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HP Drops Microsoft Word in Favor of WordPerfect
nexex points to this Financial Times article, which says that HP has dropped Microsoft Word from the software lineup in the personal computers it sells to customers. From the article: "The move follows a decision last week by Dell Computer, the number two PC maker, to replace Microsoft software. Both companies said they would offer WordPerfect productivity software from Corel of Canada instead of Microsoft's Works, a scaled-down version of its top-selling Office software." Nexex writes:"I think it should be noted, MS Works does include the full version of Word."
buy are overpriced non-OS software product... or buy the scaled down version and get the full version free.
HP, why not just go OpenOffice? Word Perfect has just as many bugs, and you'd save yourself (ultimately your consumers) a lot more money.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I am surprised they aren't going for something more compatible with Microsoft Office like Star Office. People are used to using Office products as the 'standard', so why not give them an alternative that will operate approximately the same. Putting Word Perfect on them will just confuse the people who are used to Word, and they will be upset when their Word at work will not read what they did at home. They won't understand enough to install the converters, and even those don't work 100%. I realize that SO and Open Office aren't perfect either, but I am not sure this is the best way to go Microsoft-free for the average consumer.
HP also just became the first big VAR to base "business" PCs around AMD's processors. HP is busy kicking sand in the faces of the big boys. Then again with Compaq HP isn't no small player itself.
It really is remarkable though: It seems that Microsoft was their own worst enemy, and they've pissed off so many of their large corporate partners that they have very few allies, and absolutely no one trusts them. I doubt that Microsoft is going anywhere for years to come, but these are fascinating twists that would never have been considered but a few years ago.
I still use WP to this day, and have since v5 for DOS. Reveal codes is good!! it makes word processing closer to html editing in notepad. Total control over the document layout. I can not stand Word at all with its lack of this hugely important editing feature. Go HP!!!
Morphing Software
It would seem that you can only get Word included with the 2002 edition of Works Suite, which costs twice as much as Works.
Here are some links from newegg that seem to indicate as much:
Works, Standard
Works Suite
~geogeek
People are used to using Office products as the 'standard', so why not give them an alternative that will operate approximately the same.
Word is MS's crown jewel, but Word got where it is today buy stealing users from WP.
Wordperfect is *still* used in the Legal Industry far more than MS office. When I worked at the NYS DEC a few years ago, I didn't have word on my shiney Dell PC--I had wordperfect, and so did everyone else in all of EnCon.
Though it's a mind-boggling hack, Wordperfect and MS Word can and do talk to each other. In fact, having the two of them duke it out might be just the thing that OO needs to get some real work done on it, and get to be a usable beast...
MS Works does *NOT* always include word. The MS Works suite, full version ($99) includes word. The pre-installed version of works on your friendly OEM Computer MAY or MAY NOT have MS Word.
Back when I worked for Best Buy a year ago, this was a big advantage of buying a sony computer. They included the full works suite. Many (read: HP / Compaq) only included the MS Works Word Processor, MS Works Spreadsheet, etc.
MS Works Word Processor is a very stripped version of MS Word. It has no spell check, no auto format, and is missing many key functions of Word. As far as I could tell, it's existance was only to whet people's tastebuds to get them to buy office, because after using Word, trying to use "MS Works Word Processor" is a joke.
~Will
sig?
I just bought a computer for my son from Dell, and by dropping the option for MS Office Professional, I saved close to $400. Now, that's Dell setting prices, not MS, but it still saves me a bundle. My son (just entering college) seems perfectly happy using OO.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
The article is very scant on details, it's merely a statement of what happened. I'm curious as to why HP would replace a stripped down office suite (Works) with just a word processor (WordPerfect)? Perhaps they should also look at some of the available office suites like StarOffice or OpenOffice.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
Depending on the school he attends, he may be elegible to get MS Office Professional for $5. If not, he is elegible for their academic version, which runs $150 methinks.
It is quite a good deal too at $109, compared to $339 for Word 2002 by itself. Of course, there may be some restrictions on the usage of the Works Suite version of Word 2002. Works Suite 2002 seems to be marketed towards home users. Perhaps there is a "no commercial use" clause in the EULA.
My other first post is car post.
as most schools including mine use word exclusively and students are expected to know how to use it.
My school requires all engineers, architects, and sciences majors to purchase a software pack, which includes the educational version of MS Office, so I don't think it would be a huge problem to buy a computer with word perfect. It also includes AutoCad, Mathmatecia, Matlab, and alot of other stuff. For $500, it's not a bad deal, compared to actual software costs. Insert random comment about opensource software prices here, but first find me a substitute for AutoCad or Matlab.
~Will
sig?
Have you all just come out of a coma recently? Microsoft owns about 25 percent of Corel. So MSFT won't make as much money as they could have, they still get some percentage off the top of this sale. Plus it looks good to the illiterati (aka the DOJ) who think that Corel is still a competitor to Microsoft.
This is like cussing at Arab terrorists while you're standing at a gas pump.
most schools offer a seriously REDUCED rate for students purchasing MS Office.
It can only be installed twice or something but usually costs around $10. Even if you have to install it more than twice, at $10 you are still having major savings.
I haven't used MS Word much until recent when I started doing massive resume/cover letters. Businesses DO NOT appreciate text only formats unless they SPECIFICALLY ask for them.
Abiword has done wonders for me.
My guess is that 80% or more of the word processing public doesn't care what they type in so long as it prints. As for students and the like, I have always found that it is trivial to work in any word processor no matter that the college or institution "demands" Word. Most documents at these places are simple, there is always WordPad or another viewer, and the conversions in the latest versions of WordPerfect are pretty good.
I admit, I've never liked Word because I came into word processing on a weird little local text editor which featured strange embedded commands for formatting (PC Galahad at Clarkson University) and then went to WordPerfect 5.1. I got used to working with codes and being able to see those codes in my documents. WordPerfect feels like HTML for the desktop publishing sector to me. It just works really well. If this got a thousand more people to use WP, great.
One last thing about college use: most students have no idea how to really work with a word processor. They just know how to type. It's not going to take much to please them.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Before people go trashing on WordPerfect, let me point out some things you might not know about it:
And if you say it's not for you, you're right. It definitely fills an important niche that a lot of other apps can't or don't want to.
----- obSig
Ask any secretary that actually TYPES for a living, especially the ones that need to do complex text formatting (e.g., legal secretaries) -- the secretaries that type 90+wpm. They *all* agree, and I mean every single last one, that nothing can *touch* word perfect for speed of text input. The function keys, which have mapped to more or less the same functions since 1985 (...earlier?), allow experienced users to do many things in less than a second that would otherwise take quite a while to do with a mouse. WP was, and is still *keyboard* based -- that means that if you know what you are doing, you can do everything in WP, very quickly, without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. I can't imagine ever having to use that horrible MSword to do anything except under threat of starvation. Of course the very best thing about WP, that I have never seen any other WP do, is that the "control codes" option always lets you see exactly why a document is behaving the way it is on screen: each formatting option is just a simple code between text brackets in a text document. There's never any question of why something looks the way it does in WP. No matter what the function, whether it be bold, or column size, or printer type, or whatever, it is just a simple code between brackets. In contrast, MSWord users are constantly baffled by a program that is trying to "assist" the user, by doing things it wasn't asked to do (and of course, cannot be undone) -- which is generally chalked up as being "just the way the program is,;" or else the users just feel like they are stupid and don't know how to use the program properly.
MSWord exists today only because it was bundled by OEMs (originally as MSWorks, in crippled form... though the full version is still crippled...) It never could have caught on otherwise as no one that actually knew about word processors would have chosen it over WP if they actually had to pay for it.
Oh yea, what platforms does WP work on right now? At least these:
Amiga, every version ever made
Linux, every version ever made
Unix, every version ever made
Windows, every version ever made
Mac, every version ever made
I'm sure there are other versions -- the above ones are just the ones that I have personally used.
Do I know what I'm talking about? Well, I used to be a legal secretary before I started accumulating degrees. I have been tested out, several times, at 100+wpm. I was word processing on a Prime mainframe (using a text editor) before word processors (and PCs) existed.
