Judging by this Windows 95 icon I must be in Microsoft Word's historic district. #word #MSWord #microsoft

A post on the face place reminded me that at one time back when I was still occasionally using MSFT wares I had the dominant text mincer application there tell me that

"The document is too large to save. Delete some text before saving."

(in Norwegian, evidence preserved as https://nxdomain.no/~peter/dokumentet_er_for_stort.jpg).

Now I'm a tad curious whether anyone else has been bitten by that variant. (This would have been early-noughties time if it matters)

Accurate.

I switched off Copilot in my MS Word, but I've noticed this ominous green dot hovering just to the left of my blank document. I assume if I click on it accidentally, it'll switch on all AI features again, am I right?

Factors:
1. Accessibility. Not everyone has really fast (or stable) internet.
2. Environmental. There's no reason to use more computing power than necessary for the task at hand. It's wasteful. Very few people need the fancy features advanced text editors introduce.
3. Interoperability. Text files I write and send are readable *everywhere.* Try loading up Google Docs on a 1024x768 screen with a 256MB RAM Pentium 3. You'll be lucky if Google Docs even loads.
4. Privacy. A text file is easy to protect. GPG is the most straightforward. It remains small, and there's no way middle-men can read it. Google Docs? Google has root and they're not encrypted from them. So, good luck.
5. Account requirements. Text files require no accounts anywhere. All you need it an Internet connection and a DNS server that'll point your computer the right way. SaaS requires that you also have up-to-date software, a powerful computer, and that you register an account with them to access files shared with you.
6. Storage space. A text file takes kilobytes. A .docx file takes megabytes. My daily journal, which granted has some meta-data but is still plain text, is nearing on 580kb after three years of diligent, detailed journaling. I can't help but doubt that Word would even open a .docx file that large if formatted natively. (Thousands of headings, links, timestamps, etc.)
6. Feature-set. Plain text lets you do enough for 99% of all tasks. Yes, it's not as pretty, but within the bounds of putting characters into a file, you have complete freedom. Proprietary services, on the other hand, have a very very rich feature-set, most of which is irrelevant for 99% of users. The drawback of this is that every user is forced to load these rarely-used functions onto their own computer when the applications load up. That's wasteful, and likely cost the world hundreds of millions in unnecessary energy expenditure already.

TL;DR: Use plain text unless you absolutely positively can't help it. It's seriously better in every way.

#plaintext #emacs #txt #notepad #bloat #bloatware #saas #googledocs #msword #microsoftword #rant

RE: https://fed.bajsicki.com/notes/a6uy06mot0

PSA: Finally, Paste now has Copilot!

I plan on retiring in a few years, and, I gotta say, one of the things I'm most looking forward to is uninstalling effing #MSWord, effing #Dropbox, and any number of increasingly enshittified pieces of software on my computer. Ugh.

Did you know that the history of Interlisp crossed with the history of modern word processors and MS Word?

1/4

Free #Accessibility Workshop:
Make your Documents accessible to people who are #blind
January 28 2025, 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m., Eastern via #Zoom
Register at:
https://nfb.org/form/accessibility-boutique-reg
#A11Y #PDF #MSWord #GoogleDocs #NFB

"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

https://medium.com/illumination/ms-word-is-using-you-to-train-ai-86d6a4d87021

No, #MSWord, I do not want you to “helpfully” recheck the “Ordinals (1st) with superscript” setting every time you update.

I have spent my career battling this setting. It’s the 21st century, #Microsoft. Using superscript in abbreviations went out of style a long time ago!

#xl8
#FreelanceTranslator
#HelpfulSoftware
#Exasperation

If you use MS Word and you don't want their Copilot AI to access your files, go to Options > General > Privacy Settings.

Then untick all the boxes they've "helpfully" ticked for you.

Dear Microsoft, I never want to open things in ms edge. Your documents are shitty enough in your shitty word processing software and the option of a further degraded experience in trying to achieve things that should not be hard to do in a document do not make me happy. Please put your executive team in the next SpaceX launch thank you. #msword #msedge

Formatting page numbers in MSWord is an exercise in patience.

Everything before chapter one is in Roman numerals, with the cover page not numbered. Chapter one onwards is in Arabic numerals INCLUDING the first page of chapter one. If the first page of chapter one is numbered, the cover page keeps its number, if the cover page is not numbered, I loose it on the first page of chapter one.

Thank you for 12k downloads. I've just released docx2tex version 1.9:
https://github.com/transpect/docx2tex/releases/tag/v.1.9 #texlatex #docx #ooxml #msword

We've added a new blog post: "2024 Photo Calendars (part two)"

https://www.wolfnowl.com/2023/12/2024-photo-calendars-part-two/

Remember to hug the ones you love today...and every day!!

#2024 #AdobePhotoshopLightroom #AffinityPhoto #AffinityPublisher #calendar #CorelDraw #Lightroom #MSWord #photo #photography #Photoshop #template #tutorial #Word

Musk gets fact-checked by Twitter community, engages in petty public spat

Elon Musk, who was forced to buy Twitter for $44 billion and is doing everything he can to make it as trustworthy as a self-driving Tesla, was corrected on his own platform today for a misleading tweet.

"Microsoft Word now scolds you if you use words that aren't 'inclusive'!" tweeted the world's saddest billionaire. He included a screenshot of a Word document with the word "insane" underlined and a pop-up that reads, "Inclusiveness – This term implies mental health bias."

However, as Twitter Community Notes users pointed out, "This feature has been available in Microsoft Word since at least 2020 and has to be turned on manually." It links to a July 2020 article in How-To Geek titledt links to a July 2020 article in How-To Geek titled "How to Check for Inclusive Language in Microsoft Word."

#News #Elon #Musk #ElonMusk #X #Twitter #Microsoft #Word #MSWord

https://boingboing.net/2023/12/15/musk-gets-fact-checked-by-twitter-community-engages-in-petty-public-spat.html