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Time to Kill Microsoft Word?
Allnighterking writes "Apparently the frustration with another Windows Product is starting to reach increasingly visible users. John Dvorak over at ABC News is starting to question if it's time to kill Word With Viable options like Open Office.org available for Windows as well as AbiWord and others. Since they are both using XML as a way to create the documents. Or perhaps dropping a separate application altogether and going with something like X Forms to create a browser based office suite."
I imagine if there was a "reveal hidden codes" feature in Word, it might be a lot easier to use
Remember, this is the same John that predicted Apple would switch to the Itanium.
StarOffice is downloadable for free (not evaluation) to those affiliated with educational institutions. It takes a bit of navigation around the sun site but for students like myself it isnt a bad deal.
...Word is the best product in its class.
Not by a long shot. Both Lotus WordPro and WordPerfect have features, stability and ease of use on their side. Both have superior layout control. Both are better at complex text flow. Both are better at generating indexes and the like. Unfortunately, Word is bundled with Excel and Access, two products that are very, very good. Access less so than excel, which offers several features that kick the teeth of the competition in like PivotTables and Solver.
-- $G
But why use WORD to create HTML documents? That's what notepad is for.
Notepad has a serious size limit. It's ok for a couple pages, but falls flat when doing a full document. There is just too much stuff that notepad can't open because it's too large. I quickly move on to other text based editors.
The truth shall set you free!
Most companies are already archiving those as Portable Document Format (pdf) files. This preserves print format much better than Word ever did. IBM would be happy to show you how and yes, you can search the text.
If your company was dumb enough to archive things in Word format and is not looking for reliable methods to get the information out, you might as well throw the things away. New Word itself has a hard time opening older Word documents, especially "complicated" ones with OLE from visio and other programs that your company might not have anymore.
Hopefully, people will learn and use reasonable text editors and type setters for future work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Bullshit. Stop using Win9x. Notepad on NT has always been able to handle large files. Notepad on win3.x had something like a 64K limit. Win95's notepad had the same problem, and so I would assume win98 and winme did as well (don't have any of those hanging around to check, though I wouldn't be surprised if that was changed in later versions of win9x). It's never had that limitation on an NT-based OS.
Notepad does suffer for lack of features, but it does what it's supposed to do -- it's a simple, lightweight text editor. If you need more power in your text editing, install Vim, emacs, EditPad, TextPad, or one of the many other more fully-featured free and not-so-free text editors available for the win32 platform.
I didn't agree with everything he said either, but I can relate to the innumerable bugs in every version of Word that I've used (since it went GUI). I've always been surprised that people use it so much. I used it a lot during college. But over the past 10 years since, I've tried using the latest Word for various things probably 3 or 4 times, and each time I've encountered different show-stopping bugs that made me turn elsewhere (usually latex). This happens after about an hour of using it, and I would typically search the net for help and learn that it's a "well-known" bug, sorry, causing even textbook examples to fail. So I get the impression that Microsoft does less than 1 man-hour of quality-control on every version of Word they release. That's a little unfair to say, but only a little.
So I feel I can relate to Dvorak here. I'm sure that one can deal with Word if they make a career out of it after thoroughly digesting some book like O'Reilly's "Word 97 Annoyances", and learning all the work-arounds. But for the (effectively) novice user like me who will use another program after initial frustrations get too high, Word is just way too buggy to use.
surviving in a word world:
When installing word or any office program ALWAYS run a "custom" installation and get to the screen with all the grey boxes that turn white when selected for installation. Select the top-most box and click "run from installed location". All the lower boxes should turn white - that means they will all be installed on the HD.
After the installation is complete, the installer will ask if you want to delete the installation files or leave them on the hard disk. LEAVE THE FILES ON THE DISK. While this only applies to Office 2003, it does make patching or servicing the installation later a breeze.
-ted
we have several documents, a few hundred pages each.
MS Word is mandated by management--back in the day we used Pagemaker.
It's almost impossible to search or scroll through our word docs. I watched one of our support people search for a keyword and then struggle on the phone for several minutes trying to get work to move a few pages ahead or behind the search result page. It was awful. I whispered to her to get the customer's info and we would call back in 15 minutes. We ran to the hardcopies in our library and looked up the info by hand.
There is something wrong in America, and it's getting worse, when management mandates inferior tools made by criminal organizations.
Yes, the doc format changes. How else are new features supposed to be saved?
In a backwards-compatible manner, which allows older versions to safely ignore elements of a document that they can't handle. This isn't rocket science.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
. . . overworked.
As another helpdesk slave, I must say that we can stand to lose MS Offie. Windows XP and IE are all the job security we need.
People use vi because the modal interface is very efficient once you learn it.
I feel slowed down by any editor that forces me to move my fingers away from the main block of keys (note that I use ctrl-[ rather than the esc key), especially for something as simple as moving the cursor.
Also, modern versions of vi are far from crippled. Vim is very feature-rich, and it supports syntax highlighting for a huge amount of programming languages out-of-the-box (do your "real" editors have syntax highlighting for things like OCaml and Python, which I use frequently?).
A grammar checker may not be that useful for english but for several other languages it's a necessity. Anyway, people are reluctant to change and they will use any excuse to criticize the new thing. By not having a spell checker, OpenOffice is viewed as a "cheap" product, not a serious alternative.
But having said that, you are right. Word file format compatibility is the #1 problem.
But word's grammar checking is absolutely horrible.