When making a living depends on how fast you get a document out of the printer -- which word processor you use is extremely important.
The typing ability requirements for a legal secretary are far more stringent than any "normal" secretary. Glance in the want-ads in your local paper and you'll see what I mean. Legal secretaries are, on an almost daily basis, required to pump out GIGANTIC documents, always suddenly, always in a complete crisis situation, and always mere minutes before they must be faxed out. It is the rare law office that does not use WP, and the secretaries in the occasional law office that uses MSWord instead are extremely unhappy about it, bitch continuously, and quit constantly.
wow, that seriously sucks for you. We have all of that on the lab machines around campus, but they don't force us to buy anything. (cept the god damned HP49g I've touched twice)
As someone who's used OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, ClarisWorks and WordPerfect, I can say from a writer and printer standpoint, WordPerfect is the best choice.
The ability to have nearly full DTP style justification and control, as well as being a great word processor, grammar-checker and thesaurus, WordPerfect for the price is just the best choice for most people who would use Microsoft Word anyways.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Bah, this is BS. MS sold all their (non-voting) Corel shares a long time ago....
Its a risk, but HP needs to take a risk - even with Compaq, they are no match for the cost cutting and distribution that Dell offers.
And our official stance on that issue is that anyone who can't be taught how to save documents in rich text format needs to go back to high school.
Well if you have to email your papers in then I'd say it's fairly easy to tell when word mangles the formatting or won't open it at all
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hahah yeah Microsoft is the only company in the world that tries to lock people in with propreitary formats!! Haha, have another bong hit!
Have you ever considered Gobe? It rocked on BeOS, and now its available on the Windows platform. And if you don't want to trust their marketing, then here's a review from Ars Technica. And if you still want to complain, go use vi or emacs or even notepad.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
I wouldn't say it is a complete replacement for Matlab, but it is pretty nice:
http://www.octave.org/
"Reveal codes is good!! it makes word processing closer to html editing in notepad."
I think comparing to DreamWeaver is more accurate for HTML editting.
Before anyone commenting on WordPerfect vis-a-vis OO/SO, s/he should spend a few hours working with experts with both suites.
WordPerfect is so far superior, it is funny to even talk about OO in the same sentence.
BTW, the version of WordPerfect being bundled, version 10, is actually the weakest of the three 32-bit versions (but still far better than Microsoft Word in producing "conventional" documents).
Wait until Corel puts its acts together and bring the quality of its next version to the level of WordPerfect 8. But even WordPerfect 10 is good enough for enterprise use. If you don't believe me, go to any store that sells SONY PCs and play with the program that has been pre-installed in the VAIOs.
We should never expect Microsoft to produce an office suite for Linux, but Corel may (Corel's CEO recently and repeatedly stated that Corel will consider a native Linux port if there is a market). Recent moves by HP, SONY, and DELL from MS Office to WordPerfect actually send a much bigger message: they may pave the way for their eventual migration to Linux desktops.
In other words, because the profit margins are so thin, by selling Windows machines, hardware companies are only helping Microsoft. Moving to Linux not only cuts down the price (which is indeed a very minor consideration), it also allows the hardware vendors to become software distributors, i.e., allowing them to retain some control over their customers.
However, there is one critical piece missing in the Linux puzzle game, and that is an enterprise level wordprocessor. WordPerfect will fit this need perfectly.
I understand OpenOffice 6.0.1, and more particularly KOffice (1.2 rc1), have made significant improvements. However, nothing can replace the user experience that must be accumulated over time. WordPerfect 8 was built based on years and years of usage and tens of millions of user experience. Corel management screwed up on WordPerfect 10, but the person in charge was recently fired. And with the recent service pack, WordPerfect 10 indeed is almost as powerful and reliable as version 8.
word processor documents that they can't print in our labs. Headaches, ahoy.
Heck, at NCSU, we had that problem with Word documents, too. My favorite is when Word writes out a file that it can't read back in. I run those through OpenOffice and save them as RTF.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Thanks for playing.
schools have computers, at least mine does. On them the program installed is word.
I have had tests before where I had to write an essay in the alloted time in the computer lab, and if you don't know how to use word then you are screwed.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
For tables see:
http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/merg eCells.png
Martin Sevior
AbiWord Developer
Before anyone commenting on WordPerfect vis-a-vis OO/SO, s/he should spend a few hours working with experts with both suites. WordPerfect is so far superior, it is funny to even talk about OO in the same sentence. BTW, the version of WordPerfect being bundled, version 10, is actually the weakest of the three 32-bit versions (but still far better than Microsoft Word in producing "conventional" documents). Wait until Corel puts its acts together and bring the quality of its next version to the level of WordPerfect 8. But even WordPerfect 10 is good enough for enterprise use. If you don't believe me, go to any store that sells SONY PCs and play with the program that has been pre-installed in the VAIOs. We should never expect Microsoft to produce an office suite for Linux, but Corel may (Corel's CEO recently and repeatedly stated that Corel will consider a native Linux port if there is a market). Recent moves by HP, SONY, and DELL from MS Office to WordPerfect actually send a much bigger message: they may pave the way for their eventual migration to Linux desktops. In other words, because the profit margins are so thin, by selling Windows machines, hardware companies are only helping Microsoft. Moving to Linux not only cuts down the price (which is indeed a very minor consideration), it also allows the hardware vendors to become software distributors, i.e., allowing them to retain some control over their customers. However, there is one critical piece missing in the Linux puzzle game, and that is an enterprise level wordprocessor. WordPerfect will fit this need perfectly. I understand OpenOffice 6.0.1, and more particularly KOffice (1.2 rc1), have made significant improvements. However, nothing can replace the user experience that must be accumulated over time. WordPerfect 8 was built based on years and years of usage and tens of millions of user experience. Corel management screwed up on WordPerfect 10, but the person in charge was recently fired. And with the recent service pack, WordPerfect 10 indeed is almost as powerful and reliable as version 8.
Yes, I'm sure if you know your way around the 15 function keys, and understand how to read the control codes then WP is lovely to use.
I don't... I find Word easy enough to use, they keep adding features that get around my problems (e.g. format painter), and after a while, you come to understand why it's doing what it's doing... you empathise. Well, some of the time anyway.
I guess my point is that Word is easy and friendly if you're NOT a 90wpm legal sec, but someone who does a different job but still needs to knock out the occasional half-decent document.
Oh, and you can undo anything that word helpfully (bless it) tries to do for you. Ctrl-Z undoes first word's attempts at helpfulness, and then whatever you last did.
Watch me disappear beneath the waves of ACs now for having actually stood up for microsoft...
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
I know that Corel Suite is cheaper than Office, but is it cheaper than Works? I thought Works was around $100. Sure you get more with the Corel Suite, but if it's me I want the machine price to go down. But, then again they probably aren't targeting people like me. *grin*
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Try asking your mom/grandmother if they've heard of StarOffice or WordPerfect. That is your answer.
WordPerfect Office is freaking $5 to OEM's. That is close enough to free (hell they may be getting it for free, that wouldn't hurt Corel either since no one is buying it anyway).
It's all about maximizing revenue. Oh and BTW the Word in works is stripped down (less templates, clipart, etc) and there is no comparing excel, access, outlook and powerpoint (oh yeah and publisher) to MS works (oxymoron if i've ever seen one) tools. And since when does a company care about saving their customers money? they only care about saving themselves money.
The company I work for chose WordPerfect back in 1995. We went to Word for a while in 1998 but upgraded back to WordPerfect when MS got into DOJ trouble again (we figured that if MS was on our payroll to develop software and they broke the law, we'd have fired them so why would we go buy their software now?). It turned out that most of the time, WordPerfect can read Word without too much difficulty. Better yet, it can save to nearly any version of Word.
Sadly for Microsoft, Word is not nearly as adept. It can barely convert to WordPerfect 5.1. Because of this (and nearly 40,000 WordPerfect documents on our networks), using MS Word in our organization would be reckless.
