Dr. Frank's What's-it

I think that what you are looking for is the "auto correct" feature under the tools menu. Auto correct will replace things as you type, like capitalize the word at the beginning of a senctence and days of the week, turn (r) into the registered trademark, stuff like that. It is both powerful and annoying.

Frank, at least you have wizards who are concerned about how to format your stuff correctly. Last I checked, I was using an ancient WordStar program that had mere alchemists doing my spellchecking for me. And they're not even good alchemists, either. All they do is sit around smoking cigarettes in one corner of my hard drive, talking about the show they went to last night. In the fog of last night's booze-a-thon, they format all of my writing as ALLCAPS and misspell every other word. The worst thing about this motley assortment of grammar chimps is that one of them wears a t-shirt that says "WhatEver" on it. I'm thinking of upgrading my word-processing capabilities.

Sorry for ranting.

uggh....i don't know but I definately feel your
pain. i had to retype something for work recently
and that stuff was making me and my boss bonkers.

it couldn't be anything to do with the margins
right? unless the first comment helped i hope?

i'm convinced these programs are the writer's
answer to a Lovecraftian door to hell and madness.

I'm going to keep checking back to see if anyone can give you answer; terribly annoying when you're trying to write songs or poetry out. Much like PowerPoint, this stuff was made for business majors, lol.

Thanks folks. Jodi's probably right about the autocorrect being the culprit behind the invisible hand. The problem is, it seems to keep switching itself back on. Maybe there's some other sub-sub-sub menu where you can set everything to off-by-default? My experience with MS applications is that they, for reasons known only to their demented creators, try to put the most basic switches in the most obscure, counter-intuitive place they can think of. And they don't tend to support turning things off, at least not all the way. I always guess wrong, anyway. (Once I was trying to use Entourage for news just to check whether a problem I was having was with my usual newsreader or with my nntp server. It took me ages to figure out where you were supposed to enter the nntp server info., and it turned out to be something like "tools/alternate/email".)

The one that's really bugging me now is that if I type this: "1." The evil wizard will change it to "1.)", indent and single-space it, and force my next line to begin with "2.)" The only way to get out of it is to try not to type 1s. The tools/autocorrect does seem to have options that affect this, but either it turns itself back on without warning, or there's another option I can't locate that acts as a back-up, filling in when the main wizard in charge of creating formatting havoc can't make it.

It's enough to make you consider going back to vi.

My MS Word doesn't make "1." into "1.)" but it does indent it force my next line to start with "2." and so on. What I tend to do is just press backspace, about 3 times, and then the autoformat turns off. My first line, then, is un-indented and remains "1. Blah" and my second line is also unindented and there's no number next to the words.

But in addition to autocorrect under the tools menu, there is also autoformat under the format menu. You might want to try messing with that a bit because I have a feeling evil wizard isn't autocorrecting you, but auto formatting you.

Thanks, Michelle. You're right about the autoformat. It's a sub-option in the autocorrect options pane, too. I've found that messing around with that will sometimes reformat my whole document, that is, change the font size and spacing, headers, footers, pagination, etc.. It's not too hard to select all and change it back, though, and that does seem to fix the wild indenting.

Maybe I should try to backspace more, like you say. Instead of throwing the computer across the room after a couple of tries, I mean.

I think my real problem, though, is not that I'm turning off the wrong things, but that they keep switching themselves back on after they've been turned off. I'm like Lucy Ricardo trying to blow out self-relighting candles over here...

Try this routine...
http://www.scottmullen.net/Content/research/wordxslow.php

By disabling “Automatic Numbered Lists” in the Tools> Auto Correct> Auto Format As You Type dialog, you should no longer be forced into a list format. That is, you can type “1.” and Word shouldn’t start your next paragraph with “2.,” indenting everything as you go. That is the way it’s supposed to work. It’s an application level preference, not a document specific one. But Word never works the way it’s supposed to, and I don’t doubt that it has the ability to turn itself back on when you aren’t looking. MS Office aps think they are smarter than you are, and if you follow their insane, evil logic, I guess they are.

I use Entourage because OS X Mail doesn’t have all the features I need, for my work email. But when I am writing at any length, I use Adobe InCopy. I’m comfortable in the UI, and it has all the features I want, I understand how to make them work. It’s a layout and editing application, rather than a business application. And it makes PDF’s lickety-split.

and if that doesn't work try that latin chanting
while burning incense maybe.

it could be possessed. ; )

You think this is a problem? Try a bilingual Word. The Powers That Be (the wizard?) get to decide which language you will be using in your document, and there is no sense arguing with them...BTW, Frank, I have the same problem you do, and I tried EVERYTHING that was mentioned here so far - nothing worked.

