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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.
-- $G
Most companies are already archiving those as Portable Document Format (pdf) files. This preserves print format much better than Word ever did. IBM would be happy to show you how and yes, you can search the text.
If your company was dumb enough to archive things in Word format and is not looking for reliable methods to get the information out, you might as well throw the things away. New Word itself has a hard time opening older Word documents, especially "complicated" ones with OLE from visio and other programs that your company might not have anymore.
Hopefully, people will learn and use reasonable text editors and type setters for future work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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
. . . 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.
"... 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
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.
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.
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).
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.