From neowin.net:

Oddly enough, a documentary called "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap" would seem to dispute the notion that Clippy was popular with focus groups before its launch. Former Microsoft executive Roz Ho stated."

Most of the women thought the characters were too male and that they were leering at them. So we’re sitting in a conference room. There’s me and, I think, like, 11 or 12 guys, and we’re going through the results, and they said, ‘I don’t see it. I just don’t know what they’re talking about.’ And I said, ‘Guys, guys, look, I’m a woman, and I’m going to tell you, these animated characters are male-looking.’

Omg. They're absolutely right.

Be as open to seeing bias as you'd like, you will always have a blindspot. Until today, this was one of mine.

Labels: microsoft, microsoft fail, sexism, Word

Here's a nice command template for Pandoc which, in spite of its foibles, is still a very cool library.

It turns out to be quite simple to convert a docx to markdown. The following example is from the Pandoc demos site.

pandoc -s example30.docx -t markdown -o example35.md

However the generated markdown from the above command has a few issues.

The lines are only 80 characters long. I do not know why an 80-character line length is the default but I do not like it. This is fortunately quite easy to fix with the option –no-wrap.

Links do not use the reference style. I prefer the reference style links because it makes the text less cluttered by moving the link it self to the bottom of the file. This is also easy to fix with the option –reference-links.

With the two options added the command looks like this.

pandoc -s example30.docx --no-wrap --reference-links -t markdown -o example35.md

Now the generated markdown is very readable and close to what I would write myself. 

Okay, I might quibble, well, vehemently deny "quite simple" and "very readable" are accurate. I just tried it on a complicated outline that was making Word throw up, you know, a doc where you try to add another line to your outline and Word gives up, not matching up indent or numbering with the rest of the content. 

I wanted to move to Markdown so I could define precisely where each bullet level was and who belonged to it. It's painful that we're in 2021 and we haven't come to the realization that you have to use some sort of markup code for complex document authoring. No rich text editor will ever achieve true WY[intend]IWYG.

Pandoc results were... not great. Here's a snippet:

3.  Unchecked and Enabled when instructor has access for none of the selected questions (I-I/F) -- TC 697849
iii. 
iv. User perms none \<\<\< Impossible! User owns some in this situation.
    1.  
    2.  
    3.  
```{=html}
<!-- -->
```
e)  Transfer Ownership is visible -- TC 694132
f)  Remove is visible -- TC 694132

Yuck. It didn't even convert bulleted lists with a), b), c) to a list in Markdown at all. To be clear, I don't have empty 1., 2., 3. in the original. Those are hidden in Word's DOM somewhere. Ugh.

So now I'm in VIm setting things right.

But it's still a good command template:

pandoc -s in.docx --no-wrap --reference-links -t markdown -o out.md

Labels: markdown, noteToSelf, pandoc, Word

I like, obviously enough, "Single Page" viewing in pdf readers. But how do I get that in Word?

Googling for a "single page" setting in Word would be a mistake, I've found. What you're really looking to do, in Word's parlance, is zoom to the whole page. If you have a little less or more than a whole page on your screen, it'll start getting creative when you hit page up and page down, which stinks. But if you zoom to exact page size, it'll behave as if you were viewing as a single page in your favorite pdf viewer, even if you resize the window.

On most Words I've used, from the 90s on up, you can get to this setting by hitting `Alt-V` then `Z`, the selecting "Whole page".

Labels: noteToSelf, Word

Microsoft Word Starter 2010 is a simplified version of Word that comes pre-loaded on your computer. Word Starter includes features that are basic to creating and working with documents, but it does not include the rich set of features found in the full version of Word. This article lists the differences in features between Word Starter and the full version of Word.

If you find that you need a richer set of features than what Word Starter provides, you can easily upgrade from Word Starter to Word. On the Home tab, click Purchase to visit an online retailer, where you can purchase and download Office right away.

Footnotes and endnotes

Not available to create

If you open a document that contains footnotes or endnotes, you can click the footnote or endnote link to jump to the footnote or endnote. You can also cut, copy, or paste the footnote or endnote, and you can format the text.

Labels: open, Word

Labels: obsolescence, Word

The Ribbon feature has proven controversial, with Microsoft's supporters hailing it as the future of user interfaces, and its critics arguing that the move is simply an arbitrary change intended to derail any familiarity with (and therefore potential for competition from) its free OpenOffice doppelg�nger. [emph mine]

Labels: interface, microsoft, OSS, Word

So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems. Whereas DRM and software patents, for example, are manifestly and unequivocally bad for free software (and indeed for everyone), that doesn't seem to be true for the MP3 format.

Labels: control, copyright, DRM, ethics, F/free, licensing, pseudo-academic, Word

For instance, let's say you have a Word document named foo.doc, and you want to convert it to Rich Text Format without having to open the program.

$ abiword --to=rtf foo.doc

Labels: Word

Another method for deleting comments is to use Find and Replace. Select Edit->Replace and do the following:-

1) Leave the Find What box empty.

2) Click the Format button, choose Style, and select the Comment Reference style. (Don’t see the Format button? Click the More button to make it visible.)

3) Leave the Replace With box empty.

4) Click the Replace All button.

Labels: Word

Here's the simple solution if you are on a PC and have no access to a macintosh. The solutions mentioned above aren't really complete and therefore don't work.

download GZIP from www.gzip.org
save the document (word, powerpoint etc - whatever it is) as a webpage (htm/html).
Go to the subdirectory created along with that web file and find the .pcz file
Rename it as .gz (eg. REN *.PCZ *.GZ).
copy GZIP.EXE into the same directory as the picture file.
use the command GZIP -d *.gz
in the directory and you'll find a file without a file extension.
Rename the file and give it the extension .PICT

Now you'll be able to open the picture, assuming you have quicktime installed, by simply double clicking on it.

Labels: Word

Sub MacroPaste()
'
' MacroPaste Macro
' Macro created 6/6/07 by Bailey
'
'http://word.mvps.org/Mac/PasteText.html

    '
    ' equivalent to Edit>Paste Special>Unformatted Text and to using
    ' the smart button in Word 2004 to select "keep text only"
    '
    Selection.PasteSpecial datatype:=wdPasteText

End Sub

Labels: Word