Moving a photo in MS Word (worth a watch)

[ergophobe]

First, you *must* watch this full-screen so the top and bottom don't get cropped.

Second, it's only 3 seconds, so even, ahem, those with an aversion to video must watch this.

https://bsky.app/profile/oregonthedm.bsky.social/post/3lmeenfu6r22x

I've watched it about 50 times now

[rcjordan]

>ahem

OK, did it.  I can bring myself to tolerate 3-sec gifs/vids.

>MS Word

True dat.

[ergophobe]

Did you find it amusing? I thought it was brilliant. I watched it over and over trying to catch all the details.

[rcjordan]

I watched it 3 or 4 times.  I kept thinking that was a lot of staging work for a 3-second vid.  Maybe it was AI?

[ergophobe]

I doubt it is AI, but it could be an extensively edited video using "traditional" techniques (i.e. techniques that existed 2+ years ago). I kind of think this is mostly old school though

[buckworks]

Alas, I didn't get it. Why is it brilliant?

[ergophobe]

> Why is it brilliant?

It's common that you nudge a photo by one pixel and your entire layout is completely messed up across several pages. So the complete rearrangement of the room as the result of moving the table with one little tap is the equivalent to what often happens when you move a photo by a tiny bit in MS Word

It's also brilliant for, as the caption said, the total commitment to a 3-second joke. If you watch it a few times you can see how much attention to detail there is

[ergophobe]

After I posted that, I checked my RSS reader and saw that Semi-Rad also linked to it with this summary:

If you have a) ever tried to move a photo within a Microsoft Word document and b) somehow not seen this yet, I believe you will feel quite validated, and probably also laugh at this seven-second masterpiece.

[buckworks]

Thanks for that, Ergo. I get it now.

>> what often happens

I have many times had changes in how a long document flowed after small tweaks but not the degree of chaos depicted in the vignette. That might be just luck, or it might be obsessive use of settings like "keep lines together", "keep with next" etc.. Changes move in a controlled fashion and are less likely to end up looking stupid.

[ergophobe]

>>  "keep lines together", "keep with next

Honestly, when you have images on the page and you are trying to do layout in MS Word, that tends to make it even worse. This is not really a fault of Word. It is not intended as a layout tool and it works poorly as a layout tool.

With images, what often happens is you don't move the image itself, but you correct a typo that makes the word longer and that pushes the last word of the line to the next line, but since that's a really long word, that cascades throughout the paragraph and creates a new line which gets pushed to the next page. Uh oh, now you have an Orphan. No problem, you have "keep lines together" enabled to avoid orphans, but that means that it now pushes two lines to the next page.

So Word decides it now has enough space to pull your image onto the page that just lost a line. Then it pulls a ton more text onto page 2. But in the mysterious, inscrutable and apparently secret way in which MS Word anchors an image to a position (and there are multiple options for how it does this - anchored to character, absolute positioning, etc), it then decides that the image that takes up a third of the page no longer fits, so it pushes it to the next page.

For some reason it then decides it can't put any additional text on p.3 so you have an image and a ton of whitespace. Now p. 4 is half the text from the original p. 3 and half the original p. 4 text.

Your whole 28-page document is a shambles. You try to move the images around to fix it and it keeps getting worse and now you can't seem to Undo your way out of it. You put your face in your hands and cry.

And all you did was change Bukworsk to Buckworks.

If you're used to a profession layout tool like InDesign, it can be shocking how rapidly it all goes crazy.