[jen729w]

Because it tries to do far too much and fails at the basics.

Keeping track of the margin/indent settings for bulleted lists across a 50+ page document? Shambles.

Trying to guess which header you want and insisting on auto-formatting the wrong one, time and time again? Infuriating.

Weird behaviour where it promotes the penultimate paragraph to a section header if you delete the last paragraph of a section?

Deeply confusing and hidden ‘Styles’ functionality that affects the visual layout of your document in ways that a beginner couldn’t possibly understand?

I wish I’d kept a blog of Word’s infuriating behaviour over the years (except at the time, all I want is for the thing to let me finish the document I’m being forced to work on so that I can stop using it as soon as possible).

And they just keep shovelling shit in to the product. STOP IT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

The worst part is that for 95% of the cases, Word is entirely unnecessary. I’ve seen – god help me, I’ve written – 100+ page corporate documents that could just have easily been put together in Wordpad using RTF. But no, it’s got to be in Word. The thing is a fucking curse.

[rusk]

Word is hard for detail-oriented people like programmers. I want to be able to control and tweak every single bit just the way I like it, and it frustrates me that it just seems to think it knows better a lot of the time, or that it doesn't let me undo its mistakes in any obvious way.

But when it comes out at the end, it usually looks fine. I try to remember that it's the paper-based outcome that Word is designed around, so ultimately for the intermediate digital artefacts "just fine" is good enough.

I'm not saying it's right, but most day-to-day users are probably fine with it.