LVSteve
Member
WARNING!!! What follows is a major computer geek fest.
You would think after the disasters of DOS 4 and Windows 98 (original, not the patched SE) that Microsoft would know not, under any circumstances give one of their operating systems an even ID number. So, what did they replace the largely stable Windows 7 with? Windows freakin' 10. Just never learn, some people. Let's start with the issues I have at work.
I write a lot of heavy technical reports. They require illustrations, photos and graphic plots. So, my employer has given me Microsoft Word, Visio (something they recently bought) and EXCEL. So, you would think that moving stuff into Word to assemble my reports would be easy, after all, the software all came from the same place. Gentle reader, you could not be more wrong.
First off, Microsoft don't want you to move the pictures and graphs from one app to another, they want you to embed them so all you have to do is click on them to do more editing. That is an absolute, non-negotiable no-no within our company and just about every other tech company I know. The customers does not get anything he/she can edit except the actual Word text. Everything else comes as is. I say again, this is not negotiable. Certain customers only get locked PDFs of our Word docs. This stops somebody's well meaning intern from changing the whole meaning of the report. You may guess how I know this.
OK, so Microsoft has a means to transfer stuff between its apps called the "Enhanced Metafile" format, EMF for short. This is a vector graphics format that, in theory, takes the picture/graph plot you have made in Viso or EXCEL and reproduces it exactly in Word. Short version, it doesn't always work. If I do a line/box drawing in Visio, it seems OK, but if I have included a picture and used Visio to add point outs, all hell breaks loose. The picture resolution goes away, lines move, call out fonts suddenly get funky spacings. Ugly does not cover it.
Oh, before any of the those with experience ask, I have the "Do not compress graphics" boxes checked in all my apps. It hasn't helped.
The only recourse is to save my completed Visio diagram as a PNG file, but even then Visio adds extra space around the right and lower edges of the graphic. Oh, and if I want to reduce the color depth to save on file size, I have learned never to use the facility in Visio, it is utterly hopeless. I use a freeware app called Irfanview to do that and trim off the Visio extra.
When I use EMF to move stuff from EXCEL, the effects are a little more subtle. Any bold text in the plot becomes less bold and distorted. Even simple fonts like Arial just do not look right. Sooo, I tried copying and inserting into Word as a PNG file. The bold looks great, Arial numbers look OK, but the Arial in the legend suffers random letter shifts. I have a work around for this that is too long winded to go into here.
So, the short version is that Microsoft's own EMF transfer format does not work. As you might guess, it now takes 3-4 times as long to add illustrations and graphs to my reports using all my workarounds.
Today came the last straw at home tonight. My wife's brand new and expensive HP laptop repeatedly loses the pointer associated with the touchpad, like a mouse pointer. Even restarting the machine does not guarantee the pointer's return. Web research suggests that this may well be caused by Windows and HP software creating an impasse, especially if the machine enters sleep mode. Naturally, the laptop is running Win 10. My wife will be taking it back to Best Buy tomorrow for a permanent solution, because right now it's an expensive paperweight. If that solution involves returning her money and buying a Dell or Lenovo, so be it.
You would think after the disasters of DOS 4 and Windows 98 (original, not the patched SE) that Microsoft would know not, under any circumstances give one of their operating systems an even ID number. So, what did they replace the largely stable Windows 7 with? Windows freakin' 10. Just never learn, some people. Let's start with the issues I have at work.
I write a lot of heavy technical reports. They require illustrations, photos and graphic plots. So, my employer has given me Microsoft Word, Visio (something they recently bought) and EXCEL. So, you would think that moving stuff into Word to assemble my reports would be easy, after all, the software all came from the same place. Gentle reader, you could not be more wrong.
First off, Microsoft don't want you to move the pictures and graphs from one app to another, they want you to embed them so all you have to do is click on them to do more editing. That is an absolute, non-negotiable no-no within our company and just about every other tech company I know. The customers does not get anything he/she can edit except the actual Word text. Everything else comes as is. I say again, this is not negotiable. Certain customers only get locked PDFs of our Word docs. This stops somebody's well meaning intern from changing the whole meaning of the report. You may guess how I know this.
OK, so Microsoft has a means to transfer stuff between its apps called the "Enhanced Metafile" format, EMF for short. This is a vector graphics format that, in theory, takes the picture/graph plot you have made in Viso or EXCEL and reproduces it exactly in Word. Short version, it doesn't always work. If I do a line/box drawing in Visio, it seems OK, but if I have included a picture and used Visio to add point outs, all hell breaks loose. The picture resolution goes away, lines move, call out fonts suddenly get funky spacings. Ugly does not cover it.
Oh, before any of the those with experience ask, I have the "Do not compress graphics" boxes checked in all my apps. It hasn't helped.
The only recourse is to save my completed Visio diagram as a PNG file, but even then Visio adds extra space around the right and lower edges of the graphic. Oh, and if I want to reduce the color depth to save on file size, I have learned never to use the facility in Visio, it is utterly hopeless. I use a freeware app called Irfanview to do that and trim off the Visio extra.
When I use EMF to move stuff from EXCEL, the effects are a little more subtle. Any bold text in the plot becomes less bold and distorted. Even simple fonts like Arial just do not look right. Sooo, I tried copying and inserting into Word as a PNG file. The bold looks great, Arial numbers look OK, but the Arial in the legend suffers random letter shifts. I have a work around for this that is too long winded to go into here.
So, the short version is that Microsoft's own EMF transfer format does not work. As you might guess, it now takes 3-4 times as long to add illustrations and graphs to my reports using all my workarounds.
Today came the last straw at home tonight. My wife's brand new and expensive HP laptop repeatedly loses the pointer associated with the touchpad, like a mouse pointer. Even restarting the machine does not guarantee the pointer's return. Web research suggests that this may well be caused by Windows and HP software creating an impasse, especially if the machine enters sleep mode. Naturally, the laptop is running Win 10. My wife will be taking it back to Best Buy tomorrow for a permanent solution, because right now it's an expensive paperweight. If that solution involves returning her money and buying a Dell or Lenovo, so be it.
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