As a sweaty loser, all my adult life if I had to emit a document I either used LaTeX or Pandoc (which also uses LaTeX). LaTeX is its own can of worms (strange syntax, unwelcoming for newcomers, not easy to install, etc.) but if it’s weird, it’s weird in a way that I can wrap my head around.
For a group project we are using Microsoft Word, the online version, because I don’t have it in me to extol the virtues of LaTeX or Typst to non-tech people. We are using the online version because of the collaboration thing also because no one wants to buy Office.
It’s such a strange piece of software. Like what I am trying to do right now is this: semantically designate headings and subheadings to automatically number them and generate a table of content. But it just won’t work and I have no idea why because it doesn’t say anything.
When I am trying to number headings manually, it sees and understands what my intention it and turns into a numbered list, changes the number to “1.”. To work around this I have to add “a6.” then remove the “a”.
I am sure that Word veterans are horrified that I am doing everything wrong. I am accept your accusations with humility and grace. But I just want to be done with.
You must log in or register to comment.
for everyone in western eu, you should consider going go the typst meetup in berlin. it is really fun.
Try typst, it’s like halfway through markdown and latex
Yes I didn’t bother reading past the first sentence to comment sorry
Why is Microsoft Word bad? Fuck you that’s why. Literally the worst piece of software I am forced to interface with on a daily basis
It has happened to me also, that I have my nerdy good way of doing things, but then when forced to work with more common tools, I am stumped. Even when the supposedly less techy people around me have no problem. (Sometimes it is because they don’t known enough to attempt an advanced feature like automatically generating a TOC. They don’t know about how to apply headings, therefor do not encounter the incorrect behavior.)
Suggest that you just need to apply the same skills that enabled you to learn your fancy latex, to use the pedestrian Word. Read the documentation and/or web search. MS generally has good documentation available. And since it’s very popular, there are a million 3rd party resources.
I think this is the solution to your problem: How to turn off automatic creation of bulleted and numbered lists - Microsoft Word 365.
I’ll be honest, at home and for my own purposes, I use LibreOffice. But when using communally-provided non-linux devices, or to facilitate collaboration, I will use mainstream products pragmatically. MS Office tends not to be too bad, not nearly as noxious as Windows. Word kind of grew on me. The UI has some advantages. But I haven’t used it in a while so who knows what AI has done to it.
It’s a complicated problem space so I understand if Word has rough edges even if it is built and maintained by a monopolistic corporation that has limitless money at its disposal.
There’s a thing you can switch to make it autonumber headings but it’s buried deep
microsoft has been lobbying for like decades to make sure you suffer through all of their shitty software.
consider yourself lucky you don’t need to deal with teams.
Fuck the Macedonian ministry of education for locking in a contract with Microsoft. Teams makes me want to pull my toenails out and use them as a lever to seperate my fingernails from my bare skin.
(This was more of a creative writing thing, it fucking sucks but not to that degree.)
As a word veteran… No, it is garbage and you are correct at being frustrated by trying to do something simple. There definitely is wizardry that can be performed with enough knowledge, but that wizardry can be broken by simply looking at the document.
The most fun I had with word (not) was dealing with a template that was made for the desktop app, but someone on my team was using the web app and it handled formatting differently, so as soon as they opened it and made changes it broke the formatting, even if they were doing very simple text changes.
I absolutely detest the way that ms office had functional desktop apps, then made these half-baked web apps that they force on everyone before they are ready, let alone properly equivalent. Don’t get me started with Excel…
Yeah, Word is brain dead. It’s from a time when WYSIWYG was the hot buzzword for desktop publishing. It’s not a bad idea per se, but without access to the raw files it’s really hard to fix problems when things get sideways.
The best advice for instances like this is to copy all the content into a text file, nuke the original file, and start over. This is probably going to happen multiple times because Word inserted some garbage into the doc in the background and there isn’t a way to see, or remove, what exactly Word did.
There may be a way to get access to the marked up files now, but I not sure how to do that. I’ve stayed as far away from word processors as possible for the last decade.
Much of this probably has to do with the online version being really limited, but in the desktop version, you can right-click (or is it hover-click?) on the numbering or heading icon in the ribbon, open the expanded dialog, and set up really nice custom numbering/heading systems.
I’ve used Word/LibreOffice all my life, and I’m trying to get into LaTeX and Typst. It feels just as bad moving the other way (except math, LaTeX math is awesome!), I’ve just resolved to have AI generate my damn LaTeX templates. We all like what we’re used to.
Probably the easiest piece of software to borrow
Really? I couldn’t find a way to borrow it.
I only use Microsoft Word, but I haven’t used anything else. It came with the computer. I would love to know the alternatives.
To be honest I would say for the most part stick with it. When it comes to writing research papers, LaTeX and Typst (a recently developed modern alternative to LaTeX) are popular choices.
Word is what you call a What You See Is What You Get editor. How the document looks like while editing is how it will look when you print it or save as a PDF. When using LaTeX or Typst you write in a plain text file and then “compile” them to produce a PDF. Both these software are also open source. In my case, for example, I am having trouble with the generation of table of contents. In Typst this is much easier. For example my “paper.typst” file might look like this:
#outline() = Heading 1 asldjsaldjslkadlksdj == Subheading 1.1 sakldjaskdjsa == Subheading 1.2 poirypoiyopiopitoe #pagebreak() = Heading 2 tueriotuerioturiotur == Subheading 2.1 nc,mvbn,cmnvm,vnx,cIn Typst’s language, lines that start with = are headings. One = means top level heading. Two =s means a second level heading and so on. In Word, if you want to make a line a title you would increase its font size, make the text bold and so on. In Typst you are semantically defining a line as a heading. The advantage here is that if Typst knows what headings and subheadings there are, it will be able to generate a table of contents automatically without you having to create and format it manually. In this file, it is done by the
#outline()bit. It is a function call which tells the compiler to generate the outline. Similarly #pagebreak() creates a page break. The output ends up looking like this but you can format it as you wish:
The biggest advantage in terms of research paper writing is in citations. You can define your references in something like a BibTex file and then use that to cite instead of manually writing citations.
I must add that as far as I can tell, Word these days has features that do both these things to some extent (ToC generation, features that make inserting citations and bibliography easier). I haven’t been able to get them to work but I bet they work in offline Word better.
No no, you’re doing it wrong. If you make headings by just changing font sizes, Word will have no idea what you actually want.
In Word, you need to edit the default font sizes of the heading options shown in the ribbon, then apply them to the lines you want the headings to be by highlighting the text, then clicking the desired heading option in the ribbon.
This did not work for me probably because of using the online version as you said. I used the styles option for the but the ToC generation and proper number just doesn’t happen. I get what you mean though.
I see, yeah Word Online feels lobotomized and sucks.
Also why are y’all using Word online instead of Google Docs for collaboration? In terms of features, Word desktop > Google Docs > Word online.
It’s the fault of a teammate. I don’t know why he chose to be weird about it. The university gives us a G**gle account so the first choice was a google doc. But first he made a notion thing (don’t know what they call it). Then he made a publicly editable document on Office online.
Word is one of the worst things ever for collaboration. Online version sucks, and desktop version is very bad for this purpose. Also make sure everybody has the exact same version if you ever use the Desktop app, since it’s very easy to break the formatting when sending the file from one person to the other.
