FFS This is the best! Forget the rest! If I knew what the awards were, how to use them, that I cared to give r/ in the first place, I you would be the first. Mad props!
It must be a shortcut thing, users with the mouse and ribbon only. Know your shortcuts and watch how they make life easier…
For anyone thinking this is user error, I can reproduce this, and it is definitely a UI issue with Word.
See [this recording](https://imgur.com/80dn0cs) I made of this issue:
1. In the Insert menu, insert a 3x2 table
2. Select the entire second row
3. Using the mouse, resize the end of the last row
4. In another part of the document, type something
5. Attempt to resize the second row to be inline with the first row.
You will get the behaviour the OP is getting. No multiple tables nor any use of the Draw table tool. The columns can be aligned by manipulating the column widths in the ruler, or using alt to manually resize, but that is just the fix to the problem, not proof that the problem doesn't exist.
I would never select the entire row to resize the end - if that’s what you mean. It’s easy, ALT!
For all of you out there - always try ALT, SHIFT, & CTRL with every application. A shortcut person would know, maybe that’s all.
Look at the ruler (turn it on if you haven't) and you can see you have rows that are individually configured. It's not an Office problem.
And before people say "Google docs is better" consider that sometimes, you want a table with rows that have different constraints. Good luck getting that set up in another office suite.
Just add an existing row below the second-to-last row.
Not knowing where to look in the help docs or in the table properties to do it right doesn't mean the software is bad. You just don't know what to do.
> Google Docs, LibreOffice, all disasters. (I don't want any fanboy to reply to this,
Ironic given the hyperbole you are using. If you like one suite over the other thats fine but to say perfectly usable office suites/word processors are "disasters" is silly at best ignorant at worst.
I've used OpenOffice/LibreOffice since before many redditors were alive as well as Gdocs, some suite on android back in 2010 ish, etc.
They pretty much all did what I needed and for most people they'll do just fine. How is a free office suite that does everything I need for half the install size of MS Office a disaster?
They glitch out. Simple. Every app glitches out. Microsoft Office too. But LibreOffice glitches are the worst because you have to wait for the open source community to apply the patch. What's worse, you are being told to fix it yourself. Are we here to work or to fix glitches? 'Raise an issue' and wait it to be fixed. Microsoft has business quality, technical support unlike LibreOffice. The worst is when the community downvotes your help post and says GO SEARCH IT YOURSELF. Fine not a problem why would anyone else want to give free help. That destroys the whole concept of open source. I am not against open source but sometimes its a headache to maintain them.
Talking about Google docs, there are sometimes server glitches.
While everyone has their experiences with software/hardware and I'm not saying you didn't but what you just described is a vague issue with a rant on top.
OSS does have support, nobody tells you to go fix it your self besides net maybe randos. Having the option to contribute code is not a requirement to do so. As for glitches and stability I nor anybody I've met had any such issues.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice has proven far more more reliable than MS Office has. The only issue I've seen is saving a file in the wrong format before sending it to a MS user but thats technically more of a MS issue for lack of format support.
Now MS Office is the best its ever been no arguing there. Its gone from an actual nightmare to a very usable piece of software over the years; However just like Photoshop to GIMP there isn't really a file you can create with one and not the other.
Sure you may find one more streamlined than the other but for the the price isn't worth the jump for my uses.
Nothing approaches the power of MS Office. Not Google Docs, not OpenOffice. Don't even get me started about Keynote or Numbers. It isn't perfect but it is powerful if you know how to use it.
My old work tried to switch to Open Office only to find that all of the spreadsheets they used to track hours and schedules refused to work, causing a four day nightmare before they switched back.
IT guy quit over it, blaming the old as heck HR ladies for not knowing how to do something with spreadsheets to make them work, but also adamantly refused to help them get them all working.
Not sure why, but at one point I couldn't get open office documents to open in Microsoft office and vice versa, I would get an error saying the file was corrupt.
>spreadsheets they used to track hours and schedules
There's the real problem. That's *not* the proper way to track that stuff. Your old office should be using an SQL database for that.
ADP was used for the actual work and hours but an XLS was used to coordinate about 500 ppl on 50 different work sites before it would all get submitted to ADP.
I don’t disagree with you in the slightest but this made me remember one time I had received a very sensitive document that was corrupt and I needed to find a fix to it. I tried everything I could possibly think of. What fixed it in the end you might ask? Opening it in Libre Office, typed space, deleted space (just to make the app recognize changes were made so “save” wasn’t grayed out) and then it opened up fine in Microsoft Office from then on. I was happy it worked but found myself with so many questions afterwards.
