Damn You, Microsoft Word. Damn You.

I hate Microsoft bashing. I really do, but I’m on the verge of breaking my desktop apart with a baseball bat. Well, except that’s too much of a cliché. And we don’t play baseball in Israel. And I would probably hurt myself more than my computer. But still. Very annoyed.

Here’s the deal: I’m writing a document in Microsoft Word ¹ and I’m basically just gathering documentation on a certain subject, so all I do is build up a bibliography. I’m using Word’s references management, which is pretty nice but for one annoying “feature”. When I open the new source dialog (where I can enter a document’s details like name, author, year published, etc.), Word won’t let me scroll or edit my document. Which is pretty annoying in and of itself, but wait - there’s more. It also doesn’t let me edit ANY OTHER WORD DOCUMENT. I have 4-5 documents open, but I can’t move, open, scroll, edit or even restore any of them because one of them has an open dialog. So I’m forced to open the document I want to copy the details from and the one I’m currently writing, position them side by side and only then add a new source to my bibliography. Of course, I have to exit the dialog and open up my next document, etc.

WTF, Microsoft? No one thought of a use case where someone edits several Word documents simultaneously?  

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