Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Word to your mother

Okay, so I've used Word 2019 a few times now. It's not that big a change from previous editions of Microsoft Word. Maybe a little smoother in some areas.

One thing I've noticed is that it recognizes "lightbulb" and "snowbank" now. Before, the spell checker would put wavy red lines under the word unless you separated them into "light bulb" and "snow bank." So that's a welcome change regardless of what prompted it. I do remember a few days after the 2008 election it started recognizing "Obama" and "Biden." So I look forward to seeing which election the Lightbulb/Snowbank ticket won.

2 comments:

susan said...

Not always, but often enough I tend to write anything more than a couple of sentences in text edit in order that I can copy-paste the result. I do it because of having had some written comments disappear into the e-zone - a miserable experience when you can't remember exactly what you'd written. I used to have a text retrieval program called Lazarus but lost it once it was no longer supported by some computer update. Now that I've remembered it I'll have to see if there's another available.

Anyway, all this is pretty much unrelated to what you've said about Word 2019 but the point I was after is that the text edit program I use now is set to Canadian English spellings and every time I write 'neighbor' or 'harbor' it highlights those words as spelling mistakes but is happy to see 'neighbour' and 'harbour'. So now I'm used to writing them that way as I always used to do. On the other hand I tried 'lightbulb' and 'snowbank' the program was happy enough.

As for the elections, Lightbulb/Snowbank sound like reasonable contenders considering the opposition.

Ben said...

It used to be a recurring problem I noticed, that something I'd written online would get lost due to a some code stalling out. Like blog posts, blog comments, wiki edits, what have you. This doesn't seem to be as common an occurrence now. It's still a good practice to highlight and copy something you're worried about losing, keeping it on a clipboard or even saving it in a document, depending on the situation. Lazarus sounds like it used to be a handy program. Has an evocative name too.

I just tested on my own copy of word. Try writing something like "harbour" or "colour" and it will automatically remove the "u". On the other hand it seems to be agnostic between "gray/grey" and "theater/theatre". This is good for me, because I tend to favor the latter in both cases. Selective Britishims due to my Canadian background, perhaps.

One must admit, Lightbulb has plenty of ideas and Snowbank always keeps his cool.