The Joy of Technology
Good morning. Twitter, Facebook, iLike, and Word have imploded. After going offline for improvements, Twitter shows my previous custom background instead of my current choice. Random user preference rollbacks aside, at least Twitter still works. In fact it seems peppier.
Meantime, iLike in Facebook no longer shows live playlists now that iLike has officially made it possible to merge the two accounts. Playlists worked in Facebook before the announcement. (Before, iLike’s FAQ said it was impossible to merge the two accounts; but it was possible and worked well. Then iLike announced that you could at last merge the two accounts, and a nervous engineer apparently changed a setting, breaking the linkage.)
Not to be outdone by upstart web apps, Microsoft Word quits when I edit a document, and none of the standard fixes help. Word has not been updated for the Macintosh for years, of course, and it runs in emulation on Intel Macs, but I am used to that. Updating the Normal template was the last thing I did before Word started eating its own head.
Mmm, that’s good coffee.
It goes without saying that I’m editing documents of some importance.
If I open the documents in Pages, Pages posts a “Can’t find spell checker” error box. When I close the error box, Pages posts it again. When I close it again, Pages opens it again. This loop continues beyond Armageddon.
If I edit the documents in TextEdit, I can’t format them correctly, and Word’s non-standard hyperlink formatting turns nightmarish.
Third sip of coffee. Just another day at the office.
Tags: twitter, facebook, ilike, ilike.com, webapps, socialsoftware, word, microsoftword, microsoftoffice
Filed under: Applications, Community, Microsoft
while I sympathize with your facebook and twitter complaints, maybe this will help for Word – OpenOffice.org
Might as well take the day off then.
At least you’ve got good coffee :)
this is why i am going into new home construction.
I’m thinking of bringing back cuneiform.
The API on the clay tablets sucks, but my stylus-fu is unstoppable.
Dude, get a PC already…
google documents allows you to seamlessly import and export word files.
Better yet: NeoOffice.
I started giving up on desktop apps, and giving in on online apps… Google Docs works great for me. I use it to write my papers for my Masters, and works just great: Write on a few pages at home, some other pages at a coffee shop, and some more at work. It has a pretty good version control, which saves you the hassle of storing different versions of the file on your HDD. Ahhh… gotta love it!
And a cool feat is that you can save directly to PDF. Not that Macs didn’t do that, but it is nice to have. =)
Have you tried it?
You will probably appreciate this picture. That’s me with the hammer
random internet passant with a couple of things to say.
first, Office 2008 for Mac is coming soon, but that iWork is pretty darn snazzy and not badly priced.
second, i totally sympathize. last night my dear old Grandma called me over telling her that Outlook Express is marking every word misspelled. the problem seems to be that the ONLY language available for spellcheck now is French. never mind that this was never previously the case, that her computer is English, and all regional options are for American English. (not only that, spellcheck isn’t even suggesting French words.)
Lesson learned: never update the Normal template for Word.
Indeed. I bought that snazzy iWorks. Pages 3.0 is part of it. Pages 3.0 spouts endless, circular error messages when it opens one of the two essential Word docs I must finish editing today. When you close an error message, a new one opens. This goes on indefinitely, thus making it impossible ot use Pages to edit the document. Had the document been started in Pages, all would probably be well.
Apparently so, although one wonders why Microsoft gives the option to do so, if doing so causes the application to eat its own feces and gouge its own eye out. But, yes. So far, if I tell Word not to load the updated Normal template, I seem to be able to edit at least one of the documents.
Those are the days when having a six pack in the office fridge seems like it’d be a good idea.
Or a high-powered rifle and a box of Malomars.
Is ts doing this for all your documents or just the one?
I assume you have tried copying the text out of it and into a new document. I have done that before when something has happened that makes no sense and it then works fine.
Sounds like you’re looking for a good time waster. I hear all the blogs talking about Halo 3; you’re already hopped up on coffee =)
I believe you can rename your Normal template to something else and Word will create a new, functional replacement automatically when it starts.
I have Office X, so my Normal file is in “/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Templates”. Yours would probably be in a similar location.
Some days everything just works… and some days it doesn’t… aren’t we approaching a full moon?
Sure. And saving with a new name. Those things did not help. The really tough part is, halfway through a very long and rather important document, I lost all structural formatting. Bolds are still bold, and Verdana is still Verdana, but all levels of subheading, all lists, and all body text are now “Normal.”
It’s as if a structured, semantic HTML document were to be replaced with FONT tags and BR tags.
It matters because, when the writing is done, the document will be imported into InDesign. And importing without styles will create tons of unnecessary work.
I’m thinking the updating of the Normal template caused this grief, and am trying various workarounds now, including one suggested here, for which I am grateful.
It’s odd to me that Word, Twitter, and iLike in Facebook would all freak out on the same morning, but it might be someone’s way of telling me to take a break.
If ice is not hot, then perhaps it IS time to take a break. Thanks for spreading out the tea leaves for the rest of us, it’s always comforting to read the troubles of another human. In return for your kind words I have listened carefully to your message, which I interpret as an oracular one from the universe at large. Not only will I not modify the normal template for word, but I will take the rest of the day off since you cannot. Thanks for the invitation!
“I post this notice on my door for each accustomed visitor: I am gone into the fields, to take what this sweet hour yields”
We’re working on the recent plays not showing up on your Facebook profile bug. Thanks for the heads up! Hep. iLike.
As great as OpenOffice is – great enough to be one of the first apps I install on a new machine, in fact – it’s not enough for some people. And I know for a fact of one outfit that Zeldman’s worked with that REQUIRES copy to be created in the Real Broken McCoy. Something to do with the featureset.
Pissed me off too, when I found out for myself.
Music to my ears, Hep.
ok, we’ve got a fix up. Seems that we regressed when shipping some other stuff last night. Unfortunately you’ll have to trigger a update to your ilike profile widget to get the reverted code, otherwise you’ll keep getting the old stuff from the FB cache. This is done by doing anything to update your widget, like adding a song. Easiest way might be to just click “edit” in your songs ilike module and click “update” without actually changing your settings. Sorry for the bug, and the runaround to fix it. Thanks again for the bug report, this one sucked :) Hep. iLike.
Thanks, @Hep! Manual cache refresh does bring the playlist back to Facebook. Alas, the playlist does not auto-update. (Still bugs to fix, it seems.)
Update at 10:11 AM:
Darn it, iLike on Facebook is not updating.
My playlist showed up on Facebook this morning after I refreshed the cache per your suggested technique. But none of the music I’ve played this morning has yet shown up on my Facebook Profile. It still shows only the tracks I played last night.
Do I have to manually refresh the cache several times a day to force the list to update? If so, there’s still a bug in the code. (If it helps you debug: my last play was around 8:00 AM this morning. As of 10:00 AM, the list had not yet updated. I’ll keep playing music, and watch for your reply.)
Update 10:39 AM ET (7:39 AM PT)
Restored playlist still does not update. Have played over a dozen tracks since manually refreshing cache to restore playlist to Facebook Profile. Looks like I will have to manually refresh cache every hour or so if I want the playlist to show any recent history! So I’d say you’ve tracked down much of the bug, but there is still something that prevents the playlist from updating. :(
10:45 AM ET
And when I manually update again, the playlist refreshes. So there it is. The playlist is dead and does not auto-refresh without manual user intervention. So that’s the last bit that I imagine you’ll want to fix. Thanks in advance.
11:28 AM ET
Manually refreshed cache a third time at 11:28 AM ET and in that way forced playlist in Facebook to update. Playlist in Facebook simply does not auto-update.
4:46 PM ET
Manually refreshed cache once again at 4:46 pm ET, causing list to update. List does not update unless I manually refresh the cache.
Hey, sorry again :) We’re seeing this beavior as well and hoping to have a update out sometime this evening. Thanks again for all the patience and detailed feedback. Hep. iLike.
I use Adobe’s InDesign and I tend to do my drafting right in its editor — skipping the Word step altogether. These seems to work well for me. I don’t like Word.
I’d second NeoOffice as a backup option much as I used to use IE as a way to open damaged Netscape bookmark files in the old days – sometimes the slightly different approach to reading files helps things work when they otherwise wouldn’t.
NeoOffice also helps when you open a file with Macros in it you’re too scared to run (that doesn’t take “no” gracefully”).
It’s free too so makes a great backup.
I’d second the idea of completely eliminating the normal.dot file so it generates a new one though.
I’m amazed how little I actually need to format my day to day communications these days though. Hooray for plain text!
Here’s one for you: For whatever reason, regardless of what I do, Firefox refuses to save ANY setting upon exiting. I lose my bookmarks, preferences, and it seems to get confused as to which extensions I have depending on its mood. I’ve uninstalled, reinstalled, manually deleted config files and tore through my system registry, to no avail…
oh and my coffee maker broke last week.
so you have my sympathy
If you’re going to be importing into InDesign as you say, you could write the file as a tagged text file. It’s basically markup for InDesign. That would give you a file that when imported into InDesign would have all the styles you want. Adobe has a PDF describing the tagged text markup on their website. Here’s a link.
Of course, it might be just easier to place the DOC into InDesign and edit from there, but this isn’t necessarily about the easiest route.