Bullet Points and Other Haut Cuisine
The big problem with Microsoft Word is that it's always trying to be extra helpful.
My latest struggle has been bullet points.
You know the sort of thing:
1) assemble an army
2) train them for battle
a) teach them about guns
b) teach them about grenades
3) take over the world
a) invade Poland
and so forth...
Unfortunately, my bullet-point-making vocabulary is pretty non-existent, so I'm going to have to use a metaphor.
Today's metaphor will be: COOKING
* * * * *
So, you want to cook dinner, and you go into Microsoft Cook and start putting everything together.
Dinner tonight will consist of spaghetti, and chocolate cake for dessert.
And you've got a special spaghetti recipe, which includes a dash of salsa mixed in with the spaghetti sauce (for that extra bit of kick).
So, you start by getting out all the spaghetti ingredients, and Microsoft Cook goes "Ah! Clearly you're making spaghetti!" and sets it all up in the ideal spaghetti-making way.
But the thing is, Microsoft Cook is made for amateur cooks who don't really know much about cooking, so that they can pull out the ingredients, go to file: cook, and have the whole thing done for them expertly, according to Microsoft's cooking files. In fact, these amateur cooks don't even need to know the recipe, or the name of the recipe: Microsoft does it all for them! It's trained to guess, based on a couple of ingredients, what kind of dinner you want, and do the rest for you.
And the moment you pull out the salsa, Microsoft Cook realises it was wrong. You didn't want spaghetti - you wanted to make nachos. And those spaghetti-like ingredients sitting in the file? Clearly the result of a cook who isn't very good at making nachos, and needs Microsoft's help.
Microsoft Cook instantly starts converting the program into a nachos file, and you stare in horror as your spaghetti strands turn into corn chips and sour cream starts materialising out of thin air.
"What?" you ask, baffled. "But... I wanted to make spaghetti."
You race into the format: tonight's menu screen, and type in SPAGHETTI.
And Microsoft Cook goes "Ahh! Okay! I understand!" and changes it back to your original ingredients (carefully putting the salsa back in the pantry on its way past).
Not being a very savvy Microsoft Cook user yet, you pull out the salsa and try adding it to the file again, with identical results.
(repeat this process three times, add a huge amount of frustration, and stir...)
Finally, you work out a way to fool Microsoft Cook: you add some extra tomatoes, start the cooking process, and then change the tomatoes to salsa once it's already let them into the 'sauce' section.
This is sneaky, and seems to work fairly well.
Now that the spaghetti's bubbling away, you turn to the chocolate cake.
You pull out the flour, sugar, and chocolate.
And this is as far as you get before it starts going wrong.
Microsoft Cook turns the flour into spaghetti strands, gives you an "Error. Chocolate Is Not A Spaghetti Ingredient. Did You Mean: Tomatoes?" message, and dyes the sugar bright purple, for some reason.
You scream "Argh! No!" and pound the keyboard in a frantic attempt to convince it to at least let you have the flour back (especially given that you now have way too much spaghetti).
Microsoft Cook compromises by deleting the flour/extra spaghetti, and asking if there's "Anything Else You Would Like To Add?"
You pull out a new packet of flour, and are about to add it to the file when you remember that repeating an action and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
Instead, you create a separate Microsoft Cook file, just for the chocolate cake.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Cook already has a 2nites-meal.food file up and running, so the only place to put the chocolate cake is in 2morrows-breakfast.food, which isn't when you want to eat the cake.
But luckily, you have a cunning plan.
You start the cake in the separate file, then copy-paste it over into the original one. This is bound to work.
And it does.
In the sense that your cake is now recognisably a cake.recipe, and so Microsoft Cook will let it stay as a cake recipe.
Of course, now that you're clearly cooking a cake, it has all these extra ingredients to put into it somehow... so your half-cooked spaghetti strands get mashed up and used for icing, and the special salsa-added sauce gets dumped in with the eggs.
Cue much yelling and throwing of keyboards.
Quickly, you select the spaghetti ingredients, and going into tools:mixing&stirring, you put it together in spaghetti layout, and check 'preview'.
Preview is fine - you're going to be able to make cake and spaghetti, after all.
Except...
Microsoft Cook has this wonderful thing it calls "autoformat", which makes sure that your cooking all looks the same throughout the file. And when you sigh in relief at the preview and press "OK", it quickly autoformats your ingredients and puts the spaghetti stuff back into the cake again!
You experiment a few times, and finally figure out how to turn off autoformat by selecting something called QuickMeal. It's great! It lets you put all the ingredients into the combinations you want, and all it does is move them round in the final layout so that they don't interfere with each other.
It sounds perfect.
Until, that is, you reach the final minutes of baking.
At which point, Microsoft Cook's QuickMeal program decides that they do interfere with each other. After all, who would want to eat spaghetti and chocolate cake at the same time?
So it deletes the chocolate cake, grabs some ice-cream out of the freezer and puts that in instead, and puts the salsa on the ice-cream.
...and that's when you give up, and decide that ranting about it on LJ will be less expensive than burning your computer in a fit of rage.
(I've had a frustrating morning.)