Microsoft Word has become so ingrained in the modern workplace that we rarely question its faults.
But add up all the tiny frustrations, and you’re left wondering why this flawed software is still so popular.
You try to move or edit stuff and the application suddenly goes lizard brain.
Start with the basic task of moving an image. You select the picture, hit Ctrl + X to cut it, then click where you want it to go and hit Ctrl + V to paste.
Simple, right? Wrong.
Word thinks you actually want to copy the image, not cut it. So after pasting, the image is still in the original location.
You have to sell your soul by going through Microsoft’s Byzantine image settings to “actually” cut and move the picture to your intended place in the document.
Then there are Word’s random formatting changes.
Type some text, come back an hour later, and entire paragraphs have been indented or switched to a different font without your permission.
Word thinks it knows better than you how your document should look, mysteriously editing your work behind the scenes.
Don’t even get me started on Word’s unstable flaws.
Crashes, freezes, documents suddenly corrupted – these plague even the most basic Word tasks. Word’s instability has devolved into an office-wide joke, a punchline we recite every time the software crashes yet again.
Despite its issues, Word’s dominance seems unshakable.
Competitors can’t penetrate the Microsoft Office fortress. Teachers assign Word files in school, dooming each new generation to Word’s quirks. And switching costs for businesses are too high to consider abandoning Word now.
Yet the longer Word’s problems go unsolved, the more plausible the theory becomes that Microsoft designed Word to be intentionally frustrating.
The software gets just functional enough to produce documents, locking us in while finding endless petty annoyances to irritate us daily.