Finally, in the last three years, we've acquired 3 other companies. I converted all of them to WordPerfect Office 2000 (upgrading all locations to WordPerfect Office 2002 this week). Some users were so MS Word brainwashed that they panicked...and continue to panic even today. They believe that if it's not MS, it's not good. They also can't understand why we don't use AOL to get online! Needless to say, I don't worry too much about them. The rest of the organization wants to create word processing documents...quickly, reliably and professionally. WordPerfect does exactly that. Yes...you can share files and yes, it is more advanced than Word when it comes to complete control over formatting.
With all this going for it, why wouldn't HP and Dell offer this software? And the more people who go home with it, the better off we all are. We've never regretted our decision and we've never been hurt by it. Kudos to these industry leaders for taking the hard, but high road.
Although certain aspects of the DOJ case against MS are important, for the most part I always asserted that the market would correct itself. Apple is gaining ground thanks to the fact that they are finally making a great OS, and now MS is losing to big OEM's on their office products. As long as the competition doesn't suck, MS will not be a monopoly.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Dell still shows Works as their "cheap" option. HP however already has Corel as their "cheap" option.
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I just bought a computer for my son from Dell, and by dropping the option for MS Office Professional, I saved close to $400.
It sounds as though, by dropping MS Word, Dell computers just dropped in price by a _lot_. No wonder HP had to follow suit! I mean, what does WordPerfect cost? $50 tops, probably not even that for a big OEM purchase.
I feel the need to clarify on the following statement:
"The legal profession still relies on it - your lawyer uses WordPerfect and most legal forms are available in that format."
This is absolutely not true.
Now, you may definitely argue that a larger proportion of the legal community relies on WordPerfect than does the general office community. However, the legal profession itself does not rely on WordPerfect.
My father is a lawyer. I set up his law firm's computers. I've known many other lawyers and set up their law firm's networks. What you said was true 3-5 years ago, but most of them have now switched to Word.
And as for legal forms being in WordPerfect format, with the hundreds of legal forms I have had to use, they have been in one of three formats:
a) Hard Copy (as in, a piece of paper that you have to use a typewriter to type on)
or, more often,
b) PDF
or
c) a proprietary format that has to be used with a $5,000-$50,000 piece of crappy software.
ALL of the government forms that a law firm needs are in PDF. Most of the other things that lawyers used to get in hard copy (for instance, the legal books that you see in their offices) are now available for a subscription fee via sites like FindLaw.com. About 50% of the forms that come through a lawyer's office are hard copy, 40% are PDF, and 10% are proprietary, and honestly, I haven't seen a WordPerfect law document in years. Most of the hard copy ones are saved directly to either Microsoft Word or PDF via Acrobat, so the number of hard copy forms will continue to decrease.
From reading your post, it sounds like you haven't encountered WordPerfect in a couple of years, either, and are basing your opinions on what you saw a few years ago. The Internet is becoming quite integral to any lawyer these days, and as such, the number of non-Word proprietary formats for documents is decreasing rapidly (especially since there was a huge government initiative to convert everything to PDF.) Thus, your post was accurate as of a few years ago, but is no longer the case.
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I've got a Northgate Omni keyboard at work (purchased right before they tanked) and a Unicomp knockoff of the old IBM Model M keyboards at home. Both are better than your standard throwaway crap keyboard, but neither one quite feels perfect. Any recommendations?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Word Perfect was once the de-facto standard. That didn't stop MS-Word from taking over the market... which it did not by dint of being a superior product, but because of Microsoft's strong-arming PC vendors into supplying only MS-Office on MS-Windows machines.
Word Perfect 5.1 was the best word processor out there, bar none. (Especially on the NeXT.) Novell purchased Word Perfect Corp, though, and screwed it up with 5.2 and 6.0. 7.0 wasn't much better; I haven't used it since, as I've discovered LyX (and fuck compatible file formats; if I want to share a document, I'll send a PDF), but I've heard the recent versions are really quite nice.
However, though Microsoft is finally starting to catch up to WP 5.1 in usability and functionality, they *still* haven't provided anything as important as the "Reveal Codes" option. So, in many ways, Word still lags behind Word Perfect.
Mostly, your "de-facto standard" thesis is a straw man. As we've seen, only real standards survive; de-facto standards may fall at any time. And it's about bloody time the MS-Office hegomony was broken.
At least, that's my opinion. I could be wrong.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Translation: I'm all for using alternate products, as long as they come from Microsoft.
Please post a URL to a news story or an Edgar filing or a whatever. I can't find any record of the transaction.
Excel is the killer app and I've still NEVER seen a decent substitute for a complex multi-sheeted calculation rich spread sheet. I have OO, and Star Office loaded as well but neither does the job. As for a word pro I could use notepad, or heck even VI when you get right down to it. Props to them for exploring alternatives, WP suite 7.0 was quite nice but why make life harder and sacrifice that 'synergy' that Word and Excel have by replacing just one half the tool-set. Given my druthers I'd use OO and screw the Visio/Excel issues but work requires that I use such documents.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Is there any chance that the Word that comes with even the $99 Works is not full-featured?
Probably some EULA difference, some restriction that they put on $99 Word that they don't put on $350 Word.
Will I retire or break 10K?
My university (Penn State) has (on Sept. 1 the verb will change to "had") a deal with Microsoft where students could get Office XP Pro (amound several other programs, including the latest Visual Studio pro) "free". Sure, it comes from tuition, but I bet it's even cheaper because MS realized that some people already have it and some won't get it, so the poor saps who don't take advantage of it are helping me pay for my software. :)
.NET + Office XP + FrontPage (in case I go insane and use it instead of Dreamweaver) on too, all for free.)
(Just for the record, I'm trying very hard to stick with Linux, but I've got WinXP + Visual Studio
Will there be WP export? Having seen the SDK for WordPerfect, it seems like you could just use the 'write WordPerfect format' DLL they include to make it relatively easy to have this.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
>>My college is a good example. One of the required courses - no matter what your major - is called Basic Computing. It sounds like a joke class, but it's not; aside from learning how to turn the computer on and off, you also learn how to use Word, Excel, and even Access. I've been using computers since I was 8 and this class was by no means an "easy A" (since I had never before used Word, Excel, or Access). Every student who expects to graduate must take this course, even the people majoring in stuff like "Turfgrass Management" (I kid you not).
Hell, Carnegie-Mellon has a similar thing from my understanding. And they've got one of the best comp sci programs in the world!
most schools offer a seriously REDUCED rate for students purchasing MS Office.
First of all, to be pedantic, it wasn't the school offering it. It was Microsoft.
Second, I wonder if people can confirm that this is still true. My wife went back to school yesterday and, thinking that I'd be able to grab her the latest MS stuff at a good price I checked the bookstore. Microsoft Office Standard was only $10 cheaper than the exact same package from CDW. Something well north of $300.
Is this the standard practice now, or has my bookstore just not gotten their act together? (or perhaps the worst scenario, have they gotten their act together and marked up the software in a manner that would make an Enron exec blush)
I'm wondering what Corel is charging OEM's for WordPerfect Office nowadays? Considering that they are hard up for customers at the moment, I'll bet that they gave HP a sweet deal in order to get some volume sales.
Hell, for all we know, Corel might be offering WordPerfect Office for LESS that Microsoft is charging for Works! Considering the the basic version of Works doesn't come with any of the full-featured addons like Word or Microsoft Money, this might be a good deal for both HP and consumers alike.
Just what kind of an essay are you going to write in a timed environment that requires more than typing? Are you graded on inserting Excel graphs? Do you need to use an Essay Wizard?
Wake up. Unless you keep your shoes on with velcro, you don't need to know how to use word. What you need to know is how to write an essay- if you don't know that, then you are screwed. Not "knowing" Word is a pathetic whine. I don't know how to use Word. It's never stopped me from turning out what I want to in Word. If my home network were a little more sane, I'd be able to do my printing from Linux and I could kiss MS goodbye.
