~*.tmp file, I said no and exited!
And what do I find? My file has disappeared. The v0.4 file that I had saved before and worked on a few times, the whole file was gone! Vanished beyond a trace! Instead of a minute's worth of work I have lost about an hour's worth of editing. And editing is such a chore to redo.

That's it! I am through with Word. I am moving to Open Office!

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