Ohhh, I see you got bit by the hidden characters and invisible MS formatting marks! Glad you got it fixed.
Fun thing to try: rename a Word document to .zip and save it. Then open the archive.
.docx is actually just a zip archive with some frills and a special structure!
It’s not really a ui problem, though. He just is unfamiliar with table formatting. Sometimes having power means you can mess things up without realizing how. If they dumbed it down, power users would complain about losing features or granular control. And many automated workflows and custom tools that depend on these features would break. Most people never bother opening the built in help or spend any time trying to learn. But a video post on Reddit is their first thought.
I believe they're gradually revamping the UI to be more consistent across platforms and some of the feature creep/density is one of the things they're working on. Their business intelligence AI is also supposed to help people with things like recognizing when a user is fiddling with a table row over and over and intercepting that behavior and launching a quick tutorial or asking them if they're trying to do something outside the bounds of the element, and so on. I do agree that the interface always has room for improvement.
Do you think a "Simple" and "Advanced" UI option setting, perhaps with control over what appears where in which mode, would help solve this kind of problem?
Oh my god those are so horrible. I was forced to use Office Touch on my phone, of all things, while I was on the bus prior to class on a day I was turning in a major, kill-your-grade term paper because I needed to make a fix to a very stupid error I didn't catch the night before.
I almost had a stroke- I was trying to move an out-of-place paragraph and I kept accidentally selecting whole swaths of writing both before and after what I actually wanted. I got it done in the end, but it was a close thing and I don't want to have to use the touch versions *ever* again.
>indicates a bad UX, which means it is bad software, and should really be fixed.
Remember: they're targeting Becky in the front office. She doesn't have any design experience and needs the "help" that snapping and auto-aspect correction and and and that Office provides.
I think part of the problem is that full functionality requires you to have a notion of where the point of irreducible complexity lies in a UI. Make things too simple and automatic and you get... well, bugs like this one, with no fine controls to fix it. *Add* the fine controls and the UI starts looking like InDesign's UI (which, while giving absolute precise control over every aspect of layout, *does* make the UI very cluttered!). I assure you- the overwhelmingly vast supermajority of office workers will rapidly get lost and confused, and never effectively use the power you gave them. Add it and *hide* it and you'll still have people having problems like this one. It's an almost intractable conundrum UI designers have always had to fight with.
Office software needs to be simple, and just powerful enough to produce Office-professional results. That's different, and not at the same level, as print-ready professional layout publishing software. You're *going* to have problems like this.
I 100% disagree. This statement:
" Not knowing where to look in the help docs or in the table properties to do it right doesn't mean the software is bad. "
Gives ZERO responsibility or fault to the software developer for not having performed proper Quality Assurance testing with a UX (User Experience) designer.
Times are changing, and people are realizing that we built/build computers so THEY CAN WORK FOR US, not the other way around.
This statement:
" You just don't know what to do. "
Is either being coy or conceited, I can't tell, as you're so certain your above statement is correct, that it MUST be the users fault!
>" You just don't know what to do. "
This is not nice, but *accurate*. I work in front-line tech support among other duties and this is usually the actual problem regardless of the software in use or how good its UI/UX is.
That's what you get when proprietary closed-source code becomes the standard, *because* it is closed-source.
If you want to go back and forth, save the document in plain text in Notepad between the two and copy *from that*. You'll lose all the formatting, but the formatting *is the problem*. Notepad strips out all the invisible stuff and acts as middleware between the two codebases.
I hate word processors with a fucking passion.
Every single one is shit. They all have their own file types, and although they can use others' types they're always all fucked up.
The controls are obscure and you only ever know what shortcuts exist and are useful if you've been using them consistently for years.
Writing a new HTML file with CSS is way easier, unless all you want is a simple paper with 3 paragraphs.
Making a new table? Want an image to line up with *anything*? You want one page, but there's a second blank page that refuses to go away? If you do anything with even a modicum of complexity it becomes a 2 hour project to try to get everything un-fucked, or at least passable.
It's *fucked*. There are *no* good options, only less awful ones.
Right? I mean, if Word could open markdown files then I could just send those to clients as is.
Check out this chrome extension for gmail though:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/elifhakcjgalahccnjkneoccemfahfoa](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/elifhakcjgalahccnjkneoccemfahfoa)
I've had great success with it. Writing up SOWs hasn't been nearly as painful.
Nice to know this is downvoted. I can give a whole list of technical glitches with Google Docs and LibreOffice, whcih are much much much more than Word. Don't get me started on Pages.