I really liked Word 6.0, though. It was great, and you didn't need to know it.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
You're either misinformed or purposefully bending the truth. WordPerfect has been the standard for word processing under Windows in many areas of the "real world." Legal documents for example usually must be in WordPerfect format or on paper in order to even be looked at by most lawyers. The same is true of almost all financial documents and even little things like memos in the upper levels of management at many fortune 500 companies.
Microsoft has put a lot of money into funding schools (especially smallish schools) under the condition that they'll offer classes primarily requiring MS Word for their document format. I used to be the Assistant I.T. Manager for one of those small schools and I was the one who constantly got harassed by MS salespeople making such offers. (It should be noted that the school folded under the pressure of MS's marketing less than three weeks after I left, and I really can't wholly blame them. They needed the funding badly.)
MS has been trying for years to make Word the de facto standard for Word processing, especially in younger people. That you say what you did the way they did means that they're slowly succeeding... damn it.
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
OpenOffice is as good, but also gets you flexibility of choosing an operating system.
I happily use WordPerfect on Windows every day, and I have my choice of apps.
/. users should appreciate it.
e rfect/
The reason: "Reveal codes", which shows you the source of the document -- the text with all the formatting codes, with all the benefits you can imagine: You can see exactly which codes are doing what and where, insert and edit codes precisely, search for codes, double-click on one to change it, etc.
I always keep it open in a small window at the bottom, so I simultaneously get the source and the WYSIWYG. I'm not sure it appeals to the typical end user, but
Also, it should be a very good low-end XML editor: It natively uses formatting tags [b]like this[/b] (open Reveal Codes and see), it's supported SGML (an HTML/XML precursor and (superset?)) for over a decade and XML for a couple years. I've never had to try, but these guys think so (or try searching Google for much more info):
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/05/31/wordp
Eww. How about RTF? It's an MS standard, but it's a good one. I've never gone wrong with RTF moving between my NeXT, my Mac, and PCs. It supports enough formatting to be worth it, but not so many awful features that it's all crufty and hard to implement.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Why be mad? In the real world, if a commercial product isn't bought by enough people, it goes away. That's how it works.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
MS Office, at the time, was a prescription for crash and bluescreen hell. I temped at a government agency, and they had large documents that regularly stressed the application's ability to stay up for more than a few minutes.
I don't miss WYSIWYG being a buzzword, not at all.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
I support many WordPerfect users. Most Word documents open without a problem, and Word imports the WordPerfect docs successfully.
0 0/wd97vwr 32.aspx
Of course, the conversion isn't perfect. Advanced layout suffers. For most documents it looks OK, but the document source shows the formatting to be a fragile mess; send it back and forth a few times and I'm leary about what would happen. Unless there is editing to do, I set the users up to use a free Word viewer:
http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/20
I've never used it, because I bought the thing for my girlfriend, and she only liked it because 'they're pretty'. So three of the five big names have chosen Corel over Microsoft. What about Compaq and Gateway? Yes I know HP bought Compaq out.
Give me a break, WordPerfect is still more functional as a word processor. The interface is better and the placment for items in the menus and the toolbars are more functional.
_ _
You don't have to know any function keys or know how to read the reveal codes. Every tester in the software development labs I met prefer the interface of the WordPerfect app itself. Many still like Excel over Quatro Pro and would be lost without NT so they are not exactly anti-Redmond. They test lots of Office apps for creating documents in their testing.
I used WordPerfect8 in Linux and on Windows for awhile and liked it a lot. Try out a recent version and you may be surprised. If you have the chance, get a copy and use for a week when you have a few things to type up.
_______________________________________________
ACK
WordPerfect may have improved this since the last time I used it; if so someone please correct me. But as far as I know, WordPerfect doesn't have anything that come come even close to MSWord's Equation Editor. If you're doing anything even remotely technical (even a research report for your Physics class), this is extremely useful, almost necessary. The only other software I've used that can compete with MSWord's equation editing is LyX (a LaTeX frontend), and that currently doesn't run natively in Windows (though it does run on Win32 if you have cygwin and the Win32 port of XFree86, which most people don't).
Which is why for me it's LyX in UNIX, and MSWord in Windows.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
My anecodotal evidence is different: I support 4 law firms, all of which use WordPerfect (not because of me -- I support other businesses that use Word).
Certainly, a number of firms have switched to Word. The secretaries I know cursed at the loss of control over their docs (Reveal codes, which allows direct editing of the document source), and the 'help', like clippy. One secretary's hard day:
Clippy: 'It looks like you're writing a letter, would you like some help?'
Legal Secretary: 'No I don't want your #@$%! help! Get the @#$! out of my way! I've been writing letters for 20 years! Who the $##! are you??!!'
From the article:
Microsoft last financial year generated $9.6bn of its total $28bn of revenues from desktop software.
Anyone know the breakdown of where the other $18.4 billion came from? I can't even begin to hazard a guess, but I had thought, perhaps naively, that desktop software was a bigger percentage than that.
This also raises another problem for MS: at least with Word 2000 (the only Word I have access to), the import filters for Wordperfect files are old (latest is WP 6!) and horrid, while the Wordperfect import filters for Word are recent and quite good. If this catches on, MS will be in deep kaka on the file-compatability scene. I suppose they could just throw more of their monke^H^H^H^H^Hprogrammers at the problem, but they'd have to at least wait until the next version to roll it out.
(Oh wait, what am I talking about? MS Office is part of the Operating System!)
if you want more control of your document and you like reveal codes then latex is for you. really though to make something bold it's just:
\bold{something in bold}.
there might be a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it. the quality of the document is much higher than anything i've seen a word processor put out. it takes eps for figures which just rocks when printed.
latex is free and comes with most linux distros. there's even a version for windows, search for miktex on google, but i've never used it.
it's a bunch of macros to interface with tex, written by that uberpimp donal knuth.
-- john
Do they still include Notepad? Because you know that's the only reason I buy Windows PCs. Everyone used to have Notepad but then they switched to the Boston stapler, and they were married, and if they take my Notepad away again I'll... I'll... OK...
Or, rephrased, with a measure of good manners: Today's computers are fast enough for average home use. Not just some computers - everything you're likely to buy new is going to get the job done.
Does that really surprise anybody?
It's not the word processor, it's the database.
WP Office has a halfway-decent competitor to Access/Works in Quattro Pro. If Corel was still selling/supporting the Linux port of WP2000, I'd be pointing my organization in that direction in our next upgrade... unfortunately, the problem with Star / Open Office, KOffice, etc., is the lack of a good low-end database solution with a cute GUI front end and a quick learning curve. Even the Microsoft developer zealots hate Access - it breaks all the MS OOP 'rules' - but the idiot end users can set up their functional DB apps with little or no support. In my opinion, this is the thing that keeps the current crop of open source suites from going mainstream. If I am wrong - if there is an acceptable open source alternative to Access out there, that really computer-challenged people can get along with - please let me know.
How many clueless imbecile (but successful) sales reps have I supported with their precious contact databases built in the bastard Works db or in Access? Too many to recall.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
i agree with the ac about absolutes. i doubt many english prof's are writing research papers in latex. i do however agree with you that latex really looks professional, and for the most part you dont need to worry about layout.
for example: if you try to put alot of floating figures close together, you will have to concern yourself a bit with layout though.
i personally couldnt imagine writing a mathematical paper using something other than latex though. the automatic numbering of equations, theorems, references, sections, tables, etc. is just too cool. not to mention the automatic generation of table of contents, lists of figures, lists of tables. i've never tried it but i understand it will generate indices. it's just nifty.
there is a negative side. it has a bit of a learning curve-especially for someone who grewup using a wordprocessor (note: latex is not a wordprocessor, it's a typsetting program. dont confuse the two). it also has it's quirks, like the floatingfigure stuff i mentioned above. there is excellent help via usenet though.
-- john
If HP doesn't ship it people will be forced to buy it.
Why do I get the feeling that you want Microsoft to keep its monopoly? Are you afraid that Microsoft will use this as evidence of non-monopoly? Are you afraid that HP will take away the target of your hatred? I'm just guessing here, so I could be wrong.
