PowerPoint had a freaky...

...I can't think of a noun to finish that sentence, so I'll just show you the screengrab. This happened when I was trying to save a perfectly ordinary presentation (data loss was minimal (no thanks to Microsoft) so there is no profanity in this post), but had to kill PowerPoint and start again.

From the department of "Jesus H Christ, could copy and paste possibly get any worse?"

Just watch this bad boy:

Now, let's break this down:

1. Two sentences are copied from a document containing no Calibri. Literally none. Whenever I see Calibri, I go into anaphylactic shock, so trust me when I say there is precisely zero Calibri in this document. Not in the text, not in the styles, not in the figures or tables, not anywhere.
2. The two sentences are pasted back into the same document.
3. They appear in f***ing Calibri anyway.
4. To quell my rapidly worsening typography-induced medical emergency, I go to the paste options menu and select "Keep text only" to make it match the document's "Text" style (which uses Futura Book).
5. The text changes to something completely different and is still in bastarding Calibri.

Really, Microsoft? Really? FFS.

A I-don't-even-know-what-to-call-this Thing with MS Word

Imagine the scene: I had a document to send out today. Nothing massive, just 4-5 pages. A simple Microsoft Word document. Having spent some time becoming more and more irritable, with changing line spacing options to make bulleted text and unbulleted text look vaguely, stylistically-familiar, I was stumbling towards the finish line.

Almost complete, I deleted a paragraph from the very end of my document. This spontaneously changed the format of two of the preceding paragraphs in my document! Boom. Just like that. All f***ed up.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking something along the lines of "This fool deleted the hard return at the end of a paragraph causing it to change style, and he thinks it's Microsoft's fault." No, my cynical friend, I am pretty well versed in the dark arts of style manipulation in MS Word. There were two hard returns (that's two, count 'em) between the text that spontaneously changed format and the text that was deleted.

Now, in a way, I wasn't too pissed off. This was more surreal than the usual tiresome, Office-wrangling bullshit. Kind of interesting. Unfortunately, it's not repeatable (or at least I can't repeat it). This has left me wondering, in a kinda spooky way, if it really happened at all. Is it fair to write it up in this blog if I can't be 100% sure?

After all, I only have two paragraphs in Calibri to remind me that it ever happened...

p.s. Is "unbulleted" even a word? It should be. Hang on, I'll just get onto the OED.

Why can't I group with tables in MS PowerPoint?

I'm currently trying to layout a large format presentation in MS PowerPoint. It seems that you can't group anything with a table (that's been made using the INSERT>TABLE function). It's some pretty clear thinking again from our friends in Redmond. I mean, why would you want to group a table with another object (like a table caption or a footnote for example).

I'm truly sick of the relentless tide of lazy programing in PowerPoint that submerges my working day. How did this ever become an "industry standard"?

MS PowerPoint superscripting, subscripting, etc.

Why in the name of all that's holy are there no keyboard shortcuts for font effects (e.g. superscripting, subscripting, etc.) in MS PowerPoint? They exist in MS Word (e.g. CTRL+SHFT++ for superscripting) but seemingly nowhere else in the joy that is MS Office.

Did the wise old owls at Microsoft believe that PowerPoint would never really be in commercial use, where the widespread use of symbols like registered trademark, copyright, etc. would be used everyday? It takes sodding ages to superscript text. Nice touch, Microsoft.