July 1998: Microsoft Word 98 Special Report
(or Bugs That Microsoft Refuses To Acknowledge)

by Scott Rose, President of ScottWorld
(Note: As of October 2000, Microsoft has released Microsoft Office 2001. We have not yet checked to see if these bugs still exist or not.)

Right on the heels of the major security bug in Word 98, I have compiled a NEW list of Word 98 bugs that I have not seen posted anywhere else. Like all bugs, some of these are minor, while others are truly annoying and interefere with using the product to its fullest.

However, before I get into this newsletter, I would like to alert you that an "escalation engineer" (high-level tech support guy) at Microsoft called me up at my office and said that the MICROSOFT LEGAL DEPARTMENT does not take kindly to me posting unconfirmed bugs on web sites such as MacFixit and MacNN (even though my bug reports have later been confirmed to be true). He requested that I run all future bug reports through Microsoft FIRST, before posting them to any of the news sites. I took this as a not-so-subtle threat, but in good faith, I have run all the following bugs through Microsoft. In some cases, Microsoft did not have an answer for me, simply saying that "they would get back to me." They never did. In the cases where they DID have an answer for me, I have included their meager (at best) responses below... in many cases, Microsoft completely denied that these problems were even problems!

New Word 98 bugs:

• Setting the default font & size for envelopes' delivery addresses and return addresses does not "stick"... as soon as you set a default, it reverts back to Helvetica 12 pt for the delivery address, and Helvetica 10 pt for the return address.

Microsoft's response: No response yet.

• Setting the default date/time format within the "Insert Date and Time" dialog box only works during your current session in Word. As soon as you quit out of Word and relaunch it, Word 98 forgets the default and goes back to simple date format.

Microsoft's response: No response yet.

• The automatic underlining of misspelled words does not work properly under at least one particular circumstance:

When you have two sentences squished together without a space between the punctuation.Like these 2 sentences.

Using the above paragraph as an example, Word 98 correctly recognizes that the word "punctuation.Like" is not really a word, so it correctly underlines the world "punctuation.Like". However, when you add a space to separate the two sentences, it still keeps the word "punctuation" underlined MISTAKENLY, even though that word is still correctly spelled. When you edit lengthy documents as often as I do (and you use the FORWARD DELETE key to do so), the frequency at which this bug comes up is truly maddening.

Microsoft's response: Believe it or not, Microsoft incredulously wrote me back and said, "Just run the spell-check through the document again, and it will remove those red lines. This is not a bug, but rather a part of the functionality of the program."
This is not a bug?? Microsoft wants us to DOUBLE spell-check our documents, and this is part of the functionality of the program? Gee whiz -- I've only been in the computer business for 6 years, but it sure sounds like a bug to me.

• When you control-click on a word in Word 98, you have the ability to check for that word's synonyms. However, if your word is in the middle of a bulleted or numbered list, the synonym contextual menu suddenly disappears!

Microsoft's response: "The synonyms not being available on the contextual menu is not a bug. The synonyms list can still be accessed through the Tools:Language:Thesaurus." Wait a second -- Microsoft's program acting inconsistently is not a bug!? It sure seems that when we end-users have to compensate for a problem, that it should be categorized as a bug, no?

Okay, so let's say you take Microsoft's suggestion and use Tools:Language:Thesaurus to check a word in the middle of your document. I hope you weren't planning on saving your place in your document. Unlike Word 6 which does a thesaurus check properly, doing a thesaurus check in Word 98 makes the whole page jump up, so the word is up near the top of the screen. Maddening!

Microsoft's response: None yet.

• There are inconsistencies in Microsoft's "recently-used file list" (underneath the File menu): Sometimes file names are shown with a path name, and other times file names are shown without a path name. And as you continue to use Word 98, the path names for any particular document will either appear or disappear.

According to Microsoft, the recently-used file list is SUPPOSED to work like this: "Word does not show files with a path when you are working with a file that has the same path. All other files from other locations get appended with their relative path. This gets dynamically updated whenever a file in a different folder is accessed."

Of course, this is Microsoft's OFFICIAL response, but the program unfortunately does not work this way. In actuality, (a) the recently used file list DOES NOT change based on the file that you are currently editing. The recently used file list ONLY updates itself once you open up a new document. So therefore, if you have 7 documents open, and you switch back-and-forth between the 7 documents, the recently used file list only stays as current as the last file you opened. Thus making the issue even more confusing than it already is! You have to remember the path of the LAST file you opened, in order to make sense of the recently used file list! (b) Also, the recently used file list doesn't update properly if you save a document into a new location using the "Save As..." function (or saving a new document using the "save" function). What happens is that the very first file in the recently used file list suddenly lists your new file without a path, but the rest of the recently used file list is only as up-to-date as the last file you opened! This is truly, absolutely maddening!