It's flat out wrong sometimes.
take "Its" vs "It's" for instance - I've had it tell me many times that my use of "it's" in the sense of a contraction of "It is" was wrong, and that I should use "its" instead.
Advanced users are users too!
"... For instance, if you have the replace-as-you-type thing turned on and type a row of underscores (or was it hyphens..." "...I finally found out that Word creates the line by formatting the previous paragraph with a bottom border line, and the answer is to highlight the previous paragraph and edit its formatting to remove it..."
:) and many others. Enjoy.
After an undesired auto format occurs in your document just hit back space, it will only undo the undesired auto format without touching what you typed. It works with your example of a line, with the asterisks who change into a doted line, with emoticons after you type
Now do some one know what do I have to do or to deactivate if I want to paste some text that I just copied from the internet to my word document without having word wanting to connect to the internet and then applying some lame undesired formating. I just want to past clean text that's all. Right now what I do is pasting my stuff in notepad and then I copy it again in word but the process is a pain in the ass.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Nice try smart-ass, but that sentence is fine. Although it sounds awkward, continually can be used to describe is. Therefore, continually serves as an adverb like it should.
97's grammar checker did indeed suck. It commented on stupid things like using non gender-neutral nouns "anchorman".
2002's grammar checker is considerably smarter and less invasive. When it says something, there's probably something wrong. It can help avoid those little mistakes that you probably know about but made anyway. Just like spell check.
Makes sense; Word is a business program. These days it's marketed to home users since MS abandoned the word processor in Works, but that doesn't change Word's origins.
-- Terry
This is all well and good and does make Word immediately available but, on the other hand, there's a whole heap of memory other programs cannot use as a result.
Personally, I'd rather have the system memory available because then the overall speed of my PC should be better, rather than just the load-up time of Word.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
> Is Linux OO capable of rendering fonts using sub-pixel hinting (for LCD screens), yet?
GTK+ has been capable of doing this since v2.0. It gives similar results to what you would expect on XP but I found the Vera fonts render better without it (this is very subjective of course)
There is, it's called pskill which is a part of the great pstools package.
You are confusing subpixel hinting and antialiasing. Since it is unlikely that the absence of hinting caused your friend so much trouble, I presume you are referring to antialiasing.
Yes, OpenOffice.org is capable of antialiasing. There have been problems in the past (you had to do some tweaking in the font dialog, and I recall the Debian package didn't do it by default).
So don't capitalize the whole thing!
But you can create clean html with Word. Just save as Web Page, Filtered, and you get this:
/* Style Definitions */ /style>
/head>
/div>
/body>
/html>
< html>
< head>
< meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
< meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10 (filtered)">
< title>Hello Word</title>
< style>
< !--
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0cm;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:21.0cm 842.0pt;
margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
<
<
< body lang=EN-US>
< div class=Section1>
< p class=MsoNormal><span lang=EN-IE>Hello Word</span></p>
<
<
<
The main reason I'm not using Open Office.org is that it doesn't print envelopes properly. I run my own small business and I have envelopes that need to be printed off. My handwriting is also atrocious, so handwriting them is out of the question. Open Office did not print out standard envelopes properly on my setup, and the bug tracker said that this problem wouldn't be fixed until the next major version, whenever that will be. After all this, I uninstalled it and reinstalled Word.
.rtf files. The program also insisted on moving the images external to the document, meaning that I had to copy a number of files over if I wanted to show the document to someone else. Since I'm a game developer, screenshots are an important part of many documents. Being unable to handle images in the most portable format available did not instill me with confidence.
There's also lots of other little annoyances. For example, Open Office did not properly display inline graphics properly in my
I really would like a free alternative to Office. Unfortunately, the main alternative doesn't fit my needs so I am stuck with Word for now.
My view,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
As an aside to this comic relief, if you haven't discovered LaTeX, and you write even a fair amount of complex documents, it is worth checking out. I got hooked 4 or 5 years ago and haven't looked back.
Web apps don't make sense for certain things. For example: we have several users that perform data entry. Entering orders, sales leads, etc. from stacks of postcards and order forms that are mailed in. The data-entry forms programs are GUI (Gtk2-Perl), and keyboard shortcuts are heavily used. Very little (or no) mouse at all. A typical record entry would involve F1 (new), start typing, tab between fields, and F9 when finished. I have yet to see a web-based application that is as productive for data entry as anything else (even old green-screen stuff).
as good as word
Good by what measure? Obviously your workstyle is well matched to word, but there are vast numbers of people for whom the fundamental design of a Word document, a sequence of paragraphs with no inherent structure other than a paragraph or table. Everything else... nested lists, chapters, headings, and so on... are simulated by the program gluing paragraphs and tables together, and synthesising them anew when loading the document!
Someone who needs a structured document is better off editing raw HTML in Notepad. For us, "just works" is baloney. At one point I was forced to embed Word documents inside Visio documents and re-embed them in Word again to keep it from trying to forcibly "flow" parts of a quoted passage in with the surrounding text.
Alas, I haven't seen any sign that the "replacements" for word are anything more than slavish imitations of the original Word, which started out as a "cheap imitation" of real text processors in the same way that a pen-knife is a "cheap imitation" of a workshop. Today's Word might be the greatest pen-knife you can buy, a veritable leatherman tool of pen-knives, but it's no substitute for a properly equipped workshop.
LaTeX is great as long as you don't mind using the canned document styles. Trying to create a LaTeX stylesheet that looks like an existing corporate page layout done in Word or a DTP application is murder.
- chrish