Succumbing to the Evil Empire
Mood:
Grumpy
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June 3, 2005
Admit it! You read that subject heading and thought I was talking about Star Wars. Admit it! I understand! But no, I'm talking about the REAL EVIL EMPIRE--
Microsoft!
Aaaaghhhh! Okay. Backstory. For years I used WordPerfect, an excellent word processing program. My job as the editor of The Journal of the Association of Genetic Technologists forced me to deal with Microsoft Word because, well, damned near everybody on the planet uses it. (Gee, and the Justice Department was concerned about anti-trust involvement. Can you imagine?!!!) Then when I started freelancing, especially fulltime, it became clear that most publishers require your manuscript as a Word doc or rich text format. Easy enough. WordPerfect allows you to easily save as either. Just save it as both and attach the Word doc when you turn it into your editor.
In reality, of course, over the last year I decided this was getting to be too much of a hassle and started just writing everything in Word, which has a few quirks that WordPerfect doesn't have. Still, my manuscript of The Devil's Pitchfork was written in WordPerfect. I finished the re-write today and I have been saving the individual chapters as Word docs as I went along. Somewhere around page 155 I realized I'd screwed up the page numbering, so I adjusted, figuring I'd go back and fix the first chapters, which is what I've been attempting to do today.
But...
When you try to re-save the WordPerfect files reformatted as Word files with adjusted page numbers, the disk for some reason acts as if the disk is full. Okay. Plan B. Just pull up the files on the Word disk and change the page numbering. Holy Hell! Bedlam and confusion. You start getting double numbers and it seems damned impossible to format them the way you need to.
Solution?
Delete the first 18 chapters saved as Word files, go back and make the changes on the WordPerfect disk and re-save as Word files on the Word disk. Yes, folks, computers sure made our life easier.
And if you know of some simple way I could have accomplished this (short of writing it originally in Word, which I'm doing from now on), please don't tell me. I don't want to know.
Best,
Mark Terry
Admit it! You read that subject heading and thought I was talking about Star Wars. Admit it! I understand! But no, I'm talking about the REAL EVIL EMPIRE--
Microsoft!
Aaaaghhhh! Okay. Backstory. For years I used WordPerfect, an excellent word processing program. My job as the editor of The Journal of the Association of Genetic Technologists forced me to deal with Microsoft Word because, well, damned near everybody on the planet uses it. (Gee, and the Justice Department was concerned about anti-trust involvement. Can you imagine?!!!) Then when I started freelancing, especially fulltime, it became clear that most publishers require your manuscript as a Word doc or rich text format. Easy enough. WordPerfect allows you to easily save as either. Just save it as both and attach the Word doc when you turn it into your editor.
In reality, of course, over the last year I decided this was getting to be too much of a hassle and started just writing everything in Word, which has a few quirks that WordPerfect doesn't have. Still, my manuscript of The Devil's Pitchfork was written in WordPerfect. I finished the re-write today and I have been saving the individual chapters as Word docs as I went along. Somewhere around page 155 I realized I'd screwed up the page numbering, so I adjusted, figuring I'd go back and fix the first chapters, which is what I've been attempting to do today.
But...
When you try to re-save the WordPerfect files reformatted as Word files with adjusted page numbers, the disk for some reason acts as if the disk is full. Okay. Plan B. Just pull up the files on the Word disk and change the page numbering. Holy Hell! Bedlam and confusion. You start getting double numbers and it seems damned impossible to format them the way you need to.
Solution?
Delete the first 18 chapters saved as Word files, go back and make the changes on the WordPerfect disk and re-save as Word files on the Word disk. Yes, folks, computers sure made our life easier.
And if you know of some simple way I could have accomplished this (short of writing it originally in Word, which I'm doing from now on), please don't tell me. I don't want to know.
Best,
Mark Terry
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