The other day, I was making final revisions to a group of Microsoft Word documents that were needed for an imminent product release. I placed an updated version of a document on our document management system and sent a link to my manager for him to review it. In the copy he opened every single cross reference, including the Table of Contents, had been replaced by Word’s “Error! Bookmark not defined” message. Embarrassing for me? Yes. Time consuming to fix? Yes. Completely unexpected? Definitely not.

I had to reinsert each cross-reference and then rebuild the TOC, which had decided to lose all the formatting from styles TOC1 and TOC2 as well. Not a difficult thing to do, but I felt it just shouldn’t have been necessary. When I sent the repaired document to my manager I commented that:

There is, apparently, an immutable law that dictates that the more urgently a document is needed the more likely it is to go completely haywire in Microsoft Word.

I thought that remark summed up my personal experience with Microsoft Word quite well: in its own technological variation of Murphy’s Law, it goes wrong at the worst possible time.

Later that day, I posted a variation of my remark to Twitter as:

The more urgently a document is needed, the more likely it is to go completely haywire in Microsoft Word

I thought I might make an attempt to grab my 15 minutes of fame by naming this adage with a twitter hashtag. With uncalled-for immodesty, I named it Farbey’s Law (#farbey’s_law). As I thought that some of my technical writing colleagues might find it amusing, I added the Technical Communications hashtag as well (#techcomm). Some of them recognised a familiar situation, and kindly re-tweeted my message to their followers. (You can see the original tweet on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter yourself you might like to Re-tweet it too.)

Even though Farbey’s Law was coined because of an incident with Microsoft Word, and indeed mentions Microsoft Word, it is not intended as a comment on the infamous “FrameMaker vs. Word” debate, nor as a comment on the difficulties of using Microsoft Word successfully in a corporate tech comms team (which deserves a blog article all to itself). It is simply a statement about the likelihood of bad stuff happening at the least welcome moment, and how real or imagined workplace pressure seems to make things go wrong at bad times more frequently.