Ms. Harkins you're great, but Word will always be a horror
Ms. Harkins - Love your columns and find really useful stuff - thanks. BUT for 12 years MS Word has been the worst piece of excrement application I've had to wrestle with. It is so badly done that it is beyond description.
I'm a hard-working commercial real estate lawyer, I'm on the computer all day long, with Word, and I'm better than most users. Styles are a disaster, section breaks are a disaster, underscoring in bold looks terrible, we need special extra programs to do Tables of Contents and Automatic Numbering and even then they break down, macros require a degree in engineering, and Not Even Title Case Is Right Because It Capitalizes A And The And And. WordPerfect in 1996 remains a better program than every version of Word I have ever seen.
Your loyal readers shouldn't tell me about using styles correctly because I do. The problem is that nobody else can figure them out. When our documents are emailed to the other parties on a deal and they insert language with their own set of styles (badly done) and contradictory manual formatting, the result is a technical disaster EVERY TIME IN EVERY DEAL IN EVERY DOCUMENT.
If you ever see a picture of Bill Gates with a black eye, you'll know I finally had a chance to thank him properly.
