"New rules, same old microsoft word" Topic

Don't know if this topic quite fits here, but it didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

Anyway, I wrote a new set of rules using word, fairly heavily illustrated. For some reason, word has tacked a couple of garbage pages onto the end of the document, each of which contains a couple of "closed brackets" down the center of the page. When I try to delete these pages, the program freezes.

Any help?

Not a word SME (subject matter expert), but I've experienced weird stuff when I have a lot of graphics in my documents sometimes.

My suggestion would be to select a page or two's worth of stuff at a time from your damaged document and copy and paste into a brand new document. Open a new document for each paste, ie for each page or two – ultimately, you'll end up with x number of docs for y number of pages in the original damaged doument.

Once you get near the end, try your best to not select the weird brackets. A help with this would be to turn on the codes (In W2003 and earlier, this is on a tool bar with a symbol that looks like 91 – it's actually short hand for "new paragraph" used by proff readers in days of yore when everything was hand written).

You can then try combining stuff together bit at a time to see if it's Word or possibly some corrupted something or other.

Hopefully this might be of some help to at least retreive your work minus the weird stuff.
--
Tim

Pretty much what I would suggest, with a slight addition – when you get near the end, don't select all the text. Stop about a sentence out, and just retype the last bit, to prevent any oddities being carried over.

If the last item is an image, re-import it from the original source (even going so far as to import it into it's own document to double check it's not at fault).

Word is the worst publishing program ever.

You may want to save the whole thing as a .txt and see if you can find someone that has a 'publishing program' you can then import the text and format for the other stuff. Save you all kinds of heart ache in the end.

mjc

Check out Adobe InDesign.

Adobe InDesign is a very powerful tool (in fact, I teach it in college), as is Quark XPress (which I am teaching next semester). These are industry-standard publishing applications and, as such, have a very hefty price tags.

Unless you are rolling in dough, I suggest you either make do with Word (and do what Tim and Vosper suggest), or try a free desktop publishing application called Scribus.

Now, it will take a few tries to get better results from Scribus than you might be getting with Word, but if you put a little time into it you will soon find out that it is much more useful and will empower you to create professional designs with its fairly powerful text manipulation tools. I heartily recommend it:

scribus.net

Use OpenOffice (it's free!) and then export to PDF (something that Word can't do).

That's what I liked about WordPerfect. It had a View Code feature that if something weird happened in your document, you could see the coding and edit it.

I have wrestled with odd problems with Word docs. It is worth a try to open the document in OpenOffice – it can read word docs. Sometimes that works, sometimes not.

I had the same problem with Word, but didn't have ANY graphics in the document. Basically, MS sucks. I ended up having to retype the whole thing, because any cutting and pasting would carry over the garbage.

Use OpenOffice (it's free!) and then export to PDF (something that Word can't do).

OpenOffice word processor sucks for any moderately complicated tasks (a table in a table! oh no!), I've had more trouble with that than I ever had with MS Word.

MS Word can easily export to PDF. If you're on a Mac, it's built-in (print as PDF). If you're on Windows, just install a free PDF printer like CutePDF and again, just print as a PDF. Easy. And free (if you already have Word).

"OpenOffice word processor sucks for any moderately complicated tasks (a table in a table! oh no!), I've had more trouble with that than I ever had with MS Word."

How strange. I've never had any problems. And why on earth would you ever want a "table within a table"? But I digress …

"If you're on a Mac, it's built-in (print as PDF)."

Fine if you have a Mac. Sadly, many don't. Incidentally, why is MSWord on a Mac different (better?) than on its "native" OS?

"If you're on Windows, just install a free PDF printer like CutePDF and again, just print as a PDF."

But that's not "exporting to PDF". It involves running another program that effectively pretends to be a printer. No problem for geeks like us but many people would struggle to cope with it. OTOH in OO it's simply a case of File / Export to PDF and follow the instructions.

One (possibly the only) area in which (in my experience) word outperforms open office is in very very large documents.

Word shows its ancestry from the days of small ram and manages documents too large for memory with no additional hassles. Open office slows down, probably because it is relying on OS level paging to handle big docs. I mean grossly big, 400-500+ pages, with lots of illustrations.

Having said that, I use Word 2007 at home. It is the first time word has actually been improved (IMHO, YMMV) since word for windows 95, and I am used to it from work.

When working with large docs with word 98 and 2003 I got used to saving my "last good version" before any significant piece of work.