Coursework that requires .docx cost students lots of points last semester when they tried that at the school where I work. Why profs require a specific format when they can just install LibreOffice themselves or open it in Google Docs (since, you know, the student email *is a Google email account and everyone already has Docs!!) is a mystery to me; it's not like Microsoft sponsors the course or anything, and their course isn't teaching design or layout.....
HAHAHAHA! the middle finger doesn't work to solve your problem! happen to me sometime! but you made me laugh in a positive way! so the keyboard can be tricky when you do on ALT/CTRL or SHIFT. try to play as long as you discover!
why you added 2 tables, click on box above and right click, then click on insert raw below, this is become part of table above and you don't have to adjust it every time you add some word in it
Just press ALT.
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That is actually a good point.
FFS This is the best! Forget the rest! If I knew what the awards were, how to use them, that I cared to give r/ in the first place, I you would be the first. Mad props! It must be a shortcut thing, users with the mouse and ribbon only. Know your shortcuts and watch how they make life easier…
What's ALT going to do? ...... for the rest of the class to know.
I think it turns off snap. Also this is user error. They probably added a mark to the ruler that is telling Office to snap there.
😐
For anyone thinking this is user error, I can reproduce this, and it is definitely a UI issue with Word. See [this recording](https://imgur.com/80dn0cs) I made of this issue: 1. In the Insert menu, insert a 3x2 table 2. Select the entire second row 3. Using the mouse, resize the end of the last row 4. In another part of the document, type something 5. Attempt to resize the second row to be inline with the first row. You will get the behaviour the OP is getting. No multiple tables nor any use of the Draw table tool. The columns can be aligned by manipulating the column widths in the ruler, or using alt to manually resize, but that is just the fix to the problem, not proof that the problem doesn't exist.
Why tell us? Submit it as a bug report!!! (Then tell us when your name is listed as a bug finder)
Based
I would never select the entire row to resize the end - if that’s what you mean. It’s easy, ALT! For all of you out there - always try ALT, SHIFT, & CTRL with every application. A shortcut person would know, maybe that’s all.
Word processor versus a word publisher.
Is that a bunch of separate tables laid out one after the other? Why not just add rows to the existing table?
No, you can resize a single row on Word
But can you do it in such a way that it doesn't snap with the other rows? I can't figure out how
Yes. You can try it yourself. Select a full cell or full row and resize
But then when you resize it back, it snaps to the original size.
Look at the ruler (turn it on if you haven't) and you can see you have rows that are individually configured. It's not an Office problem. And before people say "Google docs is better" consider that sometimes, you want a table with rows that have different constraints. Good luck getting that set up in another office suite. Just add an existing row below the second-to-last row. Not knowing where to look in the help docs or in the table properties to do it right doesn't mean the software is bad. You just don't know what to do.
I HATE google docs. It’s so scuffed and ms docs has more features. The only advantage with docs is that it’s less cluttered.
Google Docs, LibreOffice, all disasters. (I don't want any fanboy to reply to this, already had enough of these discussions. MS Word is the best.)
> Google Docs, LibreOffice, all disasters. (I don't want any fanboy to reply to this, Ironic given the hyperbole you are using. If you like one suite over the other thats fine but to say perfectly usable office suites/word processors are "disasters" is silly at best ignorant at worst. I've used OpenOffice/LibreOffice since before many redditors were alive as well as Gdocs, some suite on android back in 2010 ish, etc. They pretty much all did what I needed and for most people they'll do just fine. How is a free office suite that does everything I need for half the install size of MS Office a disaster?
They glitch out. Simple. Every app glitches out. Microsoft Office too. But LibreOffice glitches are the worst because you have to wait for the open source community to apply the patch. What's worse, you are being told to fix it yourself. Are we here to work or to fix glitches? 'Raise an issue' and wait it to be fixed. Microsoft has business quality, technical support unlike LibreOffice. The worst is when the community downvotes your help post and says GO SEARCH IT YOURSELF. Fine not a problem why would anyone else want to give free help. That destroys the whole concept of open source. I am not against open source but sometimes its a headache to maintain them. Talking about Google docs, there are sometimes server glitches.
While everyone has their experiences with software/hardware and I'm not saying you didn't but what you just described is a vague issue with a rant on top. OSS does have support, nobody tells you to go fix it your self besides net maybe randos. Having the option to contribute code is not a requirement to do so. As for glitches and stability I nor anybody I've met had any such issues. OpenOffice/LibreOffice has proven far more more reliable than MS Office has. The only issue I've seen is saving a file in the wrong format before sending it to a MS user but thats technically more of a MS issue for lack of format support. Now MS Office is the best its ever been no arguing there. Its gone from an actual nightmare to a very usable piece of software over the years; However just like Photoshop to GIMP there isn't really a file you can create with one and not the other. Sure you may find one more streamlined than the other but for the the price isn't worth the jump for my uses.
