There is a lot to be said for writing your next magnum opus in a really simple application like Notepad (in Windows) or Notes (Mac). There’s not much functionality, but the plus side of this is that there’s a lot less to go wrong.

I recently republished an article I wrote a couple of decades ago, called Word Problem. The remainder of the article you’re reading now was also published in 2002, a short while after the one I just mentioned. This, too, is still relevant — perhaps even more so.

More fun with Word. A colleague said that her document included a copy of a spreadsheet which looked fine on the screen, but kept printing out with most of the left hand column missing. She and another colleague had spent an hour trying to sort it out, and then decided to ask me. Interestingly, I sorted it out in a couple of minutes – and then spent the next half hour trying to fathom out a new problem that had arisen.

The original problem was quite straightforward. When you copy and paste a spreadsheet or any other “object”, as it’s called, into a Word document, it is enclosed in a frame, or box. If you click on the frame, six handles will appear. Then all you have to do is click on one of the handles and drag it so that the frame becomes bigger. By a process of trial and error it shouldn’t take too long to get it to the right size, ie the size where all of it appears in the print-out.

I actually still have no idea why the print-out was different to the screen-view, but I decided a long time ago not to lose sleep over these things. For some reason, all feature-rich software seems to develop quirks that (a) you cannot foresee and (b) you cannot replicate when you are trying to describe the problem. Just like when you take kids to the doctor: the symptoms completely disappear once you’re about to go in to the surgery having waited in an unheated waiting room on the coldest night of the year for 5 hours.

The other business that I have to admit got me completely floored was a phenomenon I’d never seen before and which I dubbed “page creep” or, in the anticipation of it transpiring that I was the first to discover it, “The Freedman Effect”. When my colleague first contacted me, she said the problem was on page 36 of a 57 page document. When I returned it, having solved the problem, the offending object was on page 61 of a 102 page document. When I decided to “tweak” it a bit (always a big mistake – ones motto should be, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”!), it ended up on page 87 of a 200-odd page document.

I was starting to think that I’d entered the Twilight Zone. However, my colleague had the answer: in fixing the object problem, I’d somehow caused a whole load of pages at the beginning of the document to change their orientation from portrait to landscape. Er, don’t ask…

Lest all this be interpreted as an attack on Word, let me state for the record that odd things like this are a fact of life, at least at the moment. When software becomes ever more rich in terms of its functionality, it becomes harder and harder, and eventually impossible, to properly test every single possible combination of events. I remember once devising a spreadsheet for someone which did everything he had asked me to build in, and a lot more in anticipation of what he might ask for next. He phoned me up one day to say that when he was in one particular part of the spreadsheet, if he pressed Alt, Shift, Num Lock and Page Down he lost all the data. I have no idea what possessed him to do so, but the customer is always right.

Now, I had tested the spreadsheet extensively before handing it over to him, but (and I realise that this was somewhat remiss of me), I didn’t think to test that particular combination of keys. No idea why not, because it’s such an obvious thing to try….

I called the software producer’s help line in the UK.

They contacted the parent company in the USA.

About a week later I was told the solution. Well, two solutions in fact.

Answer #1 was to try to avoid using that particular key combination. That reminded me of a Tommy Cooper joke:

I went to the doctor the other day.
I said “It hurts when I do this.”
He said “Well don't stop doing it then!”

Answer #2 was to upgrade to the next version, which didn’t crash when you did that. (But I’ll bet there was another lethal key combination instead.)

All of this is humorous once you’ve got over being annoyed at the inconvenience, but the worrying thing is that odd things can happen with any complex software, not just office applications. It’s to do with combinations and permutations, of which I understand little, not being a mathematician, but the way it works is something like this:

If you have 3 elements in the program, they can interact in up to 6 different ways. This is calculated by using the factorial, denoted by an exclamation mark. Thus 3! Means 3 factorial, which means 3 x 2 x 1, which equals 6.

If you have 4 elements, you have to calculate 4 factorial, or 4!, ie 4 x 3 x 2 x 1, or 24 – a huge leap.

Next, if there are 5 features in the program, it’s 5 factorial. 5! Gives you 120.

6! = 720.

7! = 5040.

10! = 3,628,800.

Programs like Word have millions of lines of code, but my spreadsheet cannot calculate 1,000,000 factorial.

Now, I know that I don’t really understand all this, and I have probably made some dreadful mistake, but I think all this still illustrates the point that in such complex software as a word processor odd things are bound to happen sometimes, however much trialling takes place before it’s released onto the market. 

What to do? Well, you could write everything by hand, or you could use a simple program as I suggested at the beginning of this work of art. My preference is to use the most featured software possible — and save my work every 15 minutes, and back it up at the end of every day.

I love technology — but that doesn’t mean I have to trust it!