I spend a lot of my life in front of the computer, and a good portion of that time looking at a screen similar to the one on the left. It seems that MS Word is pretty much the only word processor out there. Even people with Apple Macs use it, which is something of a let down, to turn on a shiny, streamlined Mac and then see the Microsoft logo pop up like a bad smell.But anyway, I use it to write my unpublished nonsense, and to earn some actual money. I pull off the latter trick by translation and revision work, and on a long document this means that tracking gets used. For those who don't know, down at the bottom of the MS Word screen sits a little box with 'trk' in it. If you click this it shows up, in various colours, every change you make to the document. Stuff you've deleted remains there but with a line through it, and your additions sit side by side with the discarded stuff. Then, if another person on another computer makes changes, all their stuff appears too, in yet another colour. After a while of passing the thing around, your screen resembles a multi-coloured cluster fuck of meaningless words. The more you look at the text, picking your way through the endless changes and trying to construct a sensible sentence in your head, the more it all looks like vomit.
This of course is the only time in your life that you actually want that paper-clip cartoon to turn up with a clickable option that says 'click yes to make all this shit go away'. But if you're proof reading, you need to read it through over, and over, and over, and over again. Until you've looked at it so many times that either your eyes are bleeding or you can no longer recognise English words, let alone any rules on grammar. Of course to be fair, MS Word is one of the few things that Microsoft can be proud of. It's powerful, reliable and fast and I'm sure that even people in other galaxies use it. Before it took over I used WordPerfect for years, but Word is better. And I must confess that when I do finally get that Mac, Word will be the very first software I buy for it. And the tracking feature is actually very clever and well thought out. But try telling me that when I lie sobbing in front of my unfashionably non widescreen monitor. It's been a long day.
6 comments:
I use Word but I didn't know about the tracking option - thanks for the tip!
It's a clever trick, just try not to clutter the screen with too many changes. Nice to see you by the way, how's the OC ?
Oddly enough, my version of Word at work doesn't seem to have the TRK thing, but I don't think it's Word 2007, which may be the difference?
One word of warning on using Track Changes, though, is that Word documents sent out in a work context can have the changes tracked, which you don't always want people to do. PDFing the thing can save embarrassment.
On the Mac, a lot of people seem to like using Final Draft for writing, though as you and I have discussed before, it's not cheap (though it has some useful tricks for writing screenplays etc).
J
That's odd, I only have Word 2000. Are you absolutely sure you don't have it ?
Isn't Final Draft simply for screenplays though ?
Can't see no TRK thing at all, nope no way not never - maybe they've moved it?
Final Draft has other settings, too - radio and TV as well as screenplays, and blank ones suitable for novels and the like. But it costs, so...
J
How odd, you haven't bought your copy of Word from Ken Shabby have you ?
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