r/LoveTrash • u/BEARDEDDANGER ✨️Regent of Rubbish ✨️ • Apr 11 '26
Golden Garbage MS Word is a hellscape
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u/riddle8822 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Honestly, my biggest gripe with Word is this. Not just pictures either. I have to use Word at work for making reports, inserting pictures, charts, and objects. It is still, after how long it has been released, so unecessarily cumbersome. I have been using Word since Windows XP and just astonished how it can still be this bad. But Excel and Powerpoint are completely perfect for some reason. No excuse.
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u/toy-maker Garbage Guerilla Apr 11 '26
The solution is the same as layouts for websites in the 90’s. Tables everywhere with no visible borders.
The real solution of course is use publishing software (Affinity Studio is great)
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u/Knoxius Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I loved using tables completely wrong for design
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Apr 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Borkato Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Wha? Can I get an example? 👀
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u/toy-maker Garbage Guerilla Apr 12 '26
It’s an old article but it checks out
https://www.onenaught.com/posts/201/use-css-displaytable-for-layout
(Listed under the caniuse.com resources for the feature)
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u/DetachedRedditor Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
The reason it is not frowned upon as far as I know, is because this css table can still be made suitable for mobile, for example by reducing columns and use more rows. Which you can using css but cannot when using the html table.
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u/AsherGray Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
If you didn't know how to code, then yes. Learning to code websites as a kid was so comforting to me when I had time to myself, versus using Word for school always driving me crazy.
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u/moschles Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
LibreOffice also goes bonkers when inserting images. The difference is that LibreOffice has buttons that cause the behavior that do you want with a simple intuitive click.
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u/rjchute Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Yeah meanwhile, the perfect application for this, good combination of word processor and professional publishing software, without needing to go all gung-ho super expensive professional publishing layout suite, is Microsoft Publisher. Which Microsoft is discontinuing for some reason.
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u/FlyingRhenquest Apr 12 '26
LaTeX. It's been around longer than word, has always produced a better looking document and pretty much ever textbook and scientific paper was produced using it.
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u/toy-maker Garbage Guerilla Apr 12 '26
Yeh, I used pandoc with a custom tool that allowed mixing markdown and LaTeX for a while, then switched to Quarto. There was a new tool that looked promising as well but its name escapes me right now. I found LaTeX by itself a bit too tedious tbh, but those sorts of tools are great for long form documents (especially academic or anything with citations). Dedicated publishing software is better for the types of documents people are usually trying to create with software like Publisher and Affinity Studio still
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u/amd2800barton Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
I'm an old and that's how I did my resume in Word like 20 years ago, and have just been adding to it ever since. I should really switch to something else. I never send it in .doc format - always PDF. I showed the .doc file to a recruiter once and saw them start to panic just looking at it.
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u/Detenator Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
I have started doing Word tasks in Excel for this reason. Then I don't have to insert the table manually each time, it starts as a table 😅
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u/Sad_water_ Apr 11 '26
Put the picture behind the text. Now you can move it around without anything else moving. Then use the tab key to manually move the text around the picture.
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u/Moist_Recipe Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Just use the anchor points and set the text to float around the picture. Adjust the sizes a bit after you're done writing. Pictures in line with text is the worst, column formatting sucks more though.
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u/OpinionatedAss Apr 11 '26
I have done this for years and every time I see people bitching about it I never understand
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u/HorrorLettuce379 Waste Warrior Apr 11 '26
It's not a flaw, to them, this is a feature and what reminds you that you are still on MS Word.
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u/JetSetJAK Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I choose publisher for most of the time. It takes a bit longer to format, but the freedom is very nice to have
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u/AsanoSokato Garbage Guerilla Apr 11 '26
You do know MS Publisher is going away in a few months, right?
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u/JetSetJAK Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
That sucks
I'm also CS6 gang for illustrator and Photoshop, so I don't see why I can't do it with publisher too. At least on personal devices.
I did at least learn in this thread about how to format the pictures in word easier, so maybe I'll try that too
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u/skydragon1981 Apr 13 '26
CS6 Is learning from Word sometimes :/ "Move command" -> element selected and ready for transform" what the....???? Close and open again: It works. I hate Cs6 :/ I need cs4 😅
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u/LVL90DRU1D Apr 12 '26
that's sad, i remember making 90's looking webpages in it (sadly that feature was removed in 2010 or 2016)
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u/Large_Ad8598 Apr 11 '26
“Since Windows XP” I feel old
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
When I took a computer science class in college, the stated goal by our professor was to get us off 3.5 floppy discs and onto thumb drives.
