Word Imposters

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who think they can use Microsoft Word and come up with the most creative formatting you can imagine to do things that Word already has features for or to mask that they don't actually know how to use Word.

I call them imposters, because they are just pretending to be experienced Word users.

Recently, I was reading a document formatted as a report with headers and paragraphs. As my cursor hovered over the paragraph section, I saw a table box! Just one cell, carefully inserted to indent like a paragraph. I think there is a feature for paragraph formatting in Word.

Another formatting favorite - using spaces for tabs!

How about forms? I love those! Try entering text in one of the text fields and watch everything wrap around because there are FIFTY spaces inserted there.

The worst thing is when you try to reformat these wonderful documents.

I once was collaborating on a document created by a Word Imposter and after input from several other contributors, the formatting was so badly corrupted that I ended up copying the text, all 20 some pages, and pasting them as UNFORMATTED text to a new document. I even tried sending the document to the software support desk and they couldn't fix it. I finally had to spend several hours reformatting the entire thing.

In frustration I said to my manager that the document was a piece of crap. Boy did I ever catch it! He thought I was referring to the document contents.