Reason #472

Nannies, Technology, Wokism

…why I won’t use Microsoft Word:

The function produces a purple line beneath words or phrases it deems problematic while offering more ‘inclusive’ alternatives, and is included on the Office 365 version of Microsoft Word from 2019 onwards.

Recommended improvements to your usage:

  • Whitelist > Accepted List
  • Postman > Postal Worker
  • Mankind > Humanity
  • Maid > House Cleaner
  • Showgirl > Performing Artist
  • Master > Expert
  • Mistress > Lover
  • Manpower > Workforce
  • Heroine > Hero

For the record, I quit using Microsoft Office decades ago, for all sorts of reasons, among them:

  • Word has too many features that I can’t, don’t or won’t use
  • Excel is a shit spreadsheet program (Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro were far better)
  • Don’t get me started about Outlook, ever since MS killed Express
  • None of the other Office products are of any use to me since I retired, and I preferred Paradox to Access anyway when I was still working
  • MS Office is WAY too expensive for its actual utility.

So I use Apache OpenOffice, which while it has a few drawbacks of its own, is at least free (Writer and Calc work just fine for what I do), and Thunderbird for email.

I remember pointing the Son&Heir at OpenOffice many years ago when he was at college, and he found it worked for all his writing assignments and math homework.  He’s been grateful to me ever since, and I don’t think he’s ever used MS Office (although since he moved to Global MegaBanc Inc. that may have changed, I must ask him).

So fuck Microsoft, fuck their wokedom and by the way, fuck Windows 11, for which I’ve started getting those irritating little spam pop-up messages.

18 comments

  1. Look at it this way. Microsoft is providing you with a roadmap on how to be as offensive and politically incorrect as possible.

    Ain’t technology great!

  2. I miss Quattro Pro. I could make that program dance. I was given a project as a young engineer that no one else wanted to do. We had about 30 stations collecting data. The City wanted a graph of each day’s data. I got tired of importing, parsing, graphing, formatting, printing, etc. So I wrote a recursive macro that would do that for all 30 stations. Put the data in the right directory (they weren’t folders back then), start the macro, get a cup of coffee, and stop by the printer. I’ve not bothered to figure out Excel’s VB. I miss Quattro.

    Microsoft (and Bill Gates) makes everything worse it touches.

    1. > Put the data in the right directory (they weren’t folders back then)

      They still aren’t.

      Folders are a metaphor, not a description of how it works.

    2. It’s still available.

      I quit Corel because it got too expensive, and switched to LibreOffice.

      Unfortunately, the LibreOffice word processor and spreadsheet are just not as good as WordPerfect and QuattroPro.

      Happily, Corel had a sale and I got the complete 2021 edition for $150.00 so I’m back to running WP and QP.

      As for quality, back in the day my wife was a big cheese accountant for a big cheese energy company. Her office had built some monster Excel economic prediction spreadsheet that took 12 hours to run when any input was changed. I had her load it into quattro on my laptop which ran it in 18 minutes. She showed her boss who sighed painfully and said that Microsoft had them over a barrel with a contract that required Big Cheese Energy to use only Microsoft products.

      1. $150 is actually fairly expensive for Wordperfect 2021.

        I think I paid somewhere between $69-99 for mine, but I got the Home and Student edition that doesn’t come with Paradox (I don’t really need DB software).
        I’m not sure about 2021 (since I got it digitally from a sale for existing owners), but the WP H&S versions on DVD for earlier versions (especially X7 & X8) allowed you to install it on 3 separate machines, supposedly with the limitation that you shouldn’t have the same program from the suite open on two different machines at the same time*. Those only cost me $50-60 new when they were still the latest version.

        Plus, the purchase led to me buying a discounted version of Videostudio 2021 also at a discount (which I’ve been using the heck out of to finally convert some VHS digital conversions back into their component videos).

        *(but I never saw any indications that they were actually monitoring it in any way – at least they never gave any indication that they saw me using my laptop and desktop simultaneously).

  3. Microsoft makes things more complicated and less user friendly with each new edition of their software. Time to get rid of anything I can that is from Microsoft. and to think that Bill Gates named the company after his penis.

    What baffles me is how did Microsoft get their operating system and typically MS Office already loaded onto almost every computer in the US for decades. That reeks of a monopoly and collusion to me.

    JQ

  4. Color coded in Purple??? Ohh … that’s helpful for all of us color deficient people.

    I started with Visi-Calc and then 123 and then was dragged kicking and screaming into Excel by Clients. I prefer Larry Elison’s Oracle over MS SQLServer ( but I can code in ether one – there are small but important differences in the languages). It all depends on what the Client has as their Legacy systems.

    As a Microsoft Certified Partner, and an early stockholder, Microsoft has made me a lot of money so I can’t really complain too much.

  5. How did they get copies of Office on each PC?? It was bundled and discounted with the OS. If they wanted to sell computers with the MS operating system, they were pressured to sell both.

    ….. and those of us who were Certified Partners were given advance copies of new software before it was released and were sent new copies of ALL the software as soon as it was released for a minimal annual subscription.

    There are only two businesses who refer to their customers as “USERS” and it’s not a coincidence.

  6. I am old enough to have learned LaTeX for paper writing in college (albeit young enough that I was being retro in doing so). I’ve had to use Word to create written documents since then, and it is the “best” of an awful bunch, but when it’s my writing, I still break out LaTeX and the collection of setups I’ve got stored back over the last ~30 years.

  7. As expected from Gates, he’s so hateful of humanity he assists The Fowch Mengele in creating a culling virus and subsequent perception management narrative. When the wealthy get bored their childhood angst resurfaces, resulting in this sort of bravo sierra.

    I have the luxury of NOT updating Office so don’t have to deal with woke crappola invading my personal computer.

  8. OK, folks. Your assignment today is to write a short story including all the words on that list. 🙂

    (Should I link to this over on Sarah’s Fakebook page?)

    BTW, I used to use OpenOffice until one of my spreadsheets got corrupted and they wanted $35 for the fix. Since then (about 12 years now), I’ve using LibreOffice.

  9. Heh, I am still running the 2007 and 2010 versions of Word / Orifice under Win 10. There will be no more shifts to another OS from any of the behemoths much less any of this subscription crap. Either I own it and can re-install it when updating computers or not interested.

    When what I have ceases to work properly, will either be pushing up daisies or using some flavor of Penguin.

  10. I just typed in a few of these words on my MS Word and nothing happened.

    Must be up for an upgrade.

    I certainly have more “problematic” euphemisms than the ones Kim provides.

  11. I’m still running Word 2003. That was the last version before they switched to that ridiculous ribbon interface. Still works, does everything I need it to.

  12. Intel giveth.
    Micro$oft taketh away.

    Personally, I’ve been using Libre Office for a number of years.
    While I have to use Micro$hit at work, I find the file compatibility between the two quite acceptable.

  13. LibreOffice 7.3 released today. Screw Microsoft with a piece of rusty rebar soaked in Carolina Reaper salsa.

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