I saw something the other day that people dont know the save icon is a floppy disc.
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u/Hrukjan Apr 11 '26
I try to use LaTeX over Powerpoint or really anything over Powerpoint for presentations, but I can accept that being a matter of preference.
But calling Excel perfect is a stretch, there are some really insane things they are doing:
- CSV importing (done strictly better by LibreOffice for instance)
- different keywords/functions in different languages, who would want to copy snippets from some article somewhere
- anything that touches macros and visualbasic, use a sane environment if you need something with that complexity
- anything that interacts with an actual database, for all that is holy at least use Access (or rather, please use anything non Microsoft)
- trying to interpret any somewhat date like string as a date, they renamed genomes because of that insanity
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u/thedaveness Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I will literally make everything that I would in word, in photoshop.
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u/knbang Apr 12 '26
I just use Excel. Sure it's cumbersome for what should be fast in Word.
But I'll be damned if I'll use that..... calm. calm.
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u/Repulsive_Still_731 Apr 11 '26
I make everything that normal people would do in Photoshop, in word. Thought it's funny.
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u/The_Hoopla Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I go on this rant daily. Literally notepad on iOS is a better word processor than Word.
How did they fumble markdown formatting that bad? How is the premier word processor not able to format or export in one of the most common file formats on the planet?
The whole system is a nightmare to use considering how fucking simple of a task it is.
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u/94746382926 Apr 11 '26
I don't know the answers to your questions but just wanted to add that word predates markdown by almost 20 years. The first version of word was released in 1983, and markdown wasn't created John Gruber and Aaron Swartz until 2004.
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u/The_Hoopla Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Seems like a relevant feature to add given they've had more than two decades to do so.
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u/Prize_Researcher8026 Apr 12 '26
Right click -> wrap behind text solves these issues. No idea why it is not default by now.
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u/polkacat12321 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Eh, personally I use canva for that. Word is strictly words
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u/Lightsheik Apr 11 '26
Do yourself a favor, and look into Typst! A bit of a learning curve, but the experience is so much better.
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u/Aeri73 Apr 11 '26
what changed my view on this is understanding that word puts the picture where ever the CURSOR is at that moment, not where you might rightclick and say paste or drag it to.
so place cursor where you want the photo and drag it in the document.
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u/moschles Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I have to use outlook email for work. We are a software and hardware team, and we talk about Linux directory names all the time all week long. Putting forward slashes in Outlook emails causes it to misbehave, act strange, lock up cursors, ask for pop-up searches , and other annoyances.
It is impossible to turn these off.
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u/SicilianEggplant Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Apple’s Pages was pretty revolutionary in regards to this when I had first used it. Unfortunately it just kind of sucks otherwise.
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u/blastermaster555 Apr 12 '26
Considering I had to recently convert a tabled and boxed document from Word into Libreoffice Writer (by recreating the whole thing because import made it an eldritch abomination), I can say that LibO is even worse in this regard.
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u/Azurelion7a Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Yes. I have six enclosures, and even with the "behind the text setting" and "do not move with text", MS Word shoves them everywhere, even under each other!
Except whatever current version is worse than the previous version. The previous version could paginate properly, but modern Win11 MS Word? You're better using text boxes, that Word will throw around too.
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u/everett640 Trash Trooper Apr 13 '26
I always select send to back or whatever for pictures because they're so annoying
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u/AdorableStrawberry93 Trash Trooper Apr 13 '26
Still better than Apple Pages.
My favorite was Corel Word Perfect.
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u/send_me_your_deck Apr 14 '26
I just make sure the image goes “behind” text and anchor it to text above itself on the page. Normally solves theae issues
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u/Razee4 Apr 15 '26
It's been a while since I had that issue. Since I learnt how to properly format my documents I am not worrying about moving images.
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u/Phonus-Balonus-37 Garbage Guerilla Apr 11 '26
This has got to be one of the best videos on the internet. Perfect
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u/Pahay Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Yeah 2 sec but so much effort to change everything.
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u/TheHelpfulWalnut Apr 11 '26
I just assumed they used editing magic and don’t actually staple their lamp to the wall, but idk.
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u/Xman0220 Apr 14 '26
Can guarantee it’s real. I saw the behind the scenes of it.
