Only just DIY (but I think some readers will like it)

[newshound]

Just came across this quote from the excellent Microsoft Word MVP web site, highly recommended if you are a reasonably serious WORD user.

"By the end of this exercise, you will realise that Word's default settings are all designed for the knee-cap-level user, and that we have to spend a lot of time undoing them. {Begin Political Rant} I hereby give you permission to think unkindly of the Product Marketing Department, which took the world's finest word processor and ruined it in order to reinforce the misconceptions of people who should not be left unsupervised with a pencil!!! {end political rant}."

[Owain]

what, WordPerfect?

Word *is* awful.

Owain

[John Rumm]

+1 to both of those!

[Mark]

Especially the 2007 and later versions.

[alan]

Word is unusable without help from the paper-clip.

[polygonum]

Which equates to "Word is unusable". The paper-clip is the most useless thing since, umm, a long time ago.

I actually liked Word 2 for the Mac. Hated early PC versions. Sort of liked again as it became like the Mac version. Then started to scream in utter frustration as they kept changing things ...

[fred]

In article , Nick writes

Then why did you reply? It is relevant because I was asking a GG poster to consider modifying his replies to make them more readable given the drawbacks of his chosen posting medium.

It has nothing to do with the newsreader, it is the poster's chosen posting medium that is mangling replies by injecting double spacing and irrelevant characters.

I didn't write anything about that, read again.

I didn't write anything about that, read again.

Good for you.

You're clearly not sorry, why say you are?

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, its unusable with it. And not much better without

WYGINWYT

[Bob Eager]

Not quite. I find Office Help absolutely useless...and my colleagues do too. The solution is the alternate Office help - a.k.a. Google - which works a treat.

[Lobster]

+1

Also works well because when you want to know "How the bloody hell do I get Word to do ", if you ask Google you'll quickly find loads of rants about the bug that means that Word can't do "X", or that Microsoft decided not to implement "X" - as opposed to Office Help, which will be mysteriously 100% silent on the issue

David

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

That makes you an arse on so many levels.

[Bob Eager]

Exactly. Only last night I wanted the keyboard shortcut for strikethough (there isn't one). But I found out how to make one!

[Tim Streater]

Odd that you should bother, IMO. I OTOH found it easy enough to add to the formatting toolbar.

[Jules Richardson]

Seconded.

Although it's rare that I'll read a post where no new content fits on the screen, let alone reply to it, so I only really find it annoying when one of the regular posters who Have a Clue do it; it's not too much of an inconvenience otherwise to just delete a 'problem' post and move on.

Re. top-posting, I think MS mail clients were where I first saw it, although it quite possibly 'began' elsewhere - but with the amount of people out there using MS software it sadly became commonplace, even though it's so obviously the wrong way to do things :-(

[John Rumm]

That is is partly down to the conflation of "usenet as a type of email" they did. You can make some argument for the top post, while trailing a growing history of responses below approach in corporate environments, where during a conversation between two people you may need to copy in additional people along the way, and have all the previous history available to them in one hit rather than just the context to make sense of the current reply. However that approach is completely pointless in a threaded hierarchical organisation like usenet.

[Bob Eager]

To avoid my hands having to leave the keyboard.

[Tim Streater]

You have spare braincells available to remember keyboard shortcuts? Gosh.

[Mark]

TBH I prefer "bottom" posting in emails too as it's more logical but even fewer people do this. It's got worse recently since loads of emails are cluttered with useless confidentiality messages and adverts. These are even less likely to be snipped when "top-posting".