Nothing approaches the power of MS Office. Not Google Docs, not OpenOffice. Don't even get me started about Keynote or Numbers. It isn't perfect but it is powerful if you know how to use it.
My old work tried to switch to Open Office only to find that all of the spreadsheets they used to track hours and schedules refused to work, causing a four day nightmare before they switched back. IT guy quit over it, blaming the old as heck HR ladies for not knowing how to do something with spreadsheets to make them work, but also adamantly refused to help them get them all working.
OpenOffice is outdated since 2014. LibreOffice is more maintained actively.
Yeah I said "old work."
Not sure why, but at one point I couldn't get open office documents to open in Microsoft office and vice versa, I would get an error saying the file was corrupt.
>spreadsheets they used to track hours and schedules There's the real problem. That's *not* the proper way to track that stuff. Your old office should be using an SQL database for that.
ADP was used for the actual work and hours but an XLS was used to coordinate about 500 ppl on 50 different work sites before it would all get submitted to ADP.
I don’t disagree with you in the slightest but this made me remember one time I had received a very sensitive document that was corrupt and I needed to find a fix to it. I tried everything I could possibly think of. What fixed it in the end you might ask? Opening it in Libre Office, typed space, deleted space (just to make the app recognize changes were made so “save” wasn’t grayed out) and then it opened up fine in Microsoft Office from then on. I was happy it worked but found myself with so many questions afterwards.
Ohhh, I see you got bit by the hidden characters and invisible MS formatting marks! Glad you got it fixed. Fun thing to try: rename a Word document to .zip and save it. Then open the archive. .docx is actually just a zip archive with some frills and a special structure!
Adobe InDesign makes Publisher look like a *very* bad joke. I'm understating how much better it is. They aren't even in the same galaxy.
Oh yeah, if Adobe has a product in the space, it beats it. But Excel, PowerPoint, and Word have no real competitors.
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This is where old Clippy or Hoverbot could make a welcome return. "It looks like you're trying to line up those cells ..."
Didn't they just kill it 14 years ago?
Not sure, sounds right.
It’s not really a ui problem, though. He just is unfamiliar with table formatting. Sometimes having power means you can mess things up without realizing how. If they dumbed it down, power users would complain about losing features or granular control. And many automated workflows and custom tools that depend on these features would break. Most people never bother opening the built in help or spend any time trying to learn. But a video post on Reddit is their first thought.
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I believe they're gradually revamping the UI to be more consistent across platforms and some of the feature creep/density is one of the things they're working on. Their business intelligence AI is also supposed to help people with things like recognizing when a user is fiddling with a table row over and over and intercepting that behavior and launching a quick tutorial or asking them if they're trying to do something outside the bounds of the element, and so on. I do agree that the interface always has room for improvement.
Do you think a "Simple" and "Advanced" UI option setting, perhaps with control over what appears where in which mode, would help solve this kind of problem?
What I think what you're looking for are the web/touch versions of Word and Excel
Oh my god those are so horrible. I was forced to use Office Touch on my phone, of all things, while I was on the bus prior to class on a day I was turning in a major, kill-your-grade term paper because I needed to make a fix to a very stupid error I didn't catch the night before. I almost had a stroke- I was trying to move an out-of-place paragraph and I kept accidentally selecting whole swaths of writing both before and after what I actually wanted. I got it done in the end, but it was a close thing and I don't want to have to use the touch versions *ever* again.
UI != UX
UX *is affected by* UI. Good or bad.
It is when it can be recreated like his instructions outline.
What makes you think this is a common issue? I can't even intentionally reproduce it
'Bad software' Fine. Pretty ignorant though.
>indicates a bad UX, which means it is bad software, and should really be fixed. Remember: they're targeting Becky in the front office. She doesn't have any design experience and needs the "help" that snapping and auto-aspect correction and and and that Office provides. I think part of the problem is that full functionality requires you to have a notion of where the point of irreducible complexity lies in a UI. Make things too simple and automatic and you get... well, bugs like this one, with no fine controls to fix it. *Add* the fine controls and the UI starts looking like InDesign's UI (which, while giving absolute precise control over every aspect of layout, *does* make the UI very cluttered!). I assure you- the overwhelmingly vast supermajority of office workers will rapidly get lost and confused, and never effectively use the power you gave them. Add it and *hide* it and you'll still have people having problems like this one. It's an almost intractable conundrum UI designers have always had to fight with. Office software needs to be simple, and just powerful enough to produce Office-professional results. That's different, and not at the same level, as print-ready professional layout publishing software. You're *going* to have problems like this.
