Fighting With Microsoft Word

It’s amazing how difficult it can be to use Microsoft World. It works for simple few pages documents. But once you have hundreds of pages, with lots of massive drawings and annotations, it becomes quite painful. It’s really a big struggle if you’ve got to work at it for days and weeks. You’ve got to fight with it over the formatting of lists, the numbering of items, the pagination, the table layouts, etc. Isn’t Microsoft Word supposed to make things easier?

Nowadays with everything going paperless and 100% electronic documentation, it seems very uncool to print out documents to annotate by hand. Or to print out forms to fill out manually. Or to attach drawings, photos, sketches, etc in hardcopy. Everything has to be electronic. 100% of it. But making everything electronic sometimes becomes rather counterproductive.

One of the worse thing is with file sizes. Yes, as an IT person I know what’s wrong, but can you imagine a sample template of a 3-page cover letter weighing in at 13.5MB, all because of a single logo which, if removed, drops the file size to 68KB? Yeah, that’s over 13MB for a single small little logo. The someone who prepared the sample template is obviously not very tech savvy.

Yet despite all the difficulties with Microsoft Word, the whole world still wants to use it.