Friday, July 29, 2016

Serious Problem with MS Word

Microsoft Word has a very serious problem. The “Clear Recent” option is directly below the “More…” option in the “Open Recent” selection in the “File” pulldown menu, and it is amazingly easy to accidentally select “Clear Recent” when trying to select “More…” when you want to find and open a recent file, or a series of recent files. It doesn’t ask you, like most software when you try to delete a bunch of stuff: “Are you sure you want to clear recent files? Y/N”. And it does not allow you to undo the cleared files if you selected it by accident, so if there are a bunch of docs saved to different folders, you then have to go searching all over for the files. And if you don’t remember what they are, forget it: you may never find them.

This is such a disastrous flaw in the program that it ruins my whole day occasionally. I have repeatedly tried to ask them to fix this, but they make it virtually impossible to contact them via email, and they give their users an endless maze of menus to navigate before you finally realize they will not ever allow you to send them a message. It is positively maddening to get the runaround like that when you are already frustrated by this amazingly dunderheaded design flaw that stabs you in the back so easily, especially when using the mouse on a Windows machine.

I guess I will have to switch to another word processing program, because Microsoft Word is so poorly designed in places and is now such a massive program that takes so much memory to run, with a myriad of useless features, and is so incompetently coded that it requires weekly upgrades they claim are “critical” for security reasons. You would think they would want to allow users to easily contact them with issues so they could make the program more pleasant and efficient to use: No such luck.

Mega fail, Microsoft.