Whoever stole my MS office, I'll find you. You have my Word.

Want to work with .docx files written in English from someone who lives in a country whose main language isn't English? Better enjoy all your English words being marked as mispelt because fuck you.

$150

Per year, by the way

Everyone complaining here about not being able to have unique footers or moving images or ignoring spelling errors just doesn't know what they're doing. You're literally the bad workman blaming the tool. I can do all of those things in Word.

If you prefer another tool, fine. But please stop shitting on things just because you don't understand them.

And PDF was never meant to be edited. Its sole purpose is to give you a document file which comes out exactly the same on computer screens and printers everywhere. Compact, reliable, compatible. If you need to replace parts of a PDF document post publication, it should be prepared using the Forms tools that are readily available in all good PDF suites.

By the way: I paid 30 Euros for an Office 2019 lifetime license. If ever that should not receive further updates then I'm ready to fork over another 30.

Want to make the header or footer on this page unique? Eat a bag of dicks.

Want to add a letter to an item in a table without fucking up the formatting of every document ever created across known time and space? Guck you.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office software since the 90s. They illegally leveraged this monopoly to try to destroy competition in other areas. Most infamously, they destroyed Netscape to try to kill competition in the early Internet space. That resulted in a trial for illegally abusing their monopoly which they lost. Then George W. Bush was elected president, and somehow Microsoft effectively got off with essentially no punishment. Admittedly though, part of that was that the judge in the case was so outraged at some of the stuff Microsoft pulled (submitting falsified evidence, having Bill Gates lie under oath repeatedly) that he talked about it in public when he shouldn't, which opened a door for Microsoft to try to weasel out of the loss.

The "evil" in Google's motto "Don't be evil" was widely viewed as being Microsoft. Google was an Internet company in an age where Microsoft was on trial for using their power to make everything about the Internet shitty so that they could control it. In the early days of Google, people weren't even allowed to use Microsoft software, including Windows, without a special dispensation from the higher-ups. Microsoft effectively avoided any kind of punishment for their abuse of their monopoly, but it distracted them and made them cautious, so they weren't able to crush Google before it could get going. Before anybody chimes in about how Google is evil, first read up in what Microsoft did. Google might be a bit shady, but where Google got its monopoly by spending hundreds of billions to make its search engine the default, Microsoft used tactics to destroy potential competitors and drive them out of business.

If the US (and the world) had effective enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws, Word would actually have to compete on its own merits. But, because it's a monopoly, Microsoft can just sit back and keep collecting rent.

Wanna know something fun about Office?
The keyboard shortcuts are localized.

YES, REALLY.

If you press Ctrl+S when running in Portuguese, it doesn't save, it underlines the word instead (Because the word for it is "Sublinhar").

Whoever is responsible for this decision won't die, when their time comes they'll be swallowed alive by the earth and welcomed into the 10th circle of hell, created for them exclusively.

The 11th circle is reserved for he who decided to localize the Excel Formula Functions too.

Want to automate your office document? Enjoy making your business dependent on a language

• that will be a dead end for your developer career
• where arrays can start at 0 or 1
• where checking for an array involves ignoring an error and resuming
• that is guaranteed to be broken a future patch
• that has to be given permission to run in a security center

Libre Office isn't just a usable substitute for Word and the rest of Office. It is downright superior -- it being free and open source need not even be in the equation. I tried to use Word on my partner's laptop the other day and all I could think was "what is this crap??".

I have made so many thousands of dollars in consulting fees because people don't know about the "align object: over text" option. I would even show them, and they'd still call me back the next week offering money.

Because nobody got ever fired for choosing Microsoft. It's like that with a lot of stuff. It's the default choice because everybody else uses it, good or not. Almost nobody is going to stick their neck outs to chose something differently.

The business world in a nutshell, borrowed from Dead Poets Society: https://youtu.be/nJ_htuCMCqM

Word 5.1a for Macintosh is still peak word processing.

WYSIWYG editors are often the worst thing to ever exist. (See: Dreamweaver) I don't know how Word has managed to stay alive for so long.

Tbf, most Microsoft software sucks. Everything they touch gets sticky and moldy, like SwiftKey and Skype.

You can edit PDFs on libre?