Similarly, if, God forbid, you ever begin a note or a bibliography entry with the letter “A.,” when you hit Enter, Word automatically types “B.” on the next line. Even if you wanted to use lowercase Roman numerals somewhere, whenever you typed “i” Word would helpfully turn it into “I” as soon as you pressed the space bar.

When was the last time you read anything that adhered to this style? … To make this into something recognizably human, you need to click your way into the relevant menu (View? Insert? Format?) and change the i, ii, iii, etc., to 1, 2, 3, etc. To begin with, the designers of Word apparently believe that the conventional method of endnote numbering is with lowercase Roman numerals-i, ii, iii, etc. Because if you care about “fonts and formatting and all such things” Word is the worst possible application to deal with.Īs Louis Menand wrote some years ago, with the proper emphasis, “ Microsoft Word is a terrible program.” But when she says that her devotion to Word is a function of her being “a copy editor and thus prone to fussy opinions about fonts and formatting and all such things” - it is to laugh.

For one thing, she shows just how informed she is about these matters by referring to “the unfamiliar, bizarro-world file format RTF” - a format created by Microsoft. It’s become so commonplace for people to hate Word that a counterintuitive Slate post praising it was long overdue, but even by Slate standards Heather Schwedel has done a poor job.

And there’s a straightforward reason for that: in order to work on revisions for a forthcoming book, I’ve been using Microsoft Word. My family will tell you that I’ve been difficult to be around for the past few days - grumpy, impatient.

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