Part 38: Word/Outlook integration

While we're knocking Outlook, what's the deal with the integration of Word and Outlook? Sometimes, I'm typing away in Outlook and get a message that Word needs to close, and since Outlook uses Word to edit applications, Word's crashing has rendered Outlook braindead, so carry on.

Also, it's so very well integrated that when I was editing my signature, I had a section which was 10 point Verdana italic, which refused to show in 10 point font in the actual email. Oh, yes, Word works so well I want to use it all the time!

Part 35: hidden formatting

I had a bit of an email I wanted to post in to Facebook. I figured the steps would be copy-paste-post, right? Not so fast.

It turns out Outlook had embedded some really hidden line breaks in to the text. So I wasn't just copying the text, but I was copying the line breaks too. So when
I posted it on Facebook, it didn't look right. In fact, it had random line breaks. It looked sort of something like
this. This was a problem for me because a) Facebook only displays a certain number of lines before saying "read more" and having a link and b) more importantly this was for my work's Facebook page (it's getting
annoying, isn't it?) and it looked ugly. Even more disturbing is that if I copied the text from the email, it would sometimes paste in with a bunch of xml before it. Seriously, come on.

The workaround was to copy everything in to Notepad (one of the less braindead windows applications, since it has so few useless features) to get it in to text and then paste it from there. It worked. But it was annoying.

Part 34: Word can't open it, but Google Docs can

I went to open up an attachment in which someone had filled out with text boxes (why text boxes? someone else designed the original) and found that most of the information was squeezed out of the text boxes which we next-to-impossible to drag to expand. But, rather than much around with the document in Word, I sent it to my gmail account and opened it first as html (fail) and then as a Google Doc. All of the sudden, the text boxes are gone, and all the information I need to access is easily visible.

What is perplexing is that the native software (Word) was unable to accomplish this task, while Google Docs did with ease. Google may be a huge corporation out to make a dime, but at least their products, you know, work.

Part 33: One problem, many programs

For some reason, Word decided not to cooperate with me today. It just won't open. And since I was in the middle of writing something, this makes me angry. Oh look at what has happened!



Now, I've had programs freeze before. It happens. On all operating systems. Here's the thing: when something freezes on the Mac, it generally doesn't also freeze other programs. Like Outlook. First I got a message that Outlook used Word for writing emails, and since Word was dead, it was using something else. Then I got an active X error. Now it is frozen. So much for the typing I was doing in Word &c. Time for the three fingered salute.

Part 20: Tab-delimiting whether you want it or not

Sometimes, I have data I want to put in Excel that's not in terrific shape. For whatever reason (generally: I didn't create it) fields are separate by a variety of methods: commas, spaces and tabs. What I want to do is put it in to excel, search for multiple spaces, replace them with a symbol (perhaps an ampersand) and then use the "text to columns" feature to get the text to line up properly in columns.

Yes, that is what I want to do. Excel, however has other ideas. I paste the data and it says (Is it the paperclip? At least seems to have been mercifully killed off.) "oh, look, I see tabs, they must want it tab-delimited" and it tab-delimits it. Which would work great, if it were tab-delimited. But if that were the case, I could just as well put it in to rows and then to a text to columns and tab delimit it myself. But no, it takes one step forward and at least three steps back.

So my data is all mangled. Some rows had three tabs and were delimited in to three columns, some had five and were in five, some had none, and were in none. Oh lah-dee-dah. That didn't work, so I went back and tried a "paste special." Assuredly, if I chose to paste in "text" it would, you know, let me paste text, without the formats. Oh no, the columns remain.

That's one step back. The next step back is to open Word. Why Word? Well, even though it is part of the same product suite, it seems to have been written by an entirely different team of chimpanzees. I paste the data in to Word and it doesn't break in to columns, probably because Word doesn't have that capability. I then find all tabs and replace them with spaces, so that every column is now delimited by multiple spaces.

Now, I can paste this in to Excel, and it doesn't break in to columns (thankfully it doesn't recognise it as "space delimited" and throw in a bunch of blank columns). I search for two spaces and replace it with a semicolon. Now I have strings of semicolons (e.g. ";;;;;"). That's easy enough, I run a series of "find ';;' replace with ';'" until I have each field separated by a semicolon. Then, I do text-to-columns, semicolon-delimit and Voila! I have my data in the format I want.

That was simple, right?