Verity,

Did you fluff/fail to fluff the punchline ....... "Press the secret key combo and Word hastily conceals itself in the task tray, and, as cover, pops up – full screen – a notably pronographic website." ? :-)

I am a ninja Word user, I taught Word so well that the users' increase in activity crashed the network at a Bank.

I have *even programmed* in Word via VBA ('hey, Word is a great string class') BUT I didn't know that shift click-File gave you Save All and Close All...

If I wanted this degree of humiliation I would be paying good money at Mistress Sadie's House Of Pain. I wish I had a subscription to El Reg not to renew...

Needless to say I am posting this anonymously.

Am reading this having taken a break from editing the old thesis into shape. Said thesis being replete with styles, floating frames, and outline-linked tables of contents and figures. I have been forced more than once to reapply all of this formatting over the past weeks and henceforth will be sticking to the painful and reliable Normal.dot -- repetitive strain injuries be damned.

Sun: give me a call as soon as your product includes a friendly cartoon assistant to channel my loathing.

I'm finding WordPad curiously atrractive these days. Mot sure what that makes me...

Well, I thought I was the only one that ended up with images all on page 1... Honestly this really makes me think that Microsoft should be focusing on making word work better rather than giving it a new UI. There are so many glitches in word that make it hard to use (tables for one). People may have used word enough to find their way around them, but that doesn't actually make them non-issues...

Perhaps Ms. Stob may wish to use the spell-check feature of Word for the next article? :-)

Word 5.1 on the Mac (copyright 1992, according to the about box) still works pretty well for me, running without complaint under Classic on OS X Panther. What features in more recent versions do I miss out on? Let's think... zoom; paragraph numbering that always messes up; style editing that takes about fifteen mouse clicks to get to (Word 6 onwards) or has been bastardised beyond all usability (Word 2003); err... yup, like I said, it works pretty well for me, and it's not even too bad at opening docs from the latest versions. Shame about the zoom though.

I guess it'll finally die when I eventually upgrade to an Intel Mac, unless I find I'm so attached to it that I keep running it under some kind of emulator...

What's the scariest kind of user is the one that exclusively uses Word for EVERYTHING. I've been sent screenshots in Word documents before, when trying to fix people's computer woes. What usually follows is instructions on how to use Paint.

And what's more scary about these users is that they don't usually know much about Word.

At school it used to be Publisher that was the worst - that app is horrendous IMHO and the Word users were the better lot.

That, and I spent most of some IT lessons on showing how to paste screenshots into Word for reports (we had to) and teaching people the values of ctrl+enter so they didn't have to spend ages fiddling about getting the right number of enters on a page.

And you forgot one class in the Normals - the person who always types in Comic Sans, no matter what the document is.

FYI the Word team has setup a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word

I grew up with Wordwise Plus on the BBC Model B. You entered your text in a 40-column mode (char-mapped to save memory) and it was munged to 80 columns for printing. You could get a preview -- *if* you had enough memory left to run the 80-column mode (which was bit-mapped).

Then I used Protext on the Amiga. This had an 80-column display mode, but was still not full-on WYSIWYG -- effects beyond simple bold, underlining and italics were shown by embedded codes. (The final text was, of course, rendered in the printer's own font; and you selected draft or LQ with the buttons on the printer's control panel [remember them?]).

I think full-on WYSIWYG actually makes things worse. By emphasising presentation over content, it encourages people to design documents to be -looked at- rather than -read-.