Jules Jones

...salt the ground upon..."
"Oh."
"That is useful. I do not remember it being in Word 2003. I will check upon the morrow using the one at work."

No, it wasn't in 2003, but it is in 2007. I may have to forgive the ribbon after all. One of the ways in which I hate Word so very very much is the way it handles, or fails to handle, stylesheets. In Word Pro a different stylesheet is two clicks away, which amongst other things makes it easy to re-format a manuscript to whatever font/point size/margins/etc a publisher wants before printing/emailing. Word doesn't do it the same way, and whatever it does do, it doesn't make sense to me. It *still* doesn't make sense to me, but two clicks away in the ribbon there is a facility to select all instances of the style used in the selected text - and change them to a different existing style. Which appears to be a usable work-around for the problem of re-setting a manuscript to whatever formatting the publisher wants without losing the italics and such-like.

I still have to work out how to import the desired styles where there is a required stylesheet so that I don't have to copy and paste the entire document into a new file with the relevant template, but that's a matter of poking at it. Alternatively, I would like to do what I often do in Word Pro with scratch note files and just import a file into an existing file, but if there is a way to do this I have not seen any indication that it exists.

I still hate Word, but I hate it slightly less than I did.

Installed the Spawn of Redmond on my home machine earlier this week. I loathe Word with a fiery passion, and have no intention of using it at home other than for dealing with files from people who believe that Word Is The One True Way, but as both the day job and the writing now involve ever more frequent encounters with people who are not even aware that there exist other word processors, I don't much have choice about having it available for use, even if it's not what I use day to day. (I have nothing against Excel, but also no reason to change over from 1-2-3.)

Of course, what I've installed is 2007, since that's what there was a spare licence for lying around in this household -- and I use 2003 at work. So that's yet another set of menus to learn, then...

ETA: Please do not suggest that I download Open Office. Open Office is not reliably compatible with the group working functions in Word which are the reason for me installing the damn thing in the first place, and is all too compatible with Word in the areas which are the reason I hate having to use Word.