Second entry in my diary of Microsoft and other software fuckups.
For the past four weeks I have been editing a manual. I have had to create and modify many of the paragraph and other styles. I had a style sheet attached. Every time I changed a style or added a new one, I would save the file, Turd would ask me if I wanted to update the template, I and I always said Yes.
Today I wanted to create a new file from the document template into which I had been saving all the styles.
So I go to Tools, Templates and Add-ins, and attached that style sheet that has all the new cool styles in it!
Oh, boy, this is gonna be great! All my styles are now here, instantly, no muss no fuss.
Not there. None of the new ones. Just the old pieces of shit created by the babbling bozo who worked on this document before me.
That’s OK. No prob. Maybe it only shows the styles in use. So I tell it to show all available styles.
Still not there.
I go to the Style Organizer™ and Close one file, open another, find the template, close the other file, open it up. Can’t Add and Save files into a doc file already open. OK, no problem, I copy all the stuff in the file, close the file, and plan to add the styles and to a Save As with the blank file that will have the new style sheet in it and just overwrite the previous file with the new file with the styles all added into it and then paste in the text from the file and save again. OK, no, well, a little bit of a problem now…
OK, OK, now I do the Style Organizer™ again and I open this and close that and open another, and, anyway, now I have the file open and now I choose the template file to which I had been adding all those styles for a month and I click on Add to add all its saved styles — what a time-saving feature these styles sheets are, or, or will be, when I get the styles in there, just you wait — and I go to Add the styles, make sure the fire extinguisher is handy, and then copy the styles into the document I am working on which is blank but into which I will shortly paste the text that I want.
The styles are not there.
None of the new styles or modified styles I had been creating for a month exist in the template into which I have been saving them for that month. None. Just bozo’s bullshit.
Eventually I realize I am dealing with another ridiculous MS non-feature that doesn’t work at all.
So I paste the text into a blank document and save it as Temp and then I close it all up.
I go to the manual I have been working on and open it up and then save the whole damn thing as a document template .DOT file. But of course, when I want to save it as a template file, it doesn’t show me in the Save File dialog the place where MS keeps all the template files. It shows the current directory of the .DOC file.
Fortunately, I know where they have buried all this crap. It’s in C:\Documents and Settings\
Anyway, I end up just saving the whole goddam document as a template and then opening it up, erase everything, paste in the text still in the Clipboard®, and save it as the filename I wanted originally, and it prompts me if I want to overwrite it and that is the first thing that has worked all day.
In other words, document templates in Word are utterly bogus. They do nothing, they store nothing. If you want the styles from another document file, open the DOC file, do a Save As to a new document with the name you want, erase everything in the file, type or paste in the new text, and do a Save again.
Tomorrow’s Lesson: Repeatedly hitting your head with a lead pipe.
PS:
From today’s on-line news, boldface italics are mine:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House political adviser Karl Rove was embroiled in a new controversy over potentially missing e-mails on Friday, the latest twist in the firings of eight U.S. prosecutors last year.
The White House disclosed the Republican National Committee in early 2006 took away Rove's ability to delete e-mails sent and received through a party e-mail account. [Who could blame them?]
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino had no explanation for why the RNC, the governing arm of President George W. Bush's political party, would stop Rove from deleting e-mails. [I think we’ve figured that one out, Mr. Reuters. But read on:]
Perino said a White House review showed up to 5 million e-mails to and from as many as 1,700 executive branch employees might have been lost when the administration converted from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook in 2002 and 2003.
At last we seem here to have discovered a use for a Microsoft product! National Security! If you can’t delete e-mails, just convert to a Microsoft product and presto digitalio! all those messy e-mails are wiped out! THAT’s patriotism, so congrats to Mr. Bill Gates & The Whole Microsoft Team!
Flip Durbin
April 13, 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment