Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles ON CALL Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s reader-contributed Friday column in which you share your stories of troublesome tech support incidents. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Cooper” who told us that his employer uses an MS Word document to record incoming orders. “It includes a table with two …
> Word’s built-in spell checker at work
Maybe what Word (and the world) needs is not so much a spell checker, but a built-in fact checker. It would be great to have that included in apps that record audio or video, too.
The only issue is who gets to decide what are facts and what are fairy tales.
"How could we trust any Microsoft product to tell the truth? WAKE UP SHEEPIES!!!!"
Yes, you just continue believing everything fed to you by the MSM and polticians. After all, we know that journalists never spin facts to suit their agenda, and politicians never lie, do they? Stay in that nice, safe bubble!
Thank heavens you want the SHEEPIES to wake up, that might be the safer alternative.
Bonus points for linking to Explain XKCD, which I find delightful in its nerdy earnestness (or is that earnest nerdiness), if only for the reason that every once and a while (okay, quite often) I learn something new.
Also, in re the subject of today's On Call, Mr Munroe has also created a comic on that subject.
Remember, almost by definition, there's a first time for everyone for everything.
Elsewhere I in these comments pages I've told my own first encounter with a workstation's screen saver. I'm just glad nobody else was watching because I was supposed to be the graphics expert in the group.
Humility is a dish best served piping hot.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
EN-ZE confirmed. My bad. Though is seems it does not have an "official" name? (IsNeutralCulture = $False offers some interpretations)...
PS C:\> [cultureinfo]::GetCultureInfo("en-ze") | Select-Object *
Parent : en
LCID : 4096
KeyboardLayoutId : 1033
Name : en-ZE
IetfLanguageTag : en-ZE
EnglishName : Unknown Locale (en-ZE)
TwoLetterISOLanguageName : en
ThreeLetterISOLanguageName : eng
ThreeLetterWindowsLanguageName : ENU
CompareInfo : CompareInfo - en-ZE
TextInfo : TextInfo - en-ZE
IsNeutralCulture : False
EN-SH is:
PS C:\> [cultureinfo]::GetCultureInfo("en-sh") | Select-Object *
Parent : en
LCID : 4096
KeyboardLayoutId : 1033
Name : en-SH
IetfLanguageTag : en-SH
EnglishName : English (St Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha)
TwoLetterISOLanguageName : en
ThreeLetterISOLanguageName : eng
ThreeLetterWindowsLanguageName : ZZZ
CompareInfo : CompareInfo - en-SH
TextInfo : TextInfo - en-SH
IsNeutralCulture : False
PS C:\> [cultureinfo]::GetCultureInfo("en-tt") | Select-Object *
Parent : en
LCID : 11273
KeyboardLayoutId : 11273
Name : en-TT
IetfLanguageTag : en-TT
EnglishName : English (Trinidad & Tobago)
TwoLetterISOLanguageName : en
ThreeLetterISOLanguageName : eng
ThreeLetterWindowsLanguageName : ENT
CompareInfo : CompareInfo - en-TT
TextInfo : TextInfo - en-TT
IsNeutralCulture : False
(Or: How to kill a joke with real world answers)
I went to a fairly posh school, & not all of the kids were there on merit, shall we say.
A particular example was a Chinese lad who was very much Tim-nice-but-dim in Asian form. A thoroughly decent lad, but not likely to author any world-changing research in the foreseeable future. His dad owned a bank in Hong-Kong, though (this was all well pre handover) so he didn't need to.
The school did offer lessons in other languages than the usual French & German as an after-school activity, & it occurred to him that as the Mandarin Chinese classes offered an O-level exam at the end it might be his best chance of leaving school with something to show for his time there. Sadly not. It was the wrong sort of Mandarin apparently.
Not forgetting of course EN-EX (Essex)
After all, it's well known that in the local tongue, Essex is pronounced Essix. Having spent a fair part of my childhood there you soon get to understand the quirks.
Other gems include
Awss - a four-legged herbivorous mammal.
Eye eels - a kind of ladies' footwear.
Flaah - a pretty, colourful ornamental plant.
"One thing I've learned from watching "Brokenwood Mysteries" is that "yes" is pronounced "yis" in New Zealand."
I've got some friends who moved from the UK to NZ. Soon after they moved into their new home they got chatting with one of the neigbours. This gentleman complained at length about another neighbour's big dick and how the council/local authority should require him to cut his dick to the permitted size, etc. My friends were a little puzzled about this until they eventually realised the chap was talking about a deck, in the garden.
If you think them pronouncing "yes" as "yis" is odd, look up how they pronounce "deck". There's even a whole video on how they build their decks as they take them so seriously.
"A smoking Goon, you say? What what what what what!"
"Only five whats? Not very bright, are you?"[1]
[1] this was funnier in the Incandescent Age, but I was worried that nobody would understand if the second line was "Have a gorilla?" "No, thank you; I prefer a chimpanzee, they are milder".
Word TWO POINT ZERO? Released in 1991? That terminology wasn't even codified yet. All of the pieces technically existed — two-letter country codes are from 1974, two-letter language codes are from ISO 639 (1989) — but the combination of the two into names like en-US, de-DE, pt-BR, etc. wasn't codified until the first release of the CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository), which didn't happen until 2003.
So basically you are saying "You are right, because EN + UK was ISO 639 1989, but you are wrong because terminology EN-UK was fixed in 2003", and even the idea that programs distinguished between British and US before 1989 was impossible?
Program + Manual page 275, PDF page 296 : https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-word/2x-windows
I cut my teeth on Word Perfect from around 92 to mid 90's... Must have been about 12-13yrs old the first time I used it... On an old Olivetti 386 PC with Windows 3.1 at the local youth club where we were making a little local magazine... But mostly, that was a an excuse to sneak in at all hours and play games like the original X-Wing that we'd bought to install. :)
I believe the ISO code should be EN-RN (Piratical) since before the advent of Robert Newton's magnificent portrayal of Long John Silver in the 1950 Disney film Treasure Island pirates did not talk at all piratey.
This can be confirmed by examining the earlier films featuring pirates. I cite the 1930 documentary Captain Blood as merely one example of the historical record.
Newton gave so much in the portrayal of Long John Silver that preserved scenery at Walt Disney World and Disneyland clearly show his teeth marks.
Alternatively, does HEX have a spell checker?
When installing MS-Word on HEX I assume we would get an error message
+++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR +++
+++ REINSTALL UNIVERSE +++
+++ REDO FROM START +++
I'd better be going. Doffs hat (genuine Panama today) to the late, great sir Terry Pratchett.
I've used Word and LibreOffice extensively over the years, but when it came to writing a novel I used Notepad. It just allowed me to type without it interrupting my train of thought with complaints about any spelling or grammar oddities. Clean up came later if necessary while reviewing the text.
... with complaints about any spelling or grammar oddities.
... Clean up came later if necessary ...
Quite so.
I have, by default, always turned all that crap off.
Once I finished what I was writing, simply proof read it.
Twice if necessary.
Were she alive today, Mrs. Fowler would have opined that spell checkers and grammar correctors are for people who (for whatever reason) have not read enough.
.
I just reopened a CV I wrote over a decade ago. Somehow I never spotted two spelling errors, and I must have read through it dozens of times.
You'll probably find this difficult to credit, but it is entirely possible for my dyslexic brain to read a misspelled word multiple times without noticing it's spelled wrong. Thank fuck I grew up in the era of word processors and spell checkers, otherwise no one would ever be able to read anything I wrote.
Exactly, it’s nigh-on impossible to proof-read your own work - your brain sort of knows what it is supposed to say and that can be what it sees, or thinks it sees.
On the other hand, I do have a knack of seeing typos in other people’s text - a few weeks ago, I walked into a pub and was arrested by something wrong with a hand written notice on a blackboard. And then I spotted it; two letters transposed in a word. Pointed it out to the girl behind the bar who had written it (I know them all, so it wasn’t a big deal), who said to me ‘oh my God, I read that three or four times before putting it out’, and then rushed over to correct it.
It’s basic human nature.
"Were she alive today, Mrs. Fowler would have opined that spell checkers and grammar correctors are for people who (for whatever reason) have not read enough"
Nowadays, I see so many mis-spellings and garbled grammar in so many things that I read, and I find myself ending up making the same mistakes (or at least being no longer sure what the correct spelling/phraseology is), it is perhaps more a case that I need spell-checkers and grammar correctors because I Have read <too> much?
"Were she alive today, Mrs. Fowler would have opined that spell checkers and grammar correctors are for people who (for whatever reason) have not read enough."
Even if we accept that as true, there are at least two participants in any written communication and the reader can benefit from having things properly written even if it's the fault of the writer that it wasn't originally so. Someone who doesn't know how to spell but uses a tool to do it properly at least delivers something readable. Someone who doesn't know and doesn't have the tools to fix that without improving, unless and until they improve on their own, produces something that takes more time to properly understand.
Of course, such a complaint would be illogical for someone who told a lot of people they were writing badly, as people will learn from reading whatever style the writers used. While Fowler was less pedantic than some of his* contemporaries, he still opposed and attempted to define as ungrammatical things that people were frequently using in conversation and in writing. If those things were incorrect, then reading would not dislodge them.
* I have to wonder whether we're thinking about different Fowlers. Henry Watson Fowler was the only one that jumped to mind.
When I've writing and wanted to be unencumbered by all the nonsense that the modern desktop experience throws at us - notifications, popups, underlining correctly speeeld words, a browser just begging you to check social media, etc - I use a bit of software called WriteMonkey.
It's like going back to the olden days, just a full-screen word processor. No menus, no ribbons, no status bars - nothing but your text. If you need a menu it's through a context menu. You can even colour it with your favourite shades of green if you want to go for the full experience.
not Word-related, but on a similar clueless user tip.....
some years ago the IT manager at one of my small business clients was taken suddenly & critically ill and died shortly afterwards. it was a personal as well as a professional blow, cos he was a really good guy, knew what he was doing, and we'd become good friends over the decade or so we'd been working together.
not long after, the person newly promoted to take his place got in touch, and the first conversation we had went like this:
them: "I'm not getting any sound out of my computer"
me: "have you got any speakers or headphones plugged in?"
them: "umm...no"
me: "ok, well, plug some speakers or headphones in and please give me another call if you're still not getting any sound out"
(sigh..........)
I had one user who claimed my software was on the fritz, because when she moved the mouse left, the cursor went to the right, when moving the mouse up, the cursor went down, etc. I pointed out the "tail" of the mouse should be pointing away from her (this was in olden days, when mice had tails to connect them to the computer). In her defense mce were relatively new, and she did turn quite a fetching shade of scarlet in embarrassment.
The tail (pun intended) I heard is that the original mice (in the early 70s) had their cables coming out of the rear - towards the user. This, along with the two buttons, is what lead to it being called a mouse.
There's also the story that the word 'mouse' was an acronym for Manually Operated Utility Selection Equipment.
During a PC intro course I was giving, one of the trainees thought of the cord as the little bugger's tail and had it under her wrist. After showing the correct way to use the device, no more problems. That's the important thing, that once taught, people shouldn't need to be schooled again on the same subject!
I had a user who due to carpal tunnel insisted on using her mouse with the buttons towards so she could use both buttons and the scroll wheel with her thumb. This was with both wired and wireless mice. She was also left handed which meant that the buttons were actually set up for a right hand user, which was useful for me if I needed to work on her machine. We did try her out with a trackball with buttons for her thumb, but she didn't like it.
I got a trackball at work when I had suspected Carpal Tunnel problems (I didn't - it was spine related but that's another story). More recently I was using it on my own computer due to restricted space but I've now moved it back to the work one and bought a new wireless version for myself. They're Kensington Expert and the work one is at least 20 years old and still going strong.
(for grammar) confused her indoors — had never seen it in her employment so I suppose the grammar check was turned off in some org pollicy setting.
Mitch must have seen red underlining in his marked school essays and homework assignments but I guess he was streamed with the "special" kids.
Years ago I delivered a Word document to some typesetting folk. Panicked e-mail: your document is full of strange symbols. Turns out I forgot to turn off Word Show formatting marks (similar to Reveal codes in WordPerfect (yes, I'm that old)). Something these folk were unfamiliar with so I had to explain it, politely.
Anyway, it's almost that time of the week -->
(can we have a wine icon?)
With my OCD I have never been able to use Word (or its LibreOffice equivalent) without showing all formatting marks. It's surprising how many people have random areas of white space spread across documents they send to you, including blank tables with the lines un-coloured as well as multiple headings and format changes that you can't see. Oh, and them not knowing what F7 does either. Winds me up.
Hmmph. Keeping formatting marks *hidden* is the ONLY way to deal with Other People's Documents; otherwise the day is spent grinding teeth in a desperate attempt not to dive in and do the fix up. Especially when proof-reading for them: stick to the content, stick to the content - aaaaaargh*!
Similarly when using the Company Stylesheet: just bite one's tongue and copy the styling from another paragraph. Do NOT open the list of defined styles and try to figure out *which* of the four almost-but-not quite identical options you are supposed to be using here (ye gods, have these people never heard of deleting deprecated entries?!).
* apparently, the correct spelling of this word is "antenna"!
I was responsible recently for a major document that my manager had used AI to generate as a starting point. (It did a somewhat OK job, to be fair, but the document still needed a large amount of work to be good.) One of the first things I did was convert all the headings to use actual heading styles with auto-numbering, so we could enjoy the benefits of amazing advanced features like a table of contents and being able to reorder sections so that the document structure made sense.
"Cooper told On Call the chap who filled in the form was in his 60s, so ignorance of how Word works is plausible and perhaps understandable."
You mean as a mere 60 year old he's not been in the workplace long enough to have encountered it?
In my 80s I think I may have been using Word or alternatives for longer than Cooper has been using oxygen.
An alternative is that the user in question is old enough to have been taught well, knows how to spell and had never triggered a spill chucker with his own typing.
Cooper was trying to find some reason why the ignorance was acceptable. It's not necessarily that hard to imagine how that could happen, for example that the filler-inner did not use word processors during their education, worked a job that didn't involve them much such as something manual, and was therefore frequently using word processors for the first time in this new job later in their life. Your suggested alternative is just ridiculous, that they had used word processors for decades and were very familiar with them but somehow avoided having any familiarity with a very common feature in them for decades by virtue of never having misspelled a word, correctly spelled a word the word processor didn't recognize, or received a document in which someone else had done either of those things during their decades of thorough use. Cooper's assumption is possible. Yours is not.
Two things come to mind for this sixties geek here.
Firstly I remember setting up a PC for my Mother in Law and then having to take ages to help her undertand that moving the mouse would cause the arrow on the screen to move as well.
Secondly, as I get older what new fangled technical wonder will come along that I can't cope with?
> as I get older what new fangled technical wonder will come along that I can't cope with?
The joys of language.
"Can't cope with" == "unable to learn what it is & does": so far, ok on on that score, I think (no matter what the wife means when she mutters "dementia, I'm telling you")
"Can't cope with" == "unwilling to deal with, just get that crap out of my face, I promise you, I shall scream": oh, so very, very much. The Good Lady's 'phone fell and smashed on Monday; finding a *sensible* replacement and getting it set up how *we* want it was such a good reminder of this.
The future looks to be - such a mixed bag.
Our punchroom used machines without the printing feature, which would have cost extra. The operators (all female) rarely mis-keyed anything, and cards went through a verify pass. The rest of us just learned to read the hole patterns, which was the only option when using a hand punch, which we all did.
As I get older, it's not so much what new fangled tech cant I cope with. It's what new fangled tech can I be assed bothering to learn the stupid bloody UI for...
There was a time, in the beginning, when UI was universally crap. But IT had the excuse that it was new, and every one was still learning. So it was basically accepted.
There was a golden time, when UI took central stage. Where companies spent actual money to work out the best way to let people accomplish things on their devices in the easiest, most logical way.
And now there is our time, when entshittification rules the roost. Where UI designers, in order to justify their employment, change the UI in every edition...
I wonder if we will ever see another golden time? Probably, but no doubt it will be buried in some entshittified deluxe edition, which costs through the nose and will then immediately try to upsell you to the mega-duper-deluxe edition, which then has the actual feature you want to use, whilst probably reverting back to the absolutely shit UI, which will then require you to buy the even more expensive Giga-Mega-Alpha-Malarky-Deluxe edition to get the feature and the UI you might actually want to use. At least until the next update...
> Where UI designers, in order to justify their employment, change the UI in every edition...
Oh, if only it were that simple, we might fix it!
No, you missed a bit - where not only was there research on UIs, but there was also training for UI designers. Plus UI was its own field (as opposed to getting the front-end developer to do it)
As for UI changes as justification - that's at a company level, not just individuals - how will the customer know we spent heaps of time building this new version that they should spend more money on, unless it looks different?
They won't notice half as many crashes, but they will notice a ribbon menu!
...this sixties geek here.
Fifties (70+) geek here.
... technical wonder will come along that I can't cope with?
Just wait.
The problem is not coping with the (eventual) "technical wonder".
The problem appears when you suddenly realise it is nothing but marketing crap for credulous idiots.
That is what you will not be able to cope with.
.
> Fifties (70+) geek here.
> [...]
> The problem appears when you suddenly realise it is nothing but marketing crap for credulous idiots.
>
> That is what you will not be able to cope with.
Born in the 80s home computer boom, cut my teeth at a very young age on an Amstrad CPC 464. My Granny taught me to read at about 4-5 years old, and I was soon copying out the example programs & games from the tome-like BASIC manual that came with the computer. Been using some kind of computer ever since.
I have not needed to reach my septuagenarian or quinquagenarian decades before reaching this stage of enlightenment. It began in the very late stages of my tricenarian era, and has only accelerated since.
Sadly it is now worse than simply cloaking ill intentions in flowery language, because the "Big Tech" firms are no longer afraid to say the quiet part out loud. Where they cannot earn market position through having a compelling product offering, they will simply engineer the market conditions to favour them. There are no repercussions, because they have long since de-fanged potential legislative threats.
Black helicopter, because despite my efforts to not sound like a conspiracy theorist, I am not always successful.
I once worked with a guy who handled a lot of our business with manufacturers. Several million pounds per year (in year 2000 money) and hundreds of thousands of items across hundreds of product lines.
These were all managed in huge spreadsheets. We're talking dozens of columns and hundreds of rows. And absolutely zero formulas.
Every time he need to make a change to a value he would sit there with his calculator and go through and redo every single field it affected. Used to spend hours and hours at it.
He often got it wrong too, especially as he thought adding 20% to a value and then taking 20% off would get you back to the original value. Cost the company well into 6-figures each year because he was too stupid/idle to learn how to write simple formulas in Excel.
However, he was the son of a director and had the ear of the Chief Exec so his cock-ups were quietly swept under the rug.
Back in the days my employer used AmiPro as their default word processor.
One of the secretaries used TAB instead of indent for text.
.....And so her text had a series of diagonal spaces across the screen
If, like ..... me your screen had a different resolution
Having gotten ..... totally fed up with trying to read her documents
I tackled her about ..... it, and received a very abrupt
reply along the lines of ..... not to tell her how to do her job
as she had been a typist when ..... I was in short pants.
She was, needless to say, PA to a ..... senior manager and
known for being an arrogant battleaxe. ..... I reported her to
the group IT manager who arranged for her ..... to get a lesson
in word processing rather than typing! I got a very ..... grudging
apology.
[Using full stops to illustrate as spaces are suppressed]
I know of a case where substantial revision to a large critical document was put in the hands of an individual who had completed a word-processing course. It turned out that this individual did not know about soft line breaks, and carefully spaced out each line of the document, followed by a hard line break. It had become apparent that a rigid completion deadline would not be met, but for Reasons, this task could not be taken out of their hands and given to someone, anyone, who could do the job properly. It was then that we discovered that they did not know about Backup, and had lost every working copy they had. Although I did not work in that office, the manager asked me if there was anything I could do; I spent some time and managed to reconstruct enough of the document that they were able to meet their deadline. To this day, I prize my paper copy of this document, with Thank You signatures from everyone who worked there.
There is a danger in making computers too easy to use; we sometimes forget that the tasks themselves are difficult.
So, i'm a GenX. The # sign has always meant "number" in front of digits and "pounds" when it comes after digits.