I think it's a Good Thing(tm) that HP is shipping sometInstead of predicting dire consequences, I'm going to praise their decision.
Good job Hewlett Packard!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Sorry, up too late last night.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
When I started college in 91 (not all that ancient times really) our computer facility used an IBM mainframe, VM/CMS. It was quite a shock for some folks who had never seen a computer before to be stuck on IBM 3270 style terminals, some were real orange screen 3278s, others were ugly greenscreen Esprits with bad 3278 emulation. Many that never worked anyway. "Where do I put my floppy?" HA! you get your A disk on the mainframe, all 1Meg of it, LESS than a floppy. There were PCs, PS/2 386s. (Can you tell our comp guys was an IBM guy? rumor is we got kickbacks from them) At first the PCs only had software that wasn't available on the Mainframe, math apps and such.
;)
But the main word processor was WordPerfect 4.2 for the mainframe. And this is on the block oriented 3270 terminal. You had to get used to the clunky interface and how the cursor moved funky because of the 3270isms. It could do fonts and bold, italic yes, but on printout only. Remember these are character based terminals, "print preview" essentially just showed you margins, maybe some bold, and underline. Font size chagnes? Right. Change your font? Well, print it and hope for the best. Turnaround was attrocious; big jobs (anyting over 20 pages) jobs were automatically routed to one of the "big" printers, where they printed and the operators collected them and put them in bins. So you had to wait for the bin guy to vome around every hour or so to get your work. Saving your files, also fun!!! At that time VM/CMS didn't allow hierarchical filesystems, so all your files were in the same namespace, limited to 8.3 filenames. Good luck remembering what file is what 3 years from now. If you need more than 1.2Mb storage (yeah, nobody does) you can store it offline to tapes... then if you need it, you have to request it to be restored. That might take a day.
Slowly we changed from that. The PS/2s became more plentiful. You could actually print from them once in a while; at first you had to print to a postscript file, then ftp it to the mainframe, then print, but then we got real print servers. Pretty soon we became a real comp lab, with real apps where you could save somethng to a floppy. Now the mainframe is mothballed. Never updated it for y2k. Odd, cause Niketown uses VM/CMS, I should work there.
I'm glad you wrote all that so I won't have to. I'd like to add that MSWord was called the "Word Processor from Hello" in my old mathematics department. The equation editor is horrible. Other design flaws for large documents with lots of graphs, charts, tables, and equations is that Word stores everything in one file (last I checked). Maybe that doesn't matter on modern computers, but on a 486 you couldn't get above a few pages of graphs and stuff before things crawled.
I really wish the chem guys would get into LaTeX. I think there are some chem packages available these days. I'd love to see all the sciences using and supporting LaTeX, because there's nothing better for scientific papers. I can compile, view, and edit my LaTeX journal papers comfortably on my iPAQ. There are several good semi-WYSIWYG front ends, like LyX and Scientific Word (or Scientific Workplace, with Maple integration).
-Paul Komarek
PCs for Everyone lists the following prices (all OEM, which requires a hardware purchase):
- WP Office 2002 Standard: $19
- Works 2002 (incl. Word): $89
- Office XP Small Business: $219
- Office XP Pro: $369
I have no idea what HP and Dell pay, but this is one data point.When I finally "upgraded" the OS from Win95 to WinME (I know I know but I was told that it was basically Win98 3rd edition... anyhow) WordPerfect would not function.
Uninstall, reinstall.
Nothing.
One call to tech support later I had a solution given to me: Just pay $100 to upgrade to WordPerfect2000. This did not quite fit my budget at the time (and still doesn't) given the fact that the only added functionality I needed was the ability to work under the operating system I had bought to fix the Microsoft glitch of not recognizing AMD processors in Win95 that were faster than 300MHz.
Needless to say I have been glad to see StarOffice evolve and ecstatic to see OpenOffice mature. If I already bought your software, please don't make me suffer just because time has moved on...
It was fine software but I am not going back. They had their chance and blew it.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
have not read it, it's been on my list for a while, along with childhood's end.
sig?
Is that really true? Can a 2GHz PC with only 128MB RAM really compare with a 600MHz PC with 1GB RAM? Amazingly enough, I've seen brand new computers with almost no RAM installed at all. I wonder if this is some screwy cost-saving measure?
Yeah but which HTML standard? When I save a file as HTML in Word it has 50 HTML tags for every charcter of text I type. Now I know THAT isn't standard. :)
But the pages look fine after the 20-minute download! What are you complaining about?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
You mean "$5 plus the increase in tuition incurred by the school's deal with Microsoft". No way does Microsoft just give such low prices without obtaining the revenue somehow else.
Can a 2GHz PC with only 128MB RAM really compare with a 600MHz PC with 1GB RAM?
Of course not. My rule of thumb is to knock off enough MHz from the CPU you think would be cool to have, to cover the cost of doubling (or more) the amount of RAM. For common tasks, this makes a huge difference in performance. That's the advice I give to everybody who makes the mistake of asking me, and then they look at me funny.
I wonder if this is some screwy cost-saving measure?
Gee, I have no idea! But I have a gut feeling that it is.
Your point is valid - I forgot about the stupid amounts of RAM manufacturers ship their low-cost machines with.
Dell and HP save money buy puting Corel on. But when was the last time someone other than a lawyer used Word Perfect, and Quattro oh yuck. So when they need to learn Word and Excel because they need to know them to get a job in the real world they will have to by MS Office.
I have a document that is a society's statement of bylaws. It uses the auto-numbering feature. It has been revised several times by different people as we pass it around.
Somehow, the document has gotten to the point where certain revisions to the auto-numbering simply *cannot* be accepted.
Actually, that's not entirely true, you can accept the revisions and then save the document, and it looks just fine.
But if you close Word, then re-load the document again, you'll find the revision marks are back. What's worse, is that these show up when anybody opens the document, even if it's been emailed and is on a completely different computer. I found out about this in a rather embarrassing way by mailing the supposedly "cleaned-up" version off to some higher ups in the Society for a look-through. It made me look amateurish for not having finished accepting the revisions and leaving obvious mistakes visible. Hey thanks Microsoft!
Now, I suppose I could manually go in and delete the auto-numbering and just manually number that section, but that would mean fighting with a 17 page auto-numbered document with a numbering change on page 3.
Unfortunately, it's gotten to the point now where I don't think I have much other choice. Either that or just re-type the entire flipping thing - which might actually be easier than futzing around with the auto-numbering feature.
I'd give eye-teeth for control codes like WordPerfect had. Of course, that'd make it too easy for anybody else to translate the doc format too, now wouldn't it. Bastards.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Corel is not distributing WordPerfect for Linux anymore. Their website refers you to Xandros, who say in their FAQ that they do not have rights to distribute WordPerfect or any of the Corel graphics apps and that Corel has stopped distributing them for Linux.
-ZA
Probabbly some VP of Dell got drunk with some VP of HP and made a bet: "if you go with Corel then I go too".
And some other VP got too much coke in him when the Corel salesguys are around and probabbly said dumb stuff like "if you (Corel Wordperfect) can last to 2002 then I will ship all PCs with it!" and was caught on tape.
so one after another, the chips fall.
Otherwise, i warn you (everyone) to be wise and cautious. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" -- it is taken out of context of the original meaning -- but still rings very true here. it's a fine line between cautious and paranoia, but when big money is on the line, i'd err on the side of too cautious rather than not sufficiently so.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Now what would be really nifty would be for them to start offering Lotus Smartsuite - still an excellent choice even if IBM doesn't seem to be very interested in marketing it. Were it not for file formats I'd take Lotus Word Pro over MS Word any day of the week.
WP is not only better, there's really no contest. The only people who prefer Word are, in my long experience, those who haven't looked at WP since the DOS/Win16 era.
...
For a business that keeps documents a long time, WP provides total file compatibility: every version since WP6.1 (DOS or Win, doesn't matter) uses the same default file format, and there is also a filter to import these files into v5.1. So it doesn't matter which version you're using or what OS, anyone else using WP can read your documents.