Even if this feature worked 100% as Microsoft described, it is still very confusing for many users, myself included. I have received TONS of phone calls on this issue from my clients, who can't make rhyme-or-reason of PATHS to begin with, let alone the crazy nature by which Word 98 handles paths. Why can't Microsoft just give us an option to completely turn this feature off?

• In older versions of Microsoft Word, double-clicking on tabs that you have placed on the ruler brought up the "Format Tabs" dialog box. In Word 98, a bug prevents this from working properly. When you double-click on a tab, Word 98 thinks that you are double-clicking on the ruler, and brings up the "Format Document" dialog box instead of the "Format Tabs" dialog box.

Microsoft's response: "Pull down from 'Format' to 'Tabs'." Gee, thanks Microsoft.

• When you change your Word compatibility defaults to Word 6.0/95, a MAJOR UNDERLINE bug appears.

To change your Word compatiblity defaults, go to Tools-->Preferences-->Compatibility. Choose "Microsoft Word 6.0/95" from the pop-up menu, and then click on "Default...". Choose "Yes." Now try typing a document in Times New Roman font. Underline different parts of your document. Underline sentences here and there, underline a few words here and there. Then print your document to a PostScript laser printer. Your underlines will be skewed to the left or the right, completely shifted away from the words that they are supposed to be underlining.

Microsoft's response: "Don't change the compatibility default. Keep it as Word 97-98." Boy, am I glad I contacted Microsoft about all of these things!

• In previous versions of Word, when you open up a stationery pad through the open dialog box, Word always opens up a new blank document. (A stationery pad is a document that you specified as a stationery pad through its "Get Info" box, such as a letterhead that you use all the time.) No matter how many times you open up the same stationery pad through the open dialog box, you always get another blank document (in Word 6 and earlier). This is the way that it SHOULD work. However, in Word 98, open up a stationery pad, start typing a few lines on your document (but don't save it yet), and then go to File-->Open and open up the same stationery pad again. Word 98 attempts to OVERWRITE your existing document by REVERTING to the previously saved (most likely BLANK) stationery pad!! Thankfully, Word 98 gives you a warning before doing this, but still, many of my clients have accidentally overwritten documents because of this drastic change (bug) in how Word 98 treats stationery pads.

Microsoft's response: "Double-click stationery pads in the finder, instead of opening them through the open dialog box." Great-- what if my stationery pad is buried several folders deep, and I don't want to make an alias of it on my desktop? (Actually, a better workaround to this is to add those stationery pads to Word 98's "Work" menu, because choosing a document from the Work menu acts just like you double-clicked the document in the finder. But nonetheless, this is still a workaround that shouldn't need to be implemented.)

• Some of your documents may have "titles" associated with them (File-->Properties). This feature is a hold-over from the "summary info" feature of Word 5.1 and Word 6.0. You may even have a "title" associated with your document without you even knowing it. Many of my Word 5.1 and Word 6.0 documents mysteriously gained the title "May 31, 1995" when I opened them up in Word 98. Now the problem is this: If you have any "Title" typed into the Properties area of your document (File --> Properties), when you save your document as HTML, it will change the name of your HTML document to the name typed into the "Title" area, not the name that you gave your document in the Finder.

Microsoft's response: "Clear out the title information to fix this." Okay, that's fine for me... but what about the people who actually LIKE typing in Title information?

• Unfortunately, Word 98 also has the "display bug" which has plagued programs like Wolfram Research's Mathematica and Smith-Micro's MacComCenter. (The display bug is where words will unexpectedly get squished together, spacing on the screen becomes erratic, and it is just plain difficult to read anything on the screen. Usually quitting the program fixes this problem, but sometimes it is necessary to restart the computer.) This is probably a bug in Apple's Appearance Extension, but applying the patch from Wolfram does not PERMANENTLY fix the Word 98 problem as previously thought -- it only temporarily solves the problem until the next restart.

Microsoft's response: "Oh yeah... we've seen this problem pop up from time to time." Gee, I'm glad they're taking it as seriously as Wolfram and trying to figure out a fix with Apple.

Well, that's it for now! And isn't it enough?

I seriously hope that Microsoft will acknowledge that these issues are genuine bugs, and not "features" as they have implied time and time again.

Sincerely,
Scott

P.S. If you simply can't get enough of tracking Word 98 bugs, or if you just need confirmation that "No, you're not going crazy!", be sure to visit Joe Clark's Word 98 Bugs Page, one of the most comprehensive lists I have found on the insidious problems with Word 98. Plus, at the bottom of Joe's page, he keeps an updated list of links to other resources on the web that are also keeping track of Word 98 bugs. Enjoy!

P.P.S. If you can't stand the poor manuals that came with Microsoft Word 98, check out these new books on Word 98:
MacWorld Office 98 Bible
Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh: Comprehensive Guide
Microsoft Office 98 At A Glance
Microsoft Office 98 For Dummies
Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide