Word 2007 for word processing? I think not!

I have always thought MS Word was a highly dependable piece of software. I've delved fairly deeply into lots of different features and have found some surprises, but nothing that I would classify as a significant bug.

Until now.

I was helping my wife with a cookbook as a fundraiser for our school. I had collected all the recipes from various people using a web-form (wikiforms via pmwiki) and then exported them to CSV.

First MS problem, but Excel rather than Word. Excel refuses to handle multi-line values in CSV as far as I can tell. I used the same data and imported it into OpenOffice Calc and it came in without a hitch. Saved into Excel format and I had the data I wanted. Not overly pleased with M$ at this point, but importing and exporting can be fickle so I'm OK with that. We'll mark them down to a B, but it's with a comforting smile...

Now I want to set up a form and merge my data into it. Each recipe includes horizontal lines, lines with right-alignment and left-alignment, columns, and some conditions to get rid of blank lines if certain data elements are not present. And, of course, each recipe has "keep together" and "keep with next" on every single line in order to keep each recipe on the same page. I included two additional lines after the recipe that did not have "keep together" nor "keep with next" so as to have a place where it can break.

Of course with columns that means we're going to have a bunch of different sections. Oh, and I formatted each field with its own style so that I could change it globally.

So I ran the merge. The first problem (not discovered until later) is that Word seems to have arbitrarily cut off portions of some of the longer fields -- no special characters or anything, but all of a sudden the instructions or the notes or whatever would just come to an end in the middle of a sentence. BIG PROBLEM! Suddenly they're down at a C- and the teacher's comforting smile is becoming a big grim.

Next problem. Word chooses to ignore "keep with next" and "keep together" attributes. It just breaks everything wherever it comes on the page. Did I forget to have the lines that were allowed to break? No, they are there... Recreating the same document from scratch results in proper "keeps" but my large document (~80 pages) seems to be confused. Suddenly I'm going through all these recipes, one at a time, putting in hard page breaks to keep my recipes together. And M$ is moved to the bottom of the class and is staring at a D-.

Next problem. Newspaper columns. If you have a continuous section break before and after columns, Word is supposed to put them into roughly equal newspaper columns. And that's exactly what happened ... for about 20% of my columnized sections! For the other 80% I had to go through by hand once again to manually insert column breaks. The grim smile has turned into a scowl and the big red "F" has a very frowny face next to it now!

I won't go into the list of additional minor issues that we encountered. Suffice it to say Word did very little that it was supposed to do in a number of relatively minor ways. But then came the biggy... Footers!

We wanted to have a footer which was different on odd and even pages. On even pages it would have "GDQ Cookbook" and the page number and on odd pages it would have the name of the chapter ("Appetizers", "Desserts", etc.) and the page number. Since my chapter titles were all conveniently marked with "Heading 1" I immediately went to a { STYLEREF ... } and everything worked GREAT ... except ... what's that little forward slash in front of each chapter name in the footer? I see "/Appetizers", "/Main Meals", "/Desserts", etc. Must be something in the footer definition? No, not there. Maybe my chapter titles have something weird? No, I deleted them and re-created them by hand ... MULTIPLE times. A little googling reveals that sometimes Word just gets confused and inserts mysterious characters before/during/after STYLEREF marks.

Well, there goes the elegant solution. But no big deal -- there's only 9 chapters in the whole cookbook (plus some introductory stuff plus some indices at the end) so I'll just go through and break the "same as previous" bond and create a new footer for each of the chapters.

Double-click on the footer, click on the "same as previous" to get rid of it, type in the chapter title and ... what's this? I'm no longer on the page I thought I was. Silly me - must have been user error. Heh-heh, I'll go back and try again.

Double-click on the footer, click on the "same as previous" to get rid of it, type in the chapter title and ... what's this? My page has been switched on me again. Well, that's weird. Oh, well, no problem - I'll just "next footer" forward until I get to the page I want to break the "same as previous", change the chapte rname and get out and ... wait! Suddenly the odd page on the PREVIOUS chapter has the chapter name for THIS chapter! Really weird. I'll come back and deal with that later. I go forward and do the next chapter. Wait, on the first page of my new chapter (where I just changed the footer) I still have the chapter name from the PREVIOUS chapter. And so on throughout the document. Sometimes the previous footer hangs on too long and other times it starts too early. This despite scrolling back and forth with the "next footer", "previous footer" and doing my level best to get it set in the right place.

Somewhere along the "footer" way I realized that the problem was this: Every time I double-clicked on the footer (or clicked "edit footer" from the ribbon) the whole document re-paginates! Since Word footers are based on the first section in the page and these sections change on re-pagination, suddenly the whole world tilts on its access. Many times I couldn't even change the footer because when I got to the first page of the chapter (always an odd page, obviously) sometimes the re-paginated-for-footers view of the document would display it as an EVEN page. When I exited out of the page view then it would repaginate back and show as an odd page (which it was.) But since it was even when in the footer view and I was trying to change an ODD footer ... I was stuck!

We have gone beyond a trip to the principle's office. Word has committed identity fraud - it claimed to be a word processor and it can't take the heat. I don't know what the sentence is for identity fraud, but I hope somebody will put Word 2007 away for a long time!

I will never attempt a significant project in Word again.

(In the unlikely chance that someone from M$ reads this, I would be happy to supply you with the document for testing purposes.)