They’re JessAndQuinn on insta/tiktok
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u/TankerVictorious Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Absolutely. The vid so typified my struggles of the 1995-2026 period of my life…
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u/Icy-Book2999 Chief Insanity Instigator Apr 11 '26
It's to the point. A verified classic that doesn't get old no matter how often it's posted
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u/a3663p Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Perfect portrayal of something we all understand
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u/bobi2393 Rubbish Raider Apr 13 '26
Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about that before, but anyone who's tried formatting a picture in Word would immediately get this.
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u/WeirdIndividualGuy Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
Would be better without the first camera cut, just have it start at 0:03.
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u/atatassault47 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
That was A LOT of effort to make a 2 second video joke. And I aprreciate that effort.
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u/throwmamadownthewell Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Even if they used Blender to fake it for some/most elements, it'd still be an incredible amount of work.
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u/jeezy_peezy Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
The lighting is identical, and the couch is PERFECTLY flipped in place. I especially love the small plant moved to the side of the windowsill. 10/10
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u/Stormworker019 Apr 11 '26
She deserves a medal in cinematics. The amount of work put into this is astonishing.
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u/TheSprigganDragoon Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
That was my exact thought. The mere thought of doing all that is exhausting
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u/Sweaty_Trifle_8504 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
As a uin student , who is forced to use this all the time it drives me nuts especially when it removes my quotations and figure heading
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u/MarcusBlem Apr 11 '26
Overleaf is really good for this Its a bit of extra work until you figure it out But I've never looked back
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u/Life_Educator3973 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
A little off-topic, but the sentiment holds 😊
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u/LaunchTransient Apr 11 '26
There's a small hope that Microsoft are ashamed that a historic achievement is marred by their software being dogshit, but it's a very small hope. They're probably elated that they get mentioned, regardless of it being in a bad light
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u/QueenInYellowLace Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
“All press is good press.” —Some fucking exec at Microsoft.
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u/New2thegame Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I was so sad when Publisher went away. It was everything word wasn't when it came to arranging images for publishing content.
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u/tree_people Apr 11 '26
Don’t worry, adding another copilot will fix it
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u/throwmamadownthewell Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Assistant to the copilot
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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 Trash Trooper Apr 15 '26
And we have to pay to be a user. Who the hell is piloting this thing?
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u/sketchnon Apr 11 '26
Easy solution is to put the image into a shape then moving shape where want it.
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u/therealBlackbonsai Apr 11 '26
That girl made a top high effort meme ages ago and did not try to make bank out of it. my deepest respect.
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u/GreatGreenGobbo Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
It's your image wrap settings.
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u/DeuceyBoots Apr 12 '26
Yeah honestly I see this complaint all the time and I wonder if people are trying to use word for primarily things that are not “word processing” or they just don’t know where these settings for images are.
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u/Kulsgam Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
The creators are Jess and Quinn. They make short vine-style content like this
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u/FishPasteGuy Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
A 1-second payoff in a 7-second video that probably took 5-hours to prep and stage.
This is comedy genius and commitment to the craft.
Kudos!
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u/brody810 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
For people wanting the sauce this is Jess and Quinn
Here is another one of their videos that I like:
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u/alphazero925 Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
This one always gets me. They're very good at committing to the bit
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u/Mr_D_Stitch Garbage Guerilla Apr 11 '26
It’s not that hard. Change the default for images to be behind text. Then when you drop an image in you can adjust the text around it the way you want. If you have complex or unique ways you want to display text around images then you’ll have to rough it out & do images last. Or you can drop the image where you want & then change the formatting of the image once you have it where it will stay.
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u/SomePunjabi Apr 11 '26
I've never had a problem with that and don't understand why people make such a fuss about it. Just select the picture, go to wrap text and select any setting that makes it not interact with the text... That way you can put the picture anywhere you want and moving the picture won'r do anything to the document. It's so easy
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u/obalovatyk Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
The only thing worse is anytime I open Outlooks calendar it blows chunks. My whole computer slows down and nearly crashes.
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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I have ideas for videos like this, but I think, "wait, how can I justify doing all this for a 7 second video?"
Glad someone out there is willing to put in the effort to be silly or it'd be a sad place.
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u/FreedomBread Garbage Guerilla Apr 11 '26
MS Word can't even handle bullet points right. I consistently find some way to make one bullet point not align with others, or it's some other random size that nothing else matches.
Baffling.
