SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the and-then-they-discovered- dept.
One space good, two spaces bad? (This story appears near the end of the article; scroll down to see it.)
Finally, Microsoft found time to weigh in on the age-old debate of just how many spaces belong after a full stop (or "period"). Thanks to an update, Word will apparently treat two spaces as a typo and festoon a double-spaced document with red, squiggly lines unless told to ignore the rule.
A debate for the ages finally settled. Where do you stand? ⚔️ https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1253655739379470338
— Microsoft 365 (@Microsoft365) April 24, 2020
Not everyone is impressed with change; this hack, for example, has fond memories of bashing away on the keys of a typewriter back in the day and slapping the spacebar twice between sentences [...]. It has proven a hard habit to break. Others, such as Jason Howard, senior project manager on the Windows Insider Team, called for a poll on the matter.
@Microsoft365 has thrown down the gauntlet. Apparently #MicrosoftWord will now flag double-spacing between sentences as an error.
Which side will you pick? Choose wisely...
— Jason Howard (@NorthFaceHiker) April 24, 2020
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @09:18PM (1 child)
Clippy was the worst, don't even try to learn more about it.
It will be awhile before MS is enforcing the single space thing on me...still using Word97 which doesn't phone home. I've managed to get Office97 running in Win7. Looking forward to the day (retirement) when I can switch to Linux, where I hear that Wine supports old Office nicely. Office97 is blazing fast on recent hardware! (it was a real dog when I first had to use it).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:31AM
I hate to ruin a perfectly good discussion filled with fun speculation, MS hatred, rants, and ribald humor (oops), but in fact you can tell Word to accept the double space after a period. In other words, the story is much ado about nothing. MS just enjoy toying with us, because they can.
Well, I mostly use WordPerfect 12 and love it. Can't pry it out of my hands.
For messy docx stuff, you probably know you can get a plugin that will let you open them. Man do I hate stuff like ".docx".
About 8 years ago I was pretty much forced (if I wanted the work and pay) to do some projects in Word 2007. It involved text and images. Well, it was near impossible to get the text to wrap the way you wanted it to. Talk about negotiating with a computer. Ugh. Coaxing, pleading, cursing. Then when you thought you had it, you scroll to another page, come back, and of course Word has fixed everything for you. And by "fixed" of course I mean broken. More ugh.
Anyway, I use LibreOffice for .docx when I have to- mostly to convert to something usable, like .wpd. LibreOffice is pretty cool stuff. Been pretty reliable, functional, etc. Good enough for me. But WP12 is very fast, I can see hidden problematic codes, it'll export to .pdf, etc., and it was FREE with Dell computers that I have.
I have MS Office Pro 2007 but have never installed it. Literally trash-picked it. I'll head off the comment: yes, it was where it belongs. I thought I had Office 2012 too, but now I'm not so sure (but I'm sure I don't care.)