Prefer Word's interface? WP has a Word compatibility mode. Use whichever interface you like -- without Word's bugs or deficiencies.
There is an article (probably still on one of the WP info sites) that compares functionality in Word 95 and WordPerfect7, which were concurrent versions. At the time, the list of what WP does easily and Word either has to use a kludge for or can't do at all, came to over 17k in plaintext, and it wasn't complete. Word is continually playing catchup in the features and functionality dept. (Here's a laugh: as of Word97, Word finally does watermarks -- by way of the same kludge used in WP5.1 DOS. WP has had true watermarks since v6.0 [1992])
For eyecandy fun, try making a Word document with all your installed fonts. It tends to choke after about 10 or so in a single document -- actually what it does is decide ALL the subsequent text is in one randomly-selected font. Conversely WP has NO limit on the number of different fonts used in a single document.
And my personal favourite: Word has a core bug that dates to the DOS4 era -- most *severe* Word problems are some manifestation of this bug (document mangling, insisting your HD is full and refusing to save, nuking the FAT on a floppy, and as of Word97 can also nuke the FAT on the HD partition). Someone who bothered to run a sniffer on it said it boils down to Word is writing to a null pointer. Now, if Word has that sort of traceable antique cruft, imagine what else is being packed along, never to be fixed.
Conversely, WP's codebase was rewritten from scratch as of v8 (that's why it suddenly got smaller and faster than the previous version).
I've known people who regularly use WP to handle documents in excess of 50 MEGS, no problem. AFAIK, WP's document size limit is the free space on your hard disk.
I once watched someone struggle for over an hour to reformat a simple one-page document in Word -- mainly trying to rectify some mangled hanging indents and the like. With the help of WP's Reveal Codes, I could have done the same job in 2 minutes flat.
M$Office is Windows' worst enemy -- the installer STILL clobbers system files as of OfficeXP. Want Windows to be as stable as linux? Don't install M$Office, and you're halfway there already. Conversely, WP doesn't typically cause stability issues, partly because the installer is much better about not dumping all over the system directory. Also, when WP is unstable, it's *usually* an indication that the system needs BIOS and/or driver updates. Fix that, and the WP crashes will go away.
I could go on and on
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
So I suffered. Man, did I suffer. I cursed Word up and down as I spent 45 minutes trying to create a two-column, wrap-around index. Word tried to be "helpful" by automagically turning my page numbering into an ordered list. Yay! It did this about 97 times, even after I thought I'd cleared all the formatting. Clear it, reformat it, hit a carriage return or a backspace, or some other innocuous key, and BAM! there goes Word, helping you out, whether you want it or not.
I pined for WordPerfect. Oh, sure, you can reveal formatting in Word, but it's those non-text areas that jump up and MAUL YOUR ASS in Word. I hate Word with the intensity of a thousand white-hot suns. Word is evil. It is the best example I can find of a crappy product winning out over several really good ones (WordPerfect included). WordPerfect is smooth, it's reveal formatting makes formatting simple and straightforward, rather than making you resort to endless menu selections. it's not a page layout app either, but man would my life have been easier with it.
Oh, that reminds me! Tabs! I can't f*#$Y# stand how Word handles tabs. I mean, Jesus Christ, an app as simple as AppleWorks has more capable and far more intuitive handling of tabs. In Word, you have to actually open up a freakin' menu and delve into it in order to use numeric controls to format something you should just be able to format in the ruler bar, but can't because it's such a pain in the ass!
And another thing...!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Well, except perhaps for the Math and Physics and Chemistry departments around here. Seems that there are places besides Legal or Medical where WP has found a niche :-) The only place I see true-blue MS bias is the School of Business...
I do all the time (or did, before installing OpenOffice.org), and I'm not a lawyer. I'd much rather have a word processor where I can see the "source" (through the "reveal codes" feature) than one where I have to struggle against the black box (e.g., Word), which forces the user to either agree with invalid assumptions about what the user wants to do, or go through grotesque convolutions to work around those assumptions. Word is a terrible mess of counter-intuitive design; WordPerfect empowers the user. Unfortunately, the fatal-error bugginess prevents me from calling WP "superior" to Word, because stability is a mighty important "feature." (That's a lesson that Opera still needs to learn, IMHO, but I digress...)
Heh, no argument there!
So when they need to learn Word and Excel because they need to know them to get a job in the real world they will have to by MS Office.
Why? Because "they" are such cretins that they can't learn one word processor and apply the same general concepts to another? I learned on WP, and I work at a place that requires Word. Did I do what your assumption implies, and go out and buy Word? Nope, I still use WP. Somebody who can't take the basics from one word processor to another has bigger problems to face in getting a job than learning the "wrong" word processor!
No Laughing Allowed!
Modern word processors are bloated messes. "Creeping featurism" has run rampant. How many of your average users ever learn more than a very small percentage of their word processors features? How many of those features would never have been added if the word processor's company's business model wasn't built on selling their customers an upgrade to a "new, improved" model every couple of years?
Emacs/Octave did *everything* for my NumAnal2 class.
Our Academic Pricing is $150 for Office. Likewise for the OS.
More than one item (*cough*xbox*cough*) in your list may be a loss leader, or just seem to act like one.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Can you please tell me how you can describe "automatic numbering" as "too cool" and "nifty" ?
Personally, I've gotten over this aspect of computing since I've reached 1,000 by hittting 1 and the plus key on my calculator...999 times.
...or have the ability to write your own print driver and output in absolutely any format. Incidentally, PDF->image is dead easy too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
WordPerfect is not available in a German version anymore. Therefore it is dead.
If you can't even serve almost 100 million rich Europeans in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, how do you want to convince anyone to take you serious?
Moritz
Is it just me, or does supplying a PC without MS Office or MS Works sound even more naked than one without Windows?
For a lot of people, Windows isn't the issue - it's MS Office that's important. As Apple will tell you. If people start to get the idea that actually you can work WITHOUT MS Office, then MS will have a problem.
I think MS will be VERY upset about this - expect to see HP reverse it's decision after "talks" this MS.
- Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
/Include/ContentScript.asp, line 111
A big thank-you to the boys in Redmond for my first smile of the day...Type mismatch: 'CInt'
I must be dreaming that the two Athlon 800 servers that I built have been running 24/7 since August 2001 then. One's Windows 2000 Server (upgraded from NT4) and the other is Debian GNU/Linux. The 2k box has crashed occasionally due to a naff IDE tape backup drive, but other than that both have been rock solid. That's with consumer motherboards, bog standard RAM and IDE RAID.
AMD doesn't make heatsinks, and there is a shitload of ways to cool a chip without causing as much noise as average AMD-compatible heatsink+fan make. It's just people that make cooling devices have creativity of a lemming.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's an excellent suite. Try it, you'll be amazed! We should spamflood them asking them to opensource it, since it seems that few people want to buy it for US$200 a po) any more. Point out that its popularity would go through the roof, especially after it was ported to Unix/X (ie Linux+XFree and OS/X+XFree).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'll just quickly reiterate my other answer to this.
If you're trying to do proper DTP stuff, use Quark. It was made for it.
If you're trying to update a legal doc and write at 100wpm and not have it automatically do stuff, fine, use WP.
If you're trying to quickly produce a document (like 99% of people actually are) use word.
And get used to it. Bitch.
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
Hmm. With cries of `DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run' ringing in my imagination, it's not that hard to figure out what one of the reasons was. It's not as if DR-DOS was welcomed to Windows or anything.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Both suites can read it. What have you got to lose?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
well when you create a section called ``goatse'' it places a number beside it-say for example 1.0. then the figures are named 1-1, 1-2, etc. say you want to insert a section called ``midget'' infront of ``goatse''. then figure 1-1 becomes 2-1, and 1-2 becomes 2-2, etc. latex renumbers these for you.
if you previously referenced equation 1-1 in the text, latex will also change this to 2-1 automatically.
latex will also change the table of contents, table numbering, references to these sections/tables in the text, etc.
i think this is too cool, and nifty.
