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Microsoft Word 5.1: The Apex of Word Processing
angkor writes "'Word 5.1 is 13 years old in 2004. Many people still swear by it. Powerful features, stable application, without bloat. Nirvana by Microsoft. It's been all downhill from there...' I always thought WordPerfect 5.1 was pretty good as well. I still use it alongside my OfficeXP."
There was probably a DOS Word 5 too.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Have you tried Abiword?
.doc also, which lets me print out all my papers at school wheer they only have windos and mac boxes.
Small, fast, light and with spellcheck. Will let you save as
Actually Netscape built a version 5, they just didn't release it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The Netscape codebase that would have become version 5 was released under the MPL and became Mozilla. After two years of work Mozilla 1.0 was released, upon which a new Netscape product was based. Because so much change had happened from the 5.0 codebase it was proper to version it 6.
Netscape 5 did exist, but was never released as a product.
That may have played a role, but for a short time, Microsoft distinguished between Word for DOS and Word for Windows. Word for DOS was generally at around the same version as WordPerfect, while Word for Windows had seperate numbering. The jump also reconciled the differences in Microsoft's own version numbering, and taken in context with the DOS product, it was actually a "normal" progression (which, I believe, was actually at Word 6 and not Word 5.1. Winword 2 and Word 5.5 were concurrent, IIRC.)
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Something cleverGramatica is THE best grammar checker I have ever used. It was written by a couple of PhD's in English who happened to get into computer science fairly early on. The triviality and incorrectness of Word's current grammar checker is appalling since Gramatica did a MUCH better job 10 years ago.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
However, several times I've seen a whole group of Word power users (not clueless lusers) need to given up on a document and start over from scratch -- usually just on little things like the company business plan or 12 month road map (urk). The only workaround each time was to copy/paste the original document text into a new Word file, because Word was hopelessly confused by whatever little magic cookies it had left in the original document.
I.e. I know it's not just me being confused, I see this happen to everyone who uses Word heavily on big documents, sooner or later.
To be charitable, this may be the eventual fate of any huge app that grows by accretion from a small program to a hugely enormous giganto app, without being redesigned and recoded and refactored along the way.
So yeah, Word -- nice when it works, I guess, but it can be quite frustrating other times.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
There is an option you can install called pack-and-go. It makes a little executable file which will show your presentation. No Powerpoint installation needed on the machine used for the presentation. It's been in every version of powerpoint I can remember using.
You can do this with most word processors, by using tabs. What you do is set a tab on the right side of the page, then modify it to be a right-aligned tab. When you tab over to it, your text will be right-aligned to the tab line. This works both in OpenOffice and Microsoft Word.
Having worked with redlining myself (not for an attorney, but for a publications department that needed it), I can confirm that. To this day, it's much easier to mark the margins of a highlighted paragraph with asterisks and the like in WordPerfect (just a format attributed) than Word (text box).
There are other things in WordPerfect that are helpful to attorneys, too. It's a shame that every version of WordPerfect since 8.0 has s*&^ed.
Did you script the changes you made so the next time, because there's always a next time especially with Windows, you don't have to do it all by hand?
A simle WSH script to automate those registry changes might save you a bunch of time and headachs next time around.
I haven't checked lately, but Word used to crash regularly on manuals that exceeded 200 pages, never did a good index, and couldn't handle multiple chapters in separate files. You'd think they'd fix this stuff before they added frills. (I'd be surprised, but maybe they did...I never do real work with Word anymore.)
For me, the most loathsome feature of Word is style inheritance. Unless you are really good at designing Word styles (and who is?), you wind up with a bunch of styles that are mutually related in some mysterious way so that when you make a little change to one style, another style suddenly morphs into Greek, or all your numbered lists turn to bullets. I hear people mention this phenomenon frequently, but they usually think that word processors are supposed to act like this.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
you may not have any MSOffice _windows_ running, but I'll bet you a copy of Office XP that if you check your 'startup items' folder, you'll find that office is preloading it'self at boot.
This isn't a bad thing, Just be aware of it when making comparisions. OOo is taking longer because it's not already there.
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