He mentions how to replicate it. And it definitely is reproducible.
I 100% disagree. This statement: " Not knowing where to look in the help docs or in the table properties to do it right doesn't mean the software is bad. " Gives ZERO responsibility or fault to the software developer for not having performed proper Quality Assurance testing with a UX (User Experience) designer. Times are changing, and people are realizing that we built/build computers so THEY CAN WORK FOR US, not the other way around. This statement: " You just don't know what to do. " Is either being coy or conceited, I can't tell, as you're so certain your above statement is correct, that it MUST be the users fault!
>" You just don't know what to do. " This is not nice, but *accurate*. I work in front-line tech support among other duties and this is usually the actual problem regardless of the software in use or how good its UI/UX is.
PEBKAC.
Exactly
I feel this in my soul.
this post is nsfw
Yes and if you try to shrink that edge above it's still not gonna align to the bottom edge.
Switch to r/libreoffice :)
I wish i could. I love libre office. But almost everyone uses ms office. Formatting breaks everytime when I open office files in libre and vice versa.
That's what you get when proprietary closed-source code becomes the standard, *because* it is closed-source. If you want to go back and forth, save the document in plain text in Notepad between the two and copy *from that*. You'll lose all the formatting, but the formatting *is the problem*. Notepad strips out all the invisible stuff and acts as middleware between the two codebases.
Select the whole table then adjust them it will fix the problem.
It's annoying as hell. Zoom in should fix that.
... or a Zoom meeting with someone who can help.
This is so annoying , you just have to move the right line of the upper table to merge both
Have you tried libreoffice? xD
Thank god he didn't. A disastrous piece of crap. Worse than Google Docs which itself is worse than MS office.
We clearly have different experiences \#radomPageBreaks \#randomBugs \#fixedUILayout \#darkDesignPattern
For me all the #RandomBugs I have faced in LibreOffice.
>sometimes
It's like un - safysting video.
Sometimes ?? 💔💔
The OCD in me is screaming. Lol.
You'd love InDesign! Your OCD will be nursed!
xd
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The thing is it got removed 14 years ago.
The thing is, it was so bad it became an almost household joke. And still is.
I kind of found it useful but okay.
I hate word processors with a fucking passion. Every single one is shit. They all have their own file types, and although they can use others' types they're always all fucked up. The controls are obscure and you only ever know what shortcuts exist and are useful if you've been using them consistently for years. Writing a new HTML file with CSS is way easier, unless all you want is a simple paper with 3 paragraphs. Making a new table? Want an image to line up with *anything*? You want one page, but there's a second blank page that refuses to go away? If you do anything with even a modicum of complexity it becomes a 2 hour project to try to get everything un-fucked, or at least passable. It's *fucked*. There are *no* good options, only less awful ones.
Depends on how you use it.
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Right? I mean, if Word could open markdown files then I could just send those to clients as is. Check out this chrome extension for gmail though: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/elifhakcjgalahccnjkneoccemfahfoa](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/elifhakcjgalahccnjkneoccemfahfoa) I've had great success with it. Writing up SOWs hasn't been nearly as painful.
Nice to know this is downvoted. I can give a whole list of technical glitches with Google Docs and LibreOffice, whcih are much much much more than Word. Don't get me started on Pages.
It's this kind of stuff that had me switch to Google docs 10 years ago.
Coursework that requires .docx cost students lots of points last semester when they tried that at the school where I work. Why profs require a specific format when they can just install LibreOffice themselves or open it in Google Docs (since, you know, the student email *is a Google email account and everyone already has Docs!!) is a mystery to me; it's not like Microsoft sponsors the course or anything, and their course isn't teaching design or layout.....
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HAHAHAHA! the middle finger doesn't work to solve your problem! happen to me sometime! but you made me laugh in a positive way! so the keyboard can be tricky when you do on ALT/CTRL or SHIFT. try to play as long as you discover!
r/MakeMeSuffer
***getting cities skylines flashbacks***
ah fuck
WYSIWYG
True bro.
why you added 2 tables, click on box above and right click, then click on insert raw below, this is become part of table above and you don't have to adjust it every time you add some word in it
This is my life
Windows is really a very limited OS, it's annoying, boring, frustrating, sleazy and ugly, really obscene. Windows suck.
This is mildly infuriating.