-- john
If you want OLE-stye operation, try gobeProductive. I presume you're under Windows, because you speak of OLE, which is good because the Linux port isn't really stable yet. gobeProductive is wetter than the wettest dreams of Microsoft's OLE development teams in terms of smooth integration.
As to the VB macros, no, thank you: I'll take the rusty spike in the ear instead. If you wanted to do that, you could hammer GnomeBASIC* into OOo and have a winner. I'd rather have Ruby, or failing that Python, and there are reprobates out there with a PERL fetish.
If you want Office macros to be useful elsewhere, I'd suggest throwing lots of money at Michael Kohn and asking him to write a OfficeBasic-to-ScriptingLingoOfYourChoice translator.
* I was a little miffed that they didn't call it something like Gnome Windowing BASIC so we could have a useful GeeWhizBASIC again.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah, everyone who is an incomming freshman has to buy a computer. The requirements are different depending on major. Science/engineers have to have a more powerful computer, music majors have to have a macintosh (to run McGamut and Finale), and business majors... well... they have to have a computer.
3 Years ago (fall 99) when I came to the university (as an engineer, i've since switched), you had to have a 400 Mhz proc, with 128 MB of ram, and a graphics card with at least 4 MB. Of course, no one checked this, but that was the requirement. They had you fill out a form when you got there.
I'd imagine I have the fastest computer of absolutely everyone in the history department (my current major). No one needs an 1800+ to do what's required for history, but... Neverwinter Nights beckens. That game, for some reason, more so than first person shooters, really pushes your comptuer and graphics card.
~Will
sig?
An Athlon gobbles less power than a P4 as well (not that this is a major accomplishment, dual P4s make effective room heaters). I think it has seomthing to do with a lower clock-rate for the same throughput.
As to reliability, not a blip. Pounded the life out of it when I first got it, just in case, and not a murmer.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you want to really reveal codes, unzip your OOo document file (yes, with zip or pkzip) and use a text editor like vi or notepad on the results. Absolutely unbeatable for fixing up broken documents or producing strange effects not supported in the menus/dialogs. Incidentally, my OOo 1.0 and SO 5.2 will both survive reading Word files that kill MS-Office dead in its tracks (freeze or crash-and-burn).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
slashdot needs to update thier corel logo to the urinal/toilet seat one corel went with
has nothing to do with superior technology or 'consumer choice' but a well funded team of corporate lawyers (Msfts chief counsel alone receives over $70 mil/year) and a big FUD machine. I say lawyers because of the question of deals: can Msft now retaliate by NOT selling Windows licenses to HP, effectively crippling their PC sales? I don't think they can even begin to get away with that, altho that's always been the 'club' waved over all the small screwdriver shops, the terms and conditions of being a Msft reseller (and being treated like a vassel tributary state). Such a big chunk of Msft revenues come from OEM, retail and other 'channel partner' sales that they're fighting to keep it, as revealed in this licensing expose' re: the dreaded 'nekkid PC' and volume lics.
Anyway, as we've gone from few households with PC's to almost everyone has one (and enough consumers found the last one sucked so bad they're not going to upgrade ever year, no, they'd rather spend the dough on new shoes, thanks anyway), and that saturated market just can't demand enough to keep prices high in face of all the supply, lets now watch the big, hungry sharks circle and kill each other off.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
For the record, I have used MikTeX for several pretty significant projects over the past decade or so, including my own Diploma thesis in CS and my girlfriend's Masters thesis about English and Hindi literature. It's always worked fine, it's easy to install, and the standard kit you get with it is well thought out (e.g., sorting out METAFONT and METAPOST to create a font to render Hindi and to produce diagrams and presentation graphs was a piece of cake).
I wouldn't recommend LaTeX as a tool for everyone, though. While I like it a lot, and it can indeed produce excellent results, it's definitely a typesetting tool and not a word processor. Although it's quite good for separating your content from presentation, you do have to learn quite a bit of needlessly cryptic voodoo in order to sort out the class or package files that do that presentation. Word processors are still much more appropriate for many users.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The great irony, of course, is that the standard class files supplied with LaTeX were never intended to be more than examples of what you could do. The people who wrote them viewed them as a decent showcase, but hardly high quality typesetting. The rest of the world, comparing them to what it had already, bowed down and cried "We're not worthy!" :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
would you suggest a good howto for miktex? i have a friend who wants to learn how to use it, and i dont really have access to his computer at work. as a result i cannot poke around on it and figure out how to get stuff to compile, convert to pdf, etc.
-- john
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why not offer any and all office suites (MS, WP, OO, Star) and let the consumer decide what he really wants/needs?
Granted, the average consumer is still uninformed, but it'd sure be nice to be able to choose what software I get bundled with my computer, instead of having it rammed down my throat whether I want it or not.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I cannot believe that you have ever used wordperfect's equation editor if you made the above statement. (Maybe you've only used it after Corel broke it by trying to make it graphical the way word's is)
I remember using it with old dos-based wordperfect in high school, (circa 1992) and it was miles beyond even current generations of word's equation editor. Basically, it was a stripped-down version of tex that let you just type what you wanted, and have it come out right. Not only that, but I never had to watch the screen to make sure my mouse pointer is over just the right one of twenty different buttons arranged in a little grid. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to use word's interface unless equations represent less than about 5% of the article's vertical space. Until I got to college and learned about TeX, I thought it was clearly the greatest thing ever for producing technical output. I still don't understand those people who would write up physics lab reports, complete with rather verbose equations, in word using the equation editor; I don't know how they could stand it.
sorry, the crack was strong and laced with lsd. you are indeed right \bold is incorrect, i also like to use {\bf stuff}. thanks for the correction.
-- john
Um, no it doesn't. Works Suite 2002 does. MS Works 6.0, however, does not. Works Suite 2002 is a new and different program (I think it's designed to replace Office - Small Business Edition). MS Works, which is a fraction of the cost of Works Suite 2002, has always included scaled down word processor and spreadsheet - it's only recently that those two applets have started res. Trust me - I've been using Works since version 2.0 in the DOS days. It never has, and never will, include a full version of Word.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
"(WP-5.1 had a VGA preview WYSIWYG option.)"
... it was great.
Ouch, that brings back fond and painful memeories. That is one feature which has been lost, and I still miss it. I have been a long-time Word Perfect user, from back in the DOS 4.0 days when it was owned by WordPerfect Corp. I did my first real work under WP 5.0/5.1, and the WYSIWYG page view was terrific. I could get a visual representation of my entire book chapter/manuscript, 32 pages at a glance, to make sure I had a consistent look to the document, no errant indentations, margin changes, odd pagination changes, font changes, strange-looking page lengths,
WP 6.0 for Win 3.1 didn't have that feature, and I really missed it. I still do, now that I'm using WP 10.0 on Win98. I can do a two-page view, but that's it. Scrolling through a 200-page manuscript two pages at a time is pretty sub-optimal for getting an overview picture.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Open office might be more compatable with word, but it is harder to use thatn Wordperfect. Anyone who has used MS-Word to do numbered documents, would jump for joy when they see how wordperfect does it (it does it RIGHT, that is why the lawers use it. Lots of numbered documents). With word the numbering and formatting are seemingly randomly decided
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That's an easy one. Most folks pay far more attention to the speed of a computer's processor than to the amount of memory the computer has. Blame this on Intel's very effective marketing campaigns. The processor speed of a computer gets top billing, and the amount of ram ends up somewhere just below the speed of the CD Rom drive.
Needless to say, most people would be far better off purchasing more memory, but the memory industry has too tight of margins and too much competition to really spend money advertise this fact, and you can bet that the guy working at Circuit City isn't telling that to his customers.
...is humorless libertarians. And Slashdot seems to be full of 'em.
Would you prefer "taking market share from competitors" rather than "stealing?" Or is there an even softer phrase you'd like?
And some people still think "political correctness" is an exclusively liberal thing....
