Perchance do you find this dialog silly too?

Shauna's been writing our annual Christmas letter. She tries to make it fun & interesting and not boring ("look at how great and amazing and so much smarter our children are"). She writes the content in Word and I typeset it with XeTeX to make it look just a little bit nicer. (I feel that I need to be involved in the process somehow...)

Word helpfully popped up this warning when I went to export her document to plain text:

Word 'Save As ...' confirmation dialog box

I find this dialog silly because Word ought to be able to:

  1. Tell definitively that the document does (or does not) contain formatting
  2. Know for sure that the document is (or is not) password protected
  3. Realize that the document has not been modified at all since the last time it was saved in Word's native format

Peradventure the document contained both formatting and was password protected... shouldn't that dialog say "and/or" instead of just a plain "or" to cover all contingencies? ;-)


—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, December 05, 2006 at 20:48

Comments:

  1. Andreas Kupries wrote (at Wed, 06 Dec 2006, 12:47):

You realize that this message has nothing to do with formatting, and passwords, etc ? IMHO the sole purpose is to simply raise the barrier to you moving out of the Word format to an open format, here, plain text. As such there will be no incentive at all to remove this dialog for specific conditions. It is just a small piece of FUD wired into the application.

  1. Michael A. Cleverly wrote (at Wed, 06 Dec 2006, 23:22):

Yes I do... hence my mocking it.

  1. crazy wrote (at Sat, 30 Dec 2006, 19:39):

I enjoyed your impeccably typeset Christmas letter! Accept my sincere (albeit typographically inferior) wishes of happy holidays!

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