MS Word

Should never have been included in Office

It wasn’t, it was included in Office Pro. (Sorry, I’ll stop now.)

My lasting memory of Access is sweating blood trying to use it as a back end database for a calendar / diary app I was writing for an Intranet website a good few years ago. Its date handling, back then at least, was a proper embuggerance. It’d happily accept UK date formats but assume US formats; so 15/1/2016 would parse as the 15th of January, but 5/1/2016 would store as the first of May. Drove me spare that did, until I realised what it was doing.

In a former life I wrote server software for some oil industry applications that worked with millions of objects in databases.

It had to run on Oracle, SQL Server and Access! 😯

Access is a nightmare if you want to scale things up but is great for really fast prototyping of projects. Having said that I did spend about a week on an earlier version writing a macro so the mouse wheel would scroll down the form rather than go to the next record.

I’ve been spoilt by working in companies with their own templates in the past – so dropping excel charts etcnnto word was simple ans was sizing and placing them.

Can anyo of your word gurus point me in the direction of a simple tutorial on setting up standard pages that could have may be 4 to 6 standard places to insert graphs from excel with Titles and Sources.

I find it incredible that MS can make it so hard to work across their basic offerings eg PPT, excel and word

Word has improved drastically from early versions. Long documents with lots of pictures, tables, headers & footers, linked content pages, mixed landscape & portrait pages, formatting and paragraph changes used to be a nightmare to edit.

It’s much better now and doesn’t get things wrong (random half & full page spaces altered formatting) when editing and moving things about.

Also.. If your trying to edit a word file and the formating is all whacked out.. Just copy and paste it into a text file.. Boom… Formatting gone.

Then paste it back into a new word doc and format it how you please.

Borland Sprint FTW.
I much prefer page layout software for most of my printed work nowadays.