Shouldn't you blame MS for this? Obviously WinME broke something that WP relied upon. This is a standard MS tactic. Of course WP could give you a cheeaper upgrade, but is it their fault that you need one?
Lasers Controlled Games!
With that said, I'm glad to see Microsoft take one in the shorts, however small. Hmm, that works on two levels.
I agree with the multitudes who point out that OpenOffice might be a better choice, but then again, maybe they were thinking about liability.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Export to a PDF file with page thumbnails, using Adobe Acrobat.
to be honest, most of the benefit comes if you're writing documents with lots of mathematical formulae or tables or something in them. LaTeX is really, really nice for research papers or something, but a lot of office documents place more emphasis on formatting than on "meaning of the formatting". They want a letterhead here, and *this* font, not "put a header on this page and use the title font".
Finally, TeX's coolest features, like setting up automatic page counters and whatever, suffer from a really ugly, archaic language.
May we never see th
I believe that your"Bzzzzt! Wrong." comment is inaccurate. The item you cited from Yahoo showing institutional investors deals with the common stock traded under the symbol "CORL" rather than the non-voting, convertible, preferred shares (all 24 million of them) which I believe MSFT still owns. I have not been able to locate anything via Google yet to confirm your contention. I am also waiting on an email reply from CORL's investor relations.
If you have a cite that actually says that the convertible, non-voting, preferred shares were sold, please post it. Otherwise, you have made an ass of yourself.
I am not sure who is correct yet. I only know that your arrogant and brash "Bzzzzt!" b.s. doesn't say what you think it does. You only got modded up to +5 because a pile of editors were as ignorant as you regarding what the Yahoo site actually meant.
Put up or shut up.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
A friend told me that he had an important MS Word file that he could not open in MS Word. He opened it in Open Office, saved it as an MS Word file, and then he was able to open it is MS Word. OO can repair Word file that are too corrupted for Word! It's that stunning MS software quality again; it stuns you; you are immobile and can't get anything done.
I had a Word document that could not be edited so that it would look right. Things kept jumping around for no apparent reason. After a few frustrating minutes, I opened it in Open Office. There was no quirkiness, I could do what I wanted.
No product is perfect, and every product has some feature that outshines all its competitors :)
.MSI installer isn't entirely compatible with Win9* (this problem is NOT limited to WP). The symptom is that after you run .MSI-installed programs a few times, the shortcuts start complaining that the program is not installed, and refuse to run the apps. However the WP2002 installer is aware of the problem and has a "repair" option which fixes all its shortcuts. The real problem is that on Win9*, the .MSI installer leaves install/uninstall info in the shortcut, that Win9* doesn't understand.
:)
I'm not familiar with the bug you mention -- what are these data source names you're talking about??
The nly installer bug I've seen is really a Win9* problem, in that the !@#$%!!
Now, if you want a REAL uninstall job, use Word97. If its null-pointer bug ever strikes while you're saving a file (basically, it fails to close the file on disk), it can nuke the FAT on that partition, and it's not recoverable with consumer-level tools. Now that's a helluva uninstaller
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yep, the "allfonts" macro. Worked absolutely great. When I was doing a lot of printing, I had close to 400 fonts installed.. but even so, it only took a couple minutes to generate the document, even on a lowly 486. Printing was another matter, Print Mangler couldn't handle it and had to be babied along a few pages at a time.
:)
I tried having Word print the same document -- that's how I learned about its font limitations. 100 pages of Whamby samples, erk!!
And remember to "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs"
Concurrent versions of WP use the same file format regardless of platform -- DOS, Win, *NIX, Mac, whatever. Also, every WP version since 6.1 saves in the WP6.1 format by default. Sure is nice for passing documents around among entirely unlike setups!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Well I just bought the 2002 version and it contains a full version of Word 2002. So whatever bastard thing you go with your laptop is not representative of the current state of the universe.
u ctInfo_WorksSu ite2002.asp
Here's a little real information:
http://works.msn.com/HomePages/Prod
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
However (and I've seen no one mention this so far), when I leave my office, I get to go home to a Macintosh. There, I use Microsoft Word for Mac -- and I have to tell you guys, it's 5x better than Word for Windows. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it's true.
I'm not saying this is a perfect product, mind you ... but it's far less annoying than the Windows equivalent.
Oh, and if Word for Mac is 5x better than Word for Windows, then Microsoft Entourage for Mac is 10x better than Outlook!
Breakfast served all day!
So why don't you have WordPerfect available?
May we never see th
Go to http://netseller.com/
Look for the Software section on the blue left hand frame. $20 plus cheap USPS shipping.
Netseller has a lousy site, but they are a pretty good company. They sell a lot of junk and they deal on eBay a lot, or used to. They get a spotlight back during the UPS strike some years ago when they were on Good Morning America (I think it was).
the 83 rocks! I've used mine since freshman year of high school (god, has it been 7 years allready?), and still find new uses for it. I'd take it anyday over my new $180 HP paperweight.
There is a MAJOR issue here. Our writing tools are of very poor quality. MS Word is worthless to me; it is too quirky; it can take 3 hours to fix small problems that arise when trying to do something simple. I haven't tried Framemaker. I haven't tried Adobe InDesign.
I still use Ventura Publisher version 5 because it can use editable ASCII text files for content and markup. I need to be able to hand edit the thousands of words of text. After version 5 of Ventura the ASCII files are no longer hand-editable. When I complained to Corel about this, I got a know-nothing reply. I own Ventura 8 and WP 8, but don't use them.
Most people who make decisions about the design of writing tools are not content producers. Sure, they are writers; they write email messages to their mom. When I look at the design of major content producer programs, I see a lot of features designed by people who are not content producers. It's "Oh, this should be good enough".
I support your idea of having keystroke combinations to do everything in OO. I suggest having configurable combinations. I'd like the WordStar/Borland control-key commands. That saves 15% from my editing time, and I do a lot of editing.
Somewhere I think I've seen something like "export every page to a separate PDF". (You could do this with a macro.) Then you could use the thumbnail folder function of Windows XP. It is possible that ThumbsPlus can display PDF files; or maybe there are other Thumbnail viewers that can.
Definitely you are asking for something that would be useful for everyone who works on long documents, even if they don't realize it yet.
There is a function in Adobe Acrobat called "Extract Pages". Obviously the Help is written by a technical writer, however, since the Help says nothing about the purpose of doing that, or how it works. It does not seem to extract anything.
Notice that the thumbnail function of Acrobat supplies thumbnails in a re-sizable window. You can have the rows and columns that you want; but I see no way to change the size of the thumbnails to something of more reasonable size; it's another example of thoughtless design by people who have never produced a long document, I'm guessing (not Adobe itself, the designers).
I think you may have had something else going on, or had a corrupted filter or something. WPWin6.0 was severely buggy (Novell fixed most of what ailed it with v6.1, in particular the speed and display glitches), but import/export of WP5.1 files was never a problem, at least not for myself or anyone else I know. Not even with WP5.1 documents with embedded fonts, built under Bitstream Facelift. Once in a while really complex partial-page columns wouldn't come out right, but that was the worst I ever saw.
I've horsed files back and forth among WP5.1, 6.1 (both DOS and Win versions), and 8.0 for years. WP5.1 DOS is still my major editor for large swaths of text, and WP8 for adding stuff the old DOS version can't readily do (fonts and the like).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And I think your comment deserved friendlier moderation than that - especially given that mine got upped.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I don't, but there are people who do. Including people who should know better. People in law. People in government. People who have secrets to protect. I reiterate that this is not a hypothetical case; there are have been high profile cases where Word documents have gotten out into the wild with their revision history intact.
People should be saving in another format that isn't proprietary, or at least doesn't keep their revision history, or failing that, purge their revisions religiously. But they don't. Or they forget. Or they use someone else's computer and don't realize that revision tracking is turned on. People tend to be lazy--they don't check for these things religiously, and it's unfair to expect them to for every single document.
Software that carries this degree of potential risk, and requires this level of vigilance to use safely in a legal or government setting, has no place in these applications.
~Idarubicin