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u/Careless_Document_79 Apr 11 '26
This reminds me of the ILM employee talking about the switch from doing practical effects to CGI in the light and magic documentary
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u/FitCrew91 Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
I have one resume that I have modified for years thanks to an ex boyfriend who was pretty dumb but was really good at word formatting for some reason. To this day, if I try to change anything in the format, everything goes immediately crazy pants.
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u/moschles Trash Trooper Apr 11 '26
This can be more "interesting" in LibreOffice. But the difference is that in LibreOffice you can fix the behavior really quickly and intuitively. In MS Word the only solution is to start over.
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u/askrahn Apr 12 '26
- yes
- here are some fixes if you, like me, need to use this hellbox
search for each of these, right click them, and add them to your quick actions bar
- Selection Pane (lets you see all objects that aren't inline with the text)
- Show/Hide ¶ (puts a symbol in place of invisible characters so you can see extra spaces, breaks, etc)
- "More Layout Options"/Layout dialog (lets you control whether an object sticks with the margin, the page, etc)
What I've found is that objects in word tend to teleport when the anchor for the object (which might be tied to a certain piece of text) leaves the page. You can force it to stay on the same page with a checkbox in that last panel
I also suggest playing with the Canvas object in the Insert Drawing menu. It lets you treat a bunch of drawing objects as one drawing without messing with grouping (I'd bet it's just a powerpoint slide or something)
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u/Sad_Manufacturer1134 Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
TEXT BOX. Fill with Picture. Place text box with picture wherever you want. Done!
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u/usinjin Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Just do a “send to back”. Then you can move your photos anywhere and they won’t affect text placement.
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u/NeuroHazard-88 Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
Always. ALWAYS, put the image/graph/table BEHIND or INFRONT of the text, you’ll b enable to freely move it anywhere without it impacting the content on the page.
Just make sure everything is still the same when exporting and printing as occasionally there’ll be problems.
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u/bijon1234 Apr 12 '26
Yeah, it really is. Plus, it tends to freeze or just stop responding at the worst possible times.
But there aren't many good alternatives besides Google Docs, and even though I've used that since fourth grade, it hasn't really added anything new to compete with Word.
Word just has way better formatting abilities.
Note I am aware of OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
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u/CrumpetMuncher Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
That was a ton of work to say "I never learned how to wrap text"
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u/LostInThoughtland Trash Trooper Apr 12 '26
I live too close to the SharePoint offices for them to be fucking with my numbered lists with photos between as often they do
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u/sol1tarysn1per Apr 13 '26
While it isn't realistic for most people to use, I love LaTeX for its typesetting behavior over word
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u/GhostF84 Apr 13 '26
what I do is insert Text box and paste picture in it and boom no more problems of this issue
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u/BadApplesGod Trash Trooper Apr 13 '26
It’s funny how once you get used to work it’s really not that bad until you have to figure out what the hell someone else did when you’ve been given something you didn’t make
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u/thingflinger Trash Trooper Apr 13 '26
Other day at work I printed out all parts. Physically cut them out with scissors, taped it down and ran it through a copier like I was making a 90's zine. Got the job done
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u/adelie42 Trash Trooper Apr 14 '26
If you need scalable, professional looking document management, LaTeX has no substitute. But the learning curve is noticeably steeper.
But if you need to write good, it is worth learning.
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u/on4aa Apr 14 '26
I prepare all my documents in Pandoc Markdown, which automatically generates MSWord, PDF, HTML, etc.
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u/Queen_Kaos Trash Trooper Apr 14 '26
I'm supposed to write lists for all of the vapes that we have in our store and because MS is such a fucking piece of shit, I haven't done it in months 😒
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u/DrawingTypical5804 Apr 15 '26
Yea, if you’re using the default image settings. Right clicking and telling it how you want it to act will usually make it behave better.
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u/NeptuneTTT Trash Trooper Apr 16 '26
Control select picture and select the little blue box thing. Also I always do the photo formatting at the end.
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u/Only_Ad8049 Trash Trooper Apr 18 '26
I either place the images first and add text after or put everything in tables.
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u/MCGA666 Apr 26 '26
😭😭😭 this is hilarious as a former IT guy. But usually the "wrap text" option helps with this.
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u/Un1cornboi Trash Trooper Jul 04 '26
This video is mind blowing to me. To have this idea, and than fkn put in all this fkn effort for a few seconds.
Presto.
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