Microsoft Office is out to get me

You know how in horror films the bad guy always comes back, no matter how many times they’ve been killed. How after being shot, stabbed, blown up, set on fire, run over, drowned and, well, basically anything else that would kill someone in the most horrible way possible, they still manage to thrust a hand up in the last scene to show that they’ll be back. Well, that’s exactly how I view Microsoft Word’s stupid language settings.

No matter what steps I take to kill the English (United States) setting, it always comes back when I least expect it, menacingly underlining all of correctly-spelt words in red because it’s spotted that I’ve used an ‘s’ rather than a ‘z’.

I wouldn’t mind so much if I hadn’t tried everything to get rid of it. Put it this way, if Word was Rasputin, I’ve gone full-on Russian revolutionary against it. I’ve told Word not to automatically check language settings ever; I’ve set English (United Kingdom) to be the default language and even believed the message that pops up telling me that the NORMAL template has been changed.

It appears, though, that there’s an ABNORMAL template that Word uses, as it’s never long before Word decides that a document I’ve opened or some text I’ve pasted is American. In retaliation I have even been into the Microsoft Office 2007 Language Settings application and removed English (United States) from the list. Yet, go back into Word and the digital hand of American spelling thrusts its way onto the screen.

No matter, you might think, why not just change the language of a document back to English (United Kingdom) manually using the handy button at the bottom of the Window. Well, I don’t because it doesn’t work the vast majority of the time.

Aside from shrinking myself down to a microscopic-size, jumping into the hard disk and stalking from cluster to cluster pumping magnetically-erasing bullet after magnetically-erasing bullet into the screaming hoards of 0s and 1s that make up the English (United States) dictionary, I’m at a bit of loss as to how to kill it off.

Fortunately, I’m feeling slightly better about the whole thing, as I’ve managed to get one-up on Excel. I’m now full of the same kind of smug feeling that you get when you trick a pet cat into doing what you actually want it to do.

The feature I’m talking about: Excel’s graphs. Now, for a spreadsheet that’s designed to manipulate, control and present facts and figures, you’d think that quite a lot of time would have been spent making graphs easy to use. Sadly, this doesn’t appear to be the case.

For years on Shopper we’ve been haunted by Excel randomly deciding to only show every-other label on a graph. There’s no rhyme or reason as to why it does this, and sometimes a graph will work properly, sometimes it won’t. Naturally, we thought it was a bug. So did Microsoft, which has a helpful little page that suggests resizing the graph until the labels reappear. This, you might have guessed, doesn’t work.

Then, I found out why: it’s not a bug, it’s actually a feature. Format the axis with the labels on it and there’s an option to change the interval. Randomly, Excel decides to set the interval to 2 on some graphs, making every-other label disappear. What a brilliant feature, as though there are actually times where you’d like to make people viewing your graphs guess what the missing labels stand for. Thanks for that Microsoft.

Still, now I’ve fixed that problem I can relax. Until, that is, I discover that the English (United States) dictionary is really in league with Clippy and they’ve just spotted that I’m about to write a letter...