Small Peculiar

Usually the Redactor, my superpowered alter ego, is a hero rather than a villain, but Microsoft Word poisons the mind. I’ve been using it for years, and now that it’s SaaS, I can’t even get used to all the ways it’s terrible, because there’s a new terrible thing every time I fire it up. Examples of pointless awfulness: The Undo feature doesn’t work on comments, meaning that if you create a comment and decide you don’t want it and hit Command+Z, Word jumps to the last thing you did before creating the comment and undoes that. The Styles Pane, which lists all the styles available for the document, cannot be customized so that the ones you use most are the most accessible. The “advanced” search and replace box, i.e. the only search feature worth a damn, is buried several clicks down. But I could have put up with all of Word’s nonsense without complaint if only they hadn’t taken away live word count—not total word count but the one that tells you how many words into the document the cursor is. It hasn’t been available since Word 2011. This makes me legitimately angry. Everyone in publishing is shackled to this garbage program, and Microsoft went out of its way to remove one of the few features that made life easier. Why? To make room for more header styles no one will ever use? Anyway that’s why I set fire to Gotham.