Shyte.
What follows is a raged induced rant so look away now.
-breathe-
I’ve just wasted an hour trying to fix the Word 2016 dictionary. It started with ‘Mira Than‘.
No, actually, it started with the combination of two big episodes of Innerscape into one very BIG Word 16 document. How big? 375 pages. Apparently, Word still has issues with very big files. That’s the reason I originally migrated my writing to a dedicated writing package [StoryBox]. Unfortunately, to publish a print version of Innerscape, I have to go Word >>PDF>>Createspace.
Anyway, after spending hours wrestling with Word’s section breaks [more on that in another post], I began doing a this-is-absolutely-the-last edit, when I realised that every time I typed in Miira Tahn, Word would ‘correct’ it to ‘Mira Than’ as soon as my attention moved elsewhere.
I tried getting Word to ‘Ignore All’, but it wouldn’t – and no, it wasn’t just variations on the name, like ‘Miira Tahn‘s‘ etc. And then it began throwing up other ‘errors’, all to do with US spelling. So, naturally, I used the nifty option at the bottom of the Spell Check pane to change the dictionary back to UK spelling:
My efforts obviously confused Word because it suddenly switched to the French dictionary. -growls in rage-
The French dictionary finds every word written in English to be incorrect…
I changed the dictionary back to English UK.
Nope…Word now wants to stay in French.
I look up fixes to the problem. I attempt to reset my language preferences. I restart Word…
Now Word wants to use the US dictionary again BUT the page full of French ‘errors’ is still set to the French dictionary. And then Word stopped working.
It’s back now, but I haven’t been game to check my document in case I end up throwing the monitor across the room. There are many basic, useful formatting functions in Word, and it works well for short-ish, business type documents, but the more Microsoft tries to automate the process, the more mangled and unstable it becomes. Especially with big documents.
I hate to think how convoluted the Word code must be because Microsoft almost never delete anything. They just keep adding to it, and adding to it, and adding to it…
Sadly, while this rant did make me feel a little less homicidal, it’s only a temporary distraction from the main event. I have to get this stupid piece of shit to play nice or I may never get my hands on those lovely, shiny books. 😦
Thanks for letting me vent,
Meeks
Authors' favourite books
NANO 2012
July 28th, 2017 at 2:33 pm
So what did you end up doing? Turning off the dictionary? I note that you can do that by going File>Options>Proofing and at the bottom, click the two boxes saying “hide spelling errors” and “hide grammar errors.” And why not? You don’t need Word to check the spelling, you already did that in a previous program, right?
It can be a beastly program sometimes. Mine likes to randomly eat spaces in my document. I went from 35000 words to 25000 words… I was a little mad. And then Word made no effort to recognize all the words it’d just bunched together. C’mon, Word, you’ve got a bigger vocabulary than me, you ought to be able to do this. Parse out the words. But no.
Now I keep backups.
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July 28th, 2017 at 7:33 pm
hi Matt. 🙂 Actually, no, I tend to check my spelling online if I’m unsure of something, but I always do a final check in Word. And yes, I have caught some typos that way. More importantly, if I need to make a global change, it’s easier to do it using Find and Replace [which does work rather well].
At the moment I’m ignoring the dictionary 90% of the time, raging at it 9.9% of the time and grudgingly making changes 0.1% of the time.
I’m also in a constant state of aggravation! lol
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July 29th, 2017 at 2:30 am
Maybe, though this is a wonky way of doing it, run separate spell checks on each chunk of text, then combine the whole shooting match for the win. But it sounds strange that the dictionary won’t update to remember important things like a proper name.
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July 29th, 2017 at 9:09 am
The reason I stopped using Word to write my stories was because it had issues with file size, and most of my stories are /long/.
Sadly, I think little has changed in that department. Word chucks wobblies. It’s just a reality I have to live with. 😦
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July 14th, 2017 at 12:40 am
Is it just a Word problem? I’ve noticed in the past few weeks that Chrome is red underlining various words that exist and are correctly spelt.
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:04 pm
It may be that Chrome is using a variant of the Microsoft spellchecker. Or perhaps it’s just that Chrome is an American product as well. But it’s not my English!
Btw I discovered that Australian English isn’t exactly like UK English either. -rolls eyes- Give it a couple of hundred years and we may all end up speaking completely different languages.
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July 13th, 2017 at 2:22 am
Good luck! I spent two hours yesterday trying to figure out where table tools were … Not as hugely frustrating as your situation, but still … 🙂
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:06 pm
lol – no, it /is/ frustating. The things that are visible are the simplest, most basic functions. ALL the more clever and useful stuff is hidden away even more thoroughly than when we just had good old fashioned menus. 😦
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July 13th, 2017 at 12:57 am
I can’t get Canadian English either. It reverts to American. Grrrr.
