Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch

An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."

Comments

Re:If they'd been using

[qbast]

Sure. Judge actually using OpenOffice would be newsworthy here.

It's a conspiracy

[antifoidulus]

turns out clippy was working for pedobear this whole time! Or maybe... come to think of it I never have actually seen clippy and pedobear in the same place at the same time....

Re:It's a conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

for some reason, gis on pedobear and clippy comes out with this:

http://pulse2.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/msft-clippy.jpg

sfw

Re:It's a conspiracy

[kainosnous]

Clippy: I see that you are writing a ruling. Would you like me to show you the EULA where we already own your ruling through Microsoft's substantial control of the legal system?

Re:Word Processors suck

[sco08y]

Why use a word processor, even Open Office or whatever, for ANYTHING? Text is much more reliable in plain text form. Formatting can be added in much better ways, independent of the content. Especially in legal cases, why thrust your textual data to such fragile, unreliable, locked in systems??

How can I spend hours obsessing over fonts, colors and trying to get my pie charts and org graphs to display nicely with such a thing?

Pardon me, I need to send an email to the entire organization because someone left a file open on their machine that I need to work on. What an idiot!

Ultimate proof that ol' Bill is evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft aids and abets child abuse. The controversy about whether or not they are evil is solved.

I accidentally read..

[Anonymous Coward]

I accidentally read 'child abuse verdict held back by MS'.

Re:Gross oversimplification

[oldmac31310]

Thanks for that concise clarification. Now back to ragging on Word!

I RTFA and

[oldmac31310]

it is difficult to get any real sense of the problem. Arrepiadd has been kind enough to give us some real background to the whole story and a clarification of what the issues are or might be or are purproted to be depending on the day of the week. Thanks for that Arrepiadd.

Please don't hold back from trashing Word. I hate very few things in life, but Word - as trivial a piece of crap as it may be, it is raises my hackles really intensely and I'm enjoying this potential Word trash fest too much let it go just because of a few pesky facts. Keep it coming! Word sucks! Word is the devil. Word eats babies. Word stole your car. Word is destroying the planet. Come on, let's keep it going. Crap /. story, but we can still have fun with the comments!

Re:Were they using Word?

[Anne Thwacks]

Cos Latex gloves cause allergies in pubic employees, and the union would strike!

Re:To show codes in Word 2007, use OOXML.

[ColdWetDog]

...saving your document in Office 2007 format, opening the document as a zipfile, and seeing the OOXML files.

Thanks for that tip. Only slightly less painful than using a hex editor. Or poking your eyes out.

Office automation at it's finest.

Re:The solution

[ColdWetDog]

In most situations, when you can't get rid of unwanted text that's sticky in word, do : CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+N, CTRL+V

That's funny, I thought it was UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A.

No wonder nothing happened. I'll try your sequence later today.

Re:A bad workman always blames his tools

[winwar]

"The people using Word messed up..."

Yes. By using MS Word in the first place. I don't know if they were ignorant, naive, clueless or stupid or some combination of all of them but I cannot fathom what made them think that using Word for a 2000 page document was a good idea. I made the mistake of using it for a paper a fraction of the size rather than learn latex. I'd swear it has a random formatting generator built in.

Re:2000 pages...

[Anonymous Coward]

In defense of the time period in question, they couldn't pull back and nuke them from orbit, so this was the only way they could be sure.