As stated above, Word is definitely not the optimum platform for any kind of desktop publishing. If you're used to Microsoft products the best option is Microsoft Publisher, which few people seem to know about(I teach a university class on Publisher). If you have a Mac, then InDesign is what you need, although there is a bit of a learning curve.

And why on earth would you ever want a "table within a table"?

I suppose OO thought the same thing, which is why it barfed. :-)

Fine if you have a Mac. Sadly, many don't. Incidentally, why is MSWord on a Mac different (better?) than on its "native" OS?

The original poster did not specify an OS.

The ability to natively print as PDF is a property of OS X itself, not Office on OS X.

But that's not "exporting to PDF". It involves running another program that effectively pretends to be a printer. No problem for geeks like us but many people would struggle to cope with it. OTOH in OO it's simply a case of File / Export to PDF and follow the instructions.

You're making it out to be much more complicated than it actually is. You don't run another program. You install CutePDF *once*, and forever after it's just one of your printer options. Is it really that hard to press "print" and select a printer? Because that's all you've got to do.

Now if you really want to get hard-core, you should go with LaTeX!

The reason Word runs better on a Mac is

1. the hardware, firm ware and software are more tightly controlled on a Mac
2. there is a separate design team working just on MS Office for the Mac to take advantage of the Mac's capabilities.

As such, I publish the Reiter, with lots of graphics, using Word on a Mac and don't have the problems mentioned above.

Rich

Sundance: You don't ever need to retype something in a situation like that. Open your old old Word Doc, Notepad, and a new Word Doc and arrange the windows so you can see all three at once.

Then perform these simple tasks:
1) Cut from old Word Doc.
2) Paste into Notepad.
3) Copy from Notepad.
4) Paste into new Word Doc.

Pasting into Notepad automatically strips out everything but the text (and I mean EVERYTHING: formatting, tables, indents, bold, italics, etc.). So, you will have to reformat the text, which makes this is last-resort, but it sure beats retying everything.

aegiscg47: I've nothing against Publisher, but I definitely prefer more powerful programs like Quark and InDesign. So, if he were going to spend money on an app, I would suggest either of those. If not, I'd say go the open source route and use Scribus.

Schogun's remarks triggered a flashback from deep within my memory. More than a quarter century ago the city of Waco decided to standardize on MS Word. My department had been happily using Word Perfect for years. So we had to attend a mandatory re-education camp put on by a snotty nosed MS trainer type the city hired. At the end of demo I asked if Word had something like reveal codes. I was informed that it did not because it is such a better designed program that you would never need it. Famous last words.

We were cutting and pasting into Notepad within weeks to clean up documents.

Now if you really want to get hard-core, you should go with LaTeX!

If you really want to get hard-core, you should go with TeX!

I love Reveal Codes in Word Perfect. Flat out the best word processor program out there. I'm also using Open Office and loving it, too. I don't have Word on my laptop. And from the cursing my wife does while being kicked in the head by Word on her PC, I'm very glad not to have it.

If you really want to get hard-core, you should go with TeX!

No, no, that's *masochistic*! :-)

No, no, that's *masochistic*! :-)

So, vi is right out then?

Farstar, that was my thought!

If all you want to do is integrate text and graphics then Quark and InDesign is overkill. While Scribus may be free, you still have to make a heavy investment in time to learn how to use the program.

Rich

That's what I liked about WordPerfect. It had a View Code feature that if something weird happened in your document, you could see the coding and edit it.

I loved that. However, I gave up on Wordperfect some time after Corel took it over and it used to crash constantly. I started calling it "Corel Crash" before I bit the bullet and was assimilated by MS and started using Word all the time.
--
Tim

Nowadays I'm writing everything that needs to be printed with LaTeX. I have used word, OO, InDesign and whatnot, but eventually one just ends up using some operating system and collection of software that makes it impossible or at least really hard to open all the old files. With LaTeX you at least have the plain text source files to fall back on in case of emergency. Also, nothing can beat LaTeX when writing really long documents. I must admit though that the learning curve might be a bit steep.

LaTeX: Underfull \hbox (badness 10000)

'nuff said ;-)

"…and then export to PDF (something that Word can't do)."

BS.

link

As for third party solutions suggested above, reason for them is mostly the age old ing contest between Adobe and Microsoft. So if anybody has a problem with that 'ommision', at least try to bark at the right tree.

Hmm. Seems I started a mini-flame war, which was not my intention. Well, I will try cutting and pasting, though I think this will be tedious, as you effectively cannot cut and paste pictures along with text in Word, though, again, I'm far from being an expert.

Anyway, thanks for all the help.