Microsoft Word *****. Discuss.

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I find that you must first be running the Whole MS system to end up with the MS output the way that MS intended it.

You mean use MS cables to the printer as well as the MS mouse, MS Keyboard and to use the MS special computer stand <g>

I read if you change the mains cable that you can get faster Internet performance - it was written by somebody at Hi-Fi News.

Macker has become the Joe90 of this thread! You need to be all MS to get the MS experience.

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Originally posted by Chris Kelly:
Macker has become the Joe90 of this thread! You need to be all MS to get the MS experience.

I must be, Joe90 had not replied so I felt it my civic duty to do so in the flavour that he himself would no doubt be proud of...I must of done a good job because he has not felt the need to reply.

Why oh why oh why oh why....

When you're trying to highlight blocks of continuous text does MS Word not just start the highlight where you first click and end the highlight in the position you let go? Working with DNA sequence it drives me mad!

Instead if you highlight more than one line of text the beginning of your highlighted block jumps to the beginning of the first line

Jonathan

I can only praise MS Word this week. Needing to produce an order of service for my mother in laws funeral I used the suggested template for a booklet added a picture and text an made a pretty good job even if I say so myself. Not exactly the most taxing project admittedly but a positive for MS for a change.

I detest Word. It's overblown and overfeatured. Why do Microsoft have to overdo everything? Is it some sort of macho thing?(The same is true of Vista, that poor quality OSX rip-off) It does all kinds of things you don't want it to do and crashes/freezes all the time - both on my PC at work and my Mac at home. It's ridiculously memory hungry too.

On my Mac, it takes about five minutes to open and is hopelessly slow. Normally I use Macwtrite Pro, but of course if you're sharing the file with anyone else you're forced to use MS Turd.

I look back rather fondly to the good old days of WordPerfect, WordStar, Websters and NisusWrite. Sigh...

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I detest Word. It's overblown and overfeatured. Why do Microsoft have to overdo everything? Is it some sort of macho thing?(The same is true of Vista, that poor quality OSX rip-off) It does all kinds of things you don't want it to do and crashes/freezes all the time - both on my PC at work and my Mac at home. It's ridiculously memory hungry too.

It sure has a lot of functions but take away only one of them and you'll have thousands of users screaming that Word wasn't able to do the least fcuking thing.

A macho thing ??

And to my knowledge there's no similarity whatsoever between OSX and Vista, or any other Windows OS.

When Word crahes/freezes all the time then there's something wrong somewhere else in your system. Problems occur when you overload documents with photos and all sorts of WordArt, shapes and other BS, especially when it's done the wrong way (e.g. pasted instead of inserted). Back in my days as a tech writer I composed 120-page documents weighing up to 80 MB, crashes were rare and if there were any, they happened because we did something that we shouldn't have done - for instance inserting a particular shape like, say, an arrow. After a while you learn such things

Either way, if you decide to write long documents (for a diploma for instance) Word is still the best application, and if you don't like crashes then simply create new versions of your document every 1-2 pages or so. So if your file is corrupt just get the last version that worked. I recently heard of a friend's friend that he lost most of his dissertation because his hard disk crashed. I would have told him sorry, guy, but if you're so dumb as not to back up your work then you don't deserve your diploma.

There definitely are issues with Word (hierarchical numbering, styles, unstable fonts) but on the whole it works pretty well and from what I can see at the company, the advanced functions of Word are extensively used except maybe the field functions which are fairly complicated to use but also very helpful if you can nick the code from some intelligent web page.

Back in the day, I used to work on Corel WordPerfect. No thanks.

Anyway, as far as I know there's no valid (and widely usable) alternative to Word so better get used to it. And please don't come up with the magical passepartout term 'Linux' unless you really know what you're talking about.

[delete please, thanks.]

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Originally posted by Cheese:
Anyway, as far as I know there's no valid (and widely usable) alternative to Word so better get used to it. And please don't come up with the magical passepartout term 'Linux' unless you really know what you're talking about.

Another endorsement for OpenOffice.org. At the price (free) it's certainly worth considering as an alternative to MicroSoft office. It runs just fine on my Mac and on a friend's Windows XP machine, so no magical "passepartout" term required.

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Another endorsement for OpenOffice.org. At the price (free) it's certainly worth considering as an alternative to MicroSoft office. It runs just fine on my Mac and on a friend's Windows XP machine, so no magical "passepartout" term required.

I expected this and I certainly believe that it works well on your Mac and on your friend's PC. Yet I would love to hear the opinion of the IT guys at a bigger company where they have switched from Office to OpenOffice. If you compare programs, compare them under the same conditions - where I work they used to switch some offices to OpenOffice but tests didn't last long until they went back to good old M$ Office.

As seen on the geekish slashdot YMMV .

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Originally posted by Cheese:

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Another endorsement for OpenOffice.org. At the price (free) it's certainly worth considering as an alternative to MicroSoft office. It runs just fine on my Mac and on a friend's Windows XP machine, so no magical "passepartout" term required.

I expected this and I certainly believe that it works well on your Mac and on your friend's PC. Yet I would love to hear the opinion of the IT guys at a bigger company where they have switched from Office to OpenOffice. If you compare programs, compare them under the same conditions - where I work they used to switch some offices to OpenOffice but tests didn't last long until they went back to good old M$ Office.

Hello from an IT guy who does a lot of work for a big company - Open Office Writer is much more stable than Word, which in my view makes it superior. Why don't more companies ditch Word - I don't know, I guess it is adequate, there's Microsoft's marketing power and like TCP/IP everybody seems to use it despite its severe weaknesses. Word is the MP3 of word processors. Word Perfect is the vinyl - I mean Word Perfect 4.1 up to 5.2 - the version written in machine code to run under DOS or Amiga OS - not the garbage released by Corel and called Word Perfect for Windows. Open Office Writer is like the CD. They still use Word as nobody wants to upset that nice Mr Gates.

However, IT guys are not the best judges of software (me included), even though I can point out many programming flaws that make Word so poor when compared to Word Perfect, which was virtually bullet proof under Amiga OS. You really need to ask authors and typists who use word processors a lot to see what they think - it's the users that count and good software should make it easy for people to their job (there's a lot of bad business software around IMHO - and it wasn't always the case). I can cope with most word processing packages (though I find Word one of the worst I've used and Open Office Writer one of the best) - so it's not an issue for me. For occasional use, once you get used to it, Pages on Mac OS X is excellent.

Interestingly. Microsoft Excel is a much more stable and altogether better package than Word - perhaps that's why companies buy MS Office.

Oh well - we have what we have. Anything is better than Vizawrite on a 40 column screen, where you only saw what it looked liked by printing it.

Always wondered why I got to choose software packages that somebody else had to use - the strange world of IT.

Rotf