I had an office job where most of the employees were in their 20's, and thus thought of it as "hashtag" because of their social medias. My job required me to ship some things off, but I had to request shipping labels from someone else who often worked remotely. I made a request for a label for a package which I expected would be "22#". The young person, after the usual day's delay, writes back and asks; "what is the weight of the package?". I replied; "22#" again, being all professional and pleasant and such. A day later, he replies; "I need to know the weight because the cost varies". I replied with "22#" but I changed the color to red and underlined it. A couple days later, hearing nothing back, I repeat my request for the label and he replies; "Will you tell me how heavy the package is PLEASE?". That's when I realized what t.f. was going on. He didn't process "22#" as "Twenty-two Pounds" but read it as "Hashtag Twenty-Two", and despite that making absolutely no sense, he didn't ask my why I was putting a hashtag in our correspondence. He thought I was just spontaneously shouting "Yeah! Hashtag Twenty Two!". Or pretending not to understand.
THIS GUY WAS THE OFFICE MANAGER. You know. Someone who makes purchases and writes reports. Does inventory.
So I grabbed a post-it, wrote "#" on it and approached one of the nearby employees, someone in his late 20's, who hadn't left for home yet, and asked him what he called it. He said; "A hashtag". I said; "yes, but what else is it called? He literally paused a while and thought about it. He said; "I know it USED to be called 'number' which is why it's on the telephone" as if those days of yore were past and # belonged wholly to the new generation to use as they please. As if The Council had Decided. Then he suddenly added; "and some people call it 'tic-tac-toe'". I'm sure I was gasping for air at this point, but I asked; "Have you heard it called 'pounds' too?" And he was all 'oh right, whatever' at that point and turned away from me like I was being exasperating.
That had to be written in the US.
In the UK, where our currency is the pound and we have pound as a weight*, # symbol is hardly ever referred to as a pound (generally called sharp or hash).
Though the £ symbol is referred to as a pound (and seen on UK currency).
.. not that US folk even have a £ on their US keyboard (though obviously can use alt codes etc.)
* I know in the US / Canada that # is often used to represent pound as a weight, but UK uses the (more common worldwide) lb.
But if you are 83, did you never bother to read the printed manual, or the manual while it was an .HLP or .CHM file? I think (would have to check) office 2003 was the last with .HLP/.CHM supplied, for office 2007 you could download it. Or maybe office 2007 was the last with a .CHM.
One excuse I could think of: You read all DOS-MS-WORD manuals, so why bother with the newer ones, there is not much improvement :D.
For those who turn off squiggly underlines, reconsider. I never use Word, and only grudgingly use LibreOffice Writer. But I enable squigglies by default in Emacs text (and TeX) modes, and they save my bacon. When I'm in full brain-dump writing mode, I mostly ignore them, but when I go into revision mode, they often catch mistakes that I might not otherwise notice. And if it bitches when you say “colour", first check your locale (mine is en-CA.UTF-8), and if that doesn't fix it, then add the word to your local dictionary.
I went off spelling correctors nearly 50 years ago when an early one thought my name was a misspelling of “Vice Mania”, but underlining possible spelling errors is a huge win.
And, no, using a Word document for order entry is still idiotic.
That classic Microsoft Word "spellcheck panic" is always hilarious because it shows just how much people rely on technology without actually understanding how it works! There is nothing quite like watching a user or a manager completely lose their mind over standard formatting or red squiggles, thinking the entire system is corrupted or crashing when the software is literally just doing its job.
Navigating these funny tech support misunderstandings and managing different user personalities often requires a deep look into how people operate under pressure, which is why exploring systemic behaviors on destinymatrics.com can be so fascinating for understanding natural communication styles and alignments. At the end of the day, you just have to take a deep breath, right-click the word, hit "Add to Dictionary," and watch their absolute tech panic instantly turn into pure relief!
Ageism isn't good.
If you're 60, windows 3 was released when you were 24. It became the most popular word processor shortly after that. It's a standard office tool, not tiktok or some such.
If you've been using a word processor at all, you've been using Word for 30 years or so.
So the excuses for a 60 year old are the same as for a 25 year old. Never used it or wasn't paying attention.