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:06 pm
I know! I just don’t get it. Why even provide the option if it’s not going to work? Recipe for frustration. 😦
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:07 pm
oh! p.s. one day we should sit down to a round robin conference to compare our various ‘dialects’. 😀
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July 12th, 2017 at 10:50 pm
As Charlie Brown would say, “Aaargh!”
Sorry you’re having to go through this nightmare, Meeks.
I guess I’ll stick with my 2008 Word.
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:09 pm
lol – I can’t remember 8 but I really miss 10. Hang on to your old faithful for as long as you can. 🙂
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July 12th, 2017 at 10:44 pm
Wow! I hope I don’t have that problem when I merge all my chapters! Loved you’re rant by the way. I felt myself getting angry along with you!
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:10 pm
If you do have trouble, you can buy either StoryBox or Scrivener [for the PC] for about $40. Both applications work really well and they’re a good investment for your writing future. Good luck. 🙂
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July 12th, 2017 at 9:13 pm
Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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July 12th, 2017 at 8:33 pm
I’m amazoned that Createspace demands MS Word files, as most typographers say ‘anything but’. How do you stop Word ‘helping’ you with grammar, and then offering the same suggestion for everything when there wasn’t a problem in the first place?
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:13 pm
I’m amazoned too. 😀 I think it’s a case of “Everyone uses Word to write their magnum opus so take the Word file, convert it to PDF and use the PDF.”
It’s a roundabout process but as I don’t have a way of converting the .rtf file into PDF directly, or then editing it to make it look nice in a PDF, I have to kind of go backwards via Word. Crazy.
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July 12th, 2017 at 6:32 pm
….and breathe…
Sounds truly awful. I’m not having the same issues with my word package, but then I’m only making small docs. I do quite a lot of ‘add to dictionary’ and copy and paste with out formatting. Perhaps you could copy all the text into a text file, or a single cell on excel, (that should remove all current preferences and formats) and then copy it back into a new word document (after rebooting) and then the new word doc should have retained all your preferences?
I converted 24 heads of garlic into garlic butter for the freezer yesterday afternoon as part of my ‘grrrrrr this isn’t working’ fix – very satisfying, but my hands stink now! hugs and raspberry jam from me. xx
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:17 pm
The original file was a very nice, clean .rtf that came straight from StoryBox. But then I had to do all sorts of prettying things in Word and I think the size issue just got too much for the program.
I fixed the problem eventually, I think. Just haven’t had the time to go back in to see.
Once the Offspring is back home and life goes back to something approaching normal, I’ll breathe deep and go back in.
Garlic butter, from home grown garlic. I’m drooling, Dawn. Seriously. 🙂
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July 15th, 2017 at 1:27 am
😀
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July 12th, 2017 at 4:49 pm
If the problem is that the writer program you want to use can’t produce PDF files, can’t you use a PDF “printer”?
Windows should have one along with normal printers. If that program can print, most probably you can select a PDF printer from the same print menu, and it’ll produce PDF files.
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:20 pm
I can producePDF files from Word, but before I do that, I have to pretty the internal format of the book up – headings, indents, alignment, pagenumbers etc. That is where the problem is happening, at that prettying level. I’ll get there, but Word will make me sweat blood for it first. 🙂
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July 12th, 2017 at 3:01 pm
This is what happens to me when I use Scrivener. I think that’s an Australian software program, so you can get your revenge there. 😄
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:22 pm
Is it? I assumed it was American, like StoryBox. lol To be honest I haven’t ever used Scrivener but I’ve read that the two apps are very similar, at least in what they do even if they’re not the same in /how/ they do it.
I’d be quite happy to go straight from StoryBox to Createspace but that’s just not an option.
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July 12th, 2017 at 2:48 pm
Feel free.
I had so many problems with Word I refused to have it and now only have and use ‘Open Office’ which is at least collaborative so all those frustrated with Word problems can improve things for others.
Unlimited de-frustrating Hugs xxx
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July 12th, 2017 at 8:30 pm
Try Libre Office, Dave — same original code but now far better and more secure, updated.
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July 14th, 2017 at 10:23 pm
Honestly, if I hadn’t spent so much money buying Word 16, I’ve reached the point where I’d be more than happy to try one of the opensource packages. Ah well, maybe one day.
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July 15th, 2017 at 11:05 pm
I would say something like inDesign to pretty things up and do the final layout work, but… Adobe. So … yeah.
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July 16th, 2017 at 9:50 pm
I actually do still have an ancient copy of InDesign CS but it’s been years since I used it and I don’t think Createspace is geared for it.
Createspace isn’t like a full on print company. It only does a fairly limited range of sizes, fonts blah blah so the finished print-on-demand book is cheap enough to make it worthwhile. Limitations but I’ll live with them. 🙂
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