About Tim Albert Training

Effective writing for
healthcare professionals
Dorking, UK

Have you had a run-in with Microsoft Word or other software?
Send it to us .

If you have had any battles with the software let us know ...
Send it to us.

Gates and styles...

Why does Word refuse to let people put a lower case letter after a bullet point? Why is it such an effort to have GPs?

These are just two of the problems we have come up against. We're sure there are many more - and we'd like to hear from you. Send it to us .

It is becoming clear that one of the casualties of the growing power of Microsoft is English English usage.
One particular galling habit is the tendency to put a capital letter after the colon: this is a US habit not a UK one. It also insists that we use a capital after a blob or bullet point; again this ignores the convention, held in the UK at least, that the bullet point is not a piece of punctuation, and thus will rarely take the capital letter immediately following it.

Then there is the near impossibility of making 'bracket - c- bracket' become anything other than a copyright sign. Try it.

Jim Wager writes: 'My word 97 doesn't turn (c) into a copyright sign. It turns it into (C).
Word 97 will often not translate documents prepared in Word 6 or Word 7 if the originals were set up for a different printer. With Word Perfect this was never a problem as you could change the settings.
Word 97 will not translate any documents prepared in Word 6 or Word 7 or anything else if the original has tables in it.
No Windows word processor works. My Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS is twice as fast as any other word processor currently being sold. Even with a Pentium II chip for WP 5.1 versus a Pentium 5 for Word 97. Also I can view files at the rate of 7 a second. And it has never crashed once in 5 years.
Word was copied from Word Perfect for Windows [this is a fact] but it was dumbed down [another fact] to allow 6 year olds (ie programmers) to be able to use it [intelligent guess]. At least that was the theory. In practice they made it harder to use.'

William Marshall of the Royal College of Pathologists wrote in to tell us that we have a mixed list of bullets, italic and plain, in the latest Short Words. 'It seems that once Word programmes have a field in which italic was used, even when this has been deleted, a trace remains and any subsequent bullets become italicised. The only way I've discovered of coping with this is to delete the offending bullets and insert the text above a line where they are not italicised.'

Does anyone in the UK write 'Yours truly' at the end of letters? So why does my Microsoft paper clip keep telling me to do so?

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