Docxmanager and Scrivener

Posted by Amontillado
Feb 4, 2022 at 03:35 PM

Listerene wrote:
>I have an iron-clad rule: Your program hurts me—and that one did—I
>will (A) never trust you with anything ever again and (B) I will tell
>everyone about how incompetent you are, forever more.
> >Do NOT trust this developer. Ever.
>

Curiously, this is why I don’t use Microsoft products.

Word used to support, using the term loosely, something called Master Documents. The idea was to use Word sort of like Scrivener. The presentation would make mud fences look pretty, even when freshly painted with leftover pig lipstick. I don’t want to be harsh, but it was jarringly ugly.

You could reorder the sections of your document, but only if your mouse positioning was pixel-perfect. Otherwise, it was like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters.

There was no un-do function.

I think for the first ten years of Word Master Documents, they would spontaneously incinerate any file. I was never able to use the reorder function more than about twice before the document was irrecoverably scrambled.

The first Writing Outliner came in that era. It was great. Then there were some updates to Word that were at least part of Writing Outliner’s downfall.

Microsoft let Master Documents operate as a food processor for documents for a decade, even though they had enormous resources. Edwin Yip just had Edwin Yip, and he got his problems fixed faster than Microsoft.

I fully appreciate fool-me-once wisdom. As best I can tell, Mr. Yip applied that thinking to his efforts. His customers benefitted.

If I were a Word user, I would use docxmanager.