"because budgets are made of words."

::blink::

My job last year fired the budget person because she was trying to keep the budget in Word, "because budgets are made of words."

?!?!?!?!?!

"because budgets are made of words."

Please to imagine that meme of Spider-Man squinting and asking what the goddamn fuck.

Though I have to admit that I do myself use Word tables occasionally--they're useful when dumping clinical notes or CVs out of yet another non-Word platform into Word, when all the formatting has been stripped in between and you've got long jumbled lists of medications or 20 years' worth of postdocs mentored, with a lot of chunks of info of wildly varying lengths to make orderly and readable with tabs alone. But in all my years I've never found any other excuse to use tables in Word, and if you asked me to create an entire lengthy narrative document made up of nested tables I wouldn't even know how to start.

This same doctor also invariably reformats all the bullet-point lists, of which these documents contain many, from actual bullets to random Greek letters (usually Σ, but not always), which the non-Word platform doesn't understand and which have to be reconverted to bullets. And I'm dead certain he again has no idea how he's doing this or even that he's doing it at all.

I feel like I have to admire, just a little, a habitual formatting mishap that is that outre

I feel like I have to admire, just a little, a habitual formatting mishap that is that outre

Same! Especially since it's mostly but not always. He keeps you guessing! Always bringing something new to the table, that accidental scamp.

usually Σ, but not always

How? What? How?

I had a problem with a table in Word ... using the table wasn't the worst thing, but something had gone wrong. It was, for some reason, inserting huge margins at top (and bottom, maybe). One page had one row - in the middle of the table - and nothing more. There was nothing I could do to get it to stop doing that. I ended up copying all the text to Notepad (to strip out any and all formatting), deleting the entire table (after I'd made notes of the column widths, margins, spacing, etc.), creating a completely new table and copying the text - one cell at a time - into the new table. Then going back and adding in all the bold, italic, etc., formatting (which did not cause the problem). I checked an earlier version of the document - from 10 years ago - and the same problem had existed then ... and NO ONE had commented on it.

I am currently converting excel docs to fillable PDF forms and trying to figure out how to do formulas.

I am now stuck on whether the row height can be adjusted once converted and I think the answer is no.

Tab order of a form with over 80 fillable cells almost broke me last night. SO TEDIOUS! Also I’ve had no training in Adobe, so I very possibly am doing things in horrible convoluted ways.

I feel like I have to admire, just a little, a habitual formatting mishap that is that outre

for real! Maybe it's some weird form of autocorrect?

I used Word tables a lot in tech writing, but nested? Does he think he's making a web page?

I use tables in Word for situations where having an X and Y axis are useful for comparing various options (like an alignment chart!). Or for copying parts of data tables out of Excel to embed in a larger narrative document. But they need to be used appropriately and I can't for the life of me imagine a scenario where *nested* tables would be a good use of anyone's time.