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Slay the Word and You'll Be Free

and printer to rethink everything . . . but still the pages don't come out. Hell
freezes over, but the document won't print. Word docs are notoriously buggy
when it comes to printing graphics, especially "objects" from other programs
like PowerPoint, and even more especially when those objects include text.

Word is supposed to be a text editor that offers WYSIWYG (What You See

Is What You Get).

It means, roughly, that what you see on your computer

monitor is the same as what you get on the printer and vice versa. The first
true WYSIWYG editor was a word processing program called Bravo. Invented
by Charles Simonyi at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, it
became the basis for Simonyi's work at Microsoft, including Word.

Somehow, something went awry, because now it's "You Don't Always Get

What You Want"

--everything changes from computer to computer depend-

ing on which fonts are installed. A document produced with Word on one
computer may end up with radically different formatting and pagination on
another computer, even using the same version of Word.

The reason for these and other printing and formatting anomalies is

this: Word silently reformats a document based on the computer's printer
settings and fonts. This is bad news for certain kinds of documents, such as
forms, that rely on elements precisely positioned on a page. In other words,
Word documents are not guaranteed to look and print the same way on
every computer and printer. The document's fonts may not be available on
another computer, and the substitute fonts force the reformatting and cause
pages to break in strange places. You can thank, among other things, the
competing technologies for rendering fonts, which have befuddled the
desktop publishing industry for two decades.

Maybe you could care less about fonts, as long as you get the document

printed. But some of us want the printed document to look vaguely the same
from one printer to the next. Thanks to the many differences in fonts and
character spacing from one computer to the next, and from one printer
driver to the next, you can't trust Word documents to look the same.

Pronounced "whiz-ee-wig." Thanks to The Dramatics for "What You See Is What You Get,"

released in 1971, and also to Tina Turner for "What You Get Is What You See," released in 1986;
as for Britney Spears, "What U See (Is What U Get)" appears to be a rip-off.

Thanks to the Rolling Stones, or rolling fonts in this case.

T I P F O R W O R D A D D I C T S

You are nearly always better off copying the slide from PowerPoint and using Paste
Special in Word to paste it as a "picture" rather than an object. What's so special
about Paste Special? It gives you choices besides the lame choice offered by Word,
which is to paste it as an object. You can use Paste Special to paste the slide as a
bitmap image, which may get through the printer; otherwise, your printer may hang
indefinitely as it tries to decipher the PowerPoint object. You would think that after two
decades inhabiting the same labs in Redmond, the PowerPoint and Word devel-
opment teams should be able to work together to get graphics and text to print
together.

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