Why I hate Microsoft Office

I don't have time for a full-blown rant here, but Office just pisses me off. The autocorrect feature is irritating enough, especially the way it capitalizes words that aren't really first words in a sentence (such as in a table). I usually just keep that turned off.

I also dislike the way Word's formatting works: autoformatting too often starts to indent things in ways I don't want it to, but then when I turn off autoformatting I can't get it to do what I want either. It's very unintuitive. Give me LaTeX, or at least old WordPerfect 5.0 with its easy-to-understand Reveal Codes key, any day of the week.

Particularly irritating was an abstract I had to write for an upcoming conference. The conference is putting the abstracts on the website ahead of time and will be distributing them to conference attendees on CD-ROM. The files they are distributing are PDFs, but for some reason we can't just submit PDFs in the first place, I guess because they want to number them in some way; they are requiring we submit in either Word or WordPerfect.

So I used Word. I had a terrible time writing a two-column paper with a footnote at the bottom of the first column and with a few figures added to the text. In fairness, it's difficult to get LaTeX to put figures where you want them also, but at least it's easy to specify the order in which the figures appear. With Word, the figures would migrate (or disappear entirely) every time I made small modifications to the text, and I repeatedly had to delete the figures and reimport them to the document.

Now I'm working on the presentation itself, and am in PowerPoint hell. I haven't worked with PowerPoint much, however, so I remain hopeful that I'll get the hang of it soon. I'd better--the presentation should be done already, and really needs to be finished by tomorrow morning.

EPA Library update
Still haven't received that article from the Journal of Colloid Interface Science.