Word: The Most Gaslighting Tool of Them All

It’s the document editor that wears a sensible suit but throws formatting tantrums like a caffeinated intern with a God complex. You don’t edit Word docs—you enter a psychological thriller where tabs shift, styles mutate, and headers revolt.

🖋️ Track Changes, Trust Issues

Track Changes is less a feature and more a digital ghosting machine. You think you’ve accepted all changes—until Word revives a deleted paragraph like a zombie draft you thought you buried.

You accept all. You save. You breathe. Then you reopen the file, and it’s there. Again. Italicized. Judging you.

You email a “final” version, but when it opens on someone else’s screen, it’s in a different font, has half your comments missing, and has spontaneously added page breaks like it’s trying to win a formatting bingo. It’s like document roulette, and no one wins.

And what is with the bubble comments duplicating themselves? Why are we seeing "Author2" when no such person exists? Is Word generating new personalities?

🎭 The Lie of Styles

“Just use Styles,” they say. “It’ll keep everything clean,” they say. That’s how they get you. It starts with Heading 1. You’re promised consistency. But then suddenly your Heading 1 is 26pt purple Comic Sans while your body text is both Calibri AND Times New Roman in the same paragraph.

You update the style once. Word creates “Heading 1 + Bold + Chaos.” You fix it again—now it’s “Heading 1 + Italic + Betrayal.” You thought you were formatting. You were actually gaslighting yourself.

Ever tried using the Format Painter? It’s like dipping a brush into a vat of confusion and spreading it generously across the canvas of despair.

🧾 Tables with a Vendetta

Tables in Word are less layout tools and more vengeful spirits trapped in grid form. Move one the wrong way, and it will stretch across three pages, devour your margins, and insert six blank paragraphs above itself just for fun.

Try to resize a cell? Prepare for the whole row to shift into another dimension. Attempt to align columns? Watch as Word randomly decides to indent half of them with no apparent reason.

You copy a table from Excel and Word reacts like it’s receiving a cursed relic. Suddenly your document has new spacing rules, a font you’ve never seen before, and an invisible border war waging under the surface.

📄 Page Numbering Gaslight Special

Why is this page numbered 4 when it’s the second page? Why is the header suddenly different in section 3? Why did the table of contents spontaneously include an image caption from your footnotes?

Because Word thrives in chaos.

You insert a section break, and everything seems fine—until your headers change, your margins shift, and page numbering skips 6 for no clear reason. Section breaks in Word are less about document structure and more like triggering alternate timelines.

And the table of contents? It gleefully includes entire paragraphs labelled as “Normal” but excludes actual headings unless you bribe it with Arial.

📂 Formatting Features Nobody Understands

• Outline View (a place where documents go to collapse)
• Master Documents (DO NOT OPEN unless you want to summon formatting demons)
• Compatibility Mode (because who doesn’t want to edit a 2003 résumé like it’s a haunted artifact?)

Even the Reveal Formatting pane is suspect—it shows too much, not enough, and never what you actually need.

🔥 Diva’s Word War Survival Guide

• Never trust formatting until you’ve seen it in PDF. PDF is truth. Word is illusion.
• Don’t mix Styles and manual formatting unless you enjoy tears and italics that won’t leave.
• Paste without formatting. Always. CTRL+SHIFT+V is salvation.
• Keep a blank template with your preferred Styles. Do not touch it. Protect it like your soul.
• Use section breaks like you're handling radioactive isotopes—slowly, deliberately, and while backing away.
• Know when to quit. Sometimes, it’s not you. It’s the document.

🎁 Reader Ritual: The Word Wreck Hall of Fame

Have a file that turned its footnotes into floating text boxes that refuse to anchor? A table of contents that added your lunch recipe because it was bolded? A document that decided, unprovoked, to centre all your bullet points halfway through?

Send it to me. Show me your cursed documents. Let’s laugh, cry, and scream into the Track Changes void together.

Because Word isn’t a word processor. It’s a formatting cult leader with boundary issues and a flair for psychological warfare.