Frank, I had the same problem last time I used Word for a serious document. I tried everything that was mentioned here - nothing worked. The damn thing seems to have a mind of its own, and a randomly crazy one, I might add. BTW, this is nothing: if you have a second language installed on your OS, it gets really entertaining, because The Powers That Be get to decide which language you will be using in your next Outlook e-mail.

Heh, MT seems to have a mind of its own as well...:-)

did you try the chanting?

if yes...

did you try finding somebody who has
the authority to do the chanting?

even then it may be a hopeless case.

You know, there's always OS X's TextEdit if you just want a very simple text editor with minimal formatting features (bold, italic, some tabbing, etc).

Or, if you just want just the very plainest text, there's BBedit, though I'm sure they've stopped offering a free Lite version of it.

My job is in the Windows world, so I can't be of much help but as an MS alternative, my Mac friends are always fawning over Star Office.

I feel your pain but can offer no help. Still, I just wanted to say that the sentence "I want the wizards go off in a corner and talk amongst themselves and get out of my face" made me spit coffee into my keyboard.

Ok, judging by your vi allusion, you're not scared to get into the system a bit.

[OS X Hard Disk]/Users/[your username]/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/MS
Office ACL (English)

is the location of the autocorrected (plain text) words. You should be able to edit this in some plain text editor to get rid of Word automatically changing mistyped words, completing abbreviations, etc.

/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Templates/Normal

is your Normal Template. If you open this in Word, and then go into
Tools>Autocorrect>Autoformat as you Type
and turn off everything, you should be able to close the template, saving, and have everything set, more or less for good.

Caveats to keep in mind when/if following my advice: 1) Most of my knowledge on this was gained in a few minutes of Googling, so no promises 2) Good idea to back things up, yadda yadda yadda 3) I've destroyed my own machine before with over-tinkering and under-backing-up.

Hope that helps.

"headers, footers, pagination, etc.."
what is a professional punkrocker doing with headers, footers, and pagination? are you writing a thesis or something? haha...

Dan Treacy found/found out:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-07/07.shtml#story4

Dan Treacy etc:

Scroll down a bit for the truth

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-07/07.shtml#story4

i saw this in my friends journal and thought of you. http://www.theory.org/~matt/digest/sample_image_collection/badword.gif

Source:http://chickensoupforthevegansoul.blogspot.com/2004/05/frinkwently-asked-questions.html

coincidentally, i came back to work, on tuesday, after saying somewhat snarky things about Office, only to find that spell check now REFUSES to work for me. and i need it! it just turned itself off... i turn the preference in entourage ON. but it doesn't stick. it's like it heard what i said... it knows i don't respect it. and now i'm going to pay.

in reality, i know how to fix it, i think. i just haven't had the time to reinstall the dictionary. it's just.... odd, i think, that it should quit like that. all of the sudden. spooky.

Okay, this question is for Frank but everyone feel free to chime in.....

I ripped my CD of Revenge is Sweet to my Ipod and noticed that the last minute of Love American Style sounded like total shit, so I did it again and same thing. I then played it in my drive and there it was "I want to tie you to a postpostpostpostpostpostpostpostpostpostpost, I want to make youyouoyouyouyouyouyouyouoyuoyou" ARRRGGGGHHHHH!!! A scratch!!!!

The question is, I already own the album, Frank (and others)do you think that it is wrong for me to go and grab "Love American Style" off of a P2P because my CD is scratched/scuffed or do you think I should bite the bullet and go spend $9.99 on a whole new CD?

PS I was going to go grab the song( for $1) off of Itunes, but MTX is mysteriously absent from the catalogue. C'mon Frank, you're a Mac man!!!

I say "fuck word formatting!" I'm all about wordpad! If anyone needs all the "wizard" help, they should read a dictionary some time.

I have AppleWorks for those days when Word infuriates me beyond all belief or for when I KNOW I am going to do something that Word likes to totally f*$& up. Sad but true...

There are just so many non-intuitive things about Word that it just leaves me in awe. As far as the auto-indent/format features are concerned, if you can't turn them off you can always hit command-Z or select "Undo Auto-format" from the Edit menu.

Best of luck!

there's an application called editpad that works pretty well. especially if you're working on more than one thing at a time it has a tab feature. it's for windows and linux only though at this point i think. google editpad.

One other thing you might want to check is whether or not you have write permission on your normal.dot file. If you don't, some prefs changes will be silently ignored on the Windows version, or won't stick after the application is shut down. I don't know about the OS X version (nitrogen will condense in Hell before I put Office on my Mac), but on Windows machinges a lot of admins install it with the normal.dot set to read-only by default. Reason: it's the one sure way to stop macro viruses from propagating.

Can anyone help!! Trying to use the spell check in FRENCH in Word for OSX -- it doesn't work -- already reinstalled Office -- any ideas? Is there a preference that's been corrupted or something?