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Which Os is better among the Windows Vista.

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Dave Plowman (News)

Jan 1, 1970
0
I guess enough people have forgotten the folly of using Word format files
for interchange. I found that only two things can read a Word 6 file:
Word 6 and StarOffice. A lot of people were burnt when Word 7 hit and
before everyone updated.

I'm a freelance sound engineer and I recently got e-mailed a call sheet
for a job I was doing. The only information I really needed was the
start/finish times. The email itself was blank but contained three
attachments. A GIF with the company logo. An HTML file with the usual
legalese. And a Word document with the necessary information. Latest
version of Word. From a company working in the communications field. ;-)
 
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William Sommerwerck

Jan 1, 1970
0
Complete nonsense. No-one needs a desktop publishing program
(which is what Word has become) to type a letter.

Yes, they do, if they want a nice-looking letter.

But...

Excuse while I roll on the floor laughing.

Microsoft might want us to _think_ Word is a DTP, but it's anything but.
It's an excellent word processor that has been tarted up with features that
give the illusion -- to the ignorant -- that it's suitable for DTP.

I cut my DTP teeth with the "original" Ventura Publisher, versions 2 and 3,
almost 20 years ago. Those "primitive" versions, which ran under GEM
(Graphics Environment Manager) utterly and totally blow away the current
versions of Word (and, I assume, WP and other word processors) for producing
long, complex documents. * And they're actually easier to use, because they
give you direct control over what you're doing, rather than automating it.

Word has major flaws that make it virtually useless for complex documents,
and even for a lot of simple ones. The worst of these is its unstable image
placement. You cannot insert an image, then expect it to either remain where
you put it, or move the way you want with the text flow. Last year I spent
several hours in a largely unsuccessful attempt to organize the graphics in
a co-worker's document. Once I got it "right", adding text or new images
caused the exisiting images to irrationally shift position, which then
required starting over.

Another problem is that, though Word can create TOCs pretty much by the user
saying "Put a TOC here", TOC formatting is unstable, and often requires
manual alterations to make the TOC look the way you want.

No one at Microsoft seems to care about these problems. And they're not
new -- I was complaining about some of them over a decade ago. For example,
there's a bug that causes Word to spontaneously switch to automatic
repagination for no obvious reason. This bug has persisted across the last
four or five versions.

It might sound paradoxical, but in making products "easy" to use, software
developers often make them harder to use -- at least if you're the sort of
person who cares about what they're doing, and is willing to make the effort
to learn. For example, in Ventura you have to manually insert an anchor for
each image. In exchange for that bit of work, you can choose how the image
will flow with the text -- and it _will_ flow correctly. Word's "automatic"
image-anchoring feature is not only much less flexible, but it's confusing
to use -- and doesn't work correctly, anyway.

The Wordpad (or Write) program included with Windows is good enough
for most letters. It's only real failing is the inability to introduce your own
page breaks. I expect MS did that for fear of crippling sales of Office.

I write for a living. Write is a near-featureless program that _might_ be
suitable for plain letters, but is pretty much useless for anything other
than very plain text. No one in their "write" mind would use Write to write
letters. It's a clunky, slow, poorly designed piece of software.

Word can produce handsome, attractive documents -- if you know how to use
it. Most people don't. They write as if the computer were a typewriter,
rather than using styles for formatting. The result is ugly, hard-to-edit
documents. (Yes, I've had to clean them up. It's appalling.) If you use Word
(or any other good word processor) the way it's supposed to be used, you
have no need or use for Write. **

I depend on Word for non-complex documents, and it doesn't let me down. I
have a 120K-word unpublished novel created with Word. I could convert it --
in a just a few minutes -- to whatever page-layout and typographic format a
publisher wanted.

There is a paradox. In general, software with a shallow learning curve (that
is, that takes a while to learn) *** is often easier to use, because the
slow learning process is the result of the program letting you do what you
want to do -- you don't have to fight the program's "automation" -- or the
fact that the designer didn't anticipate the particular way you want to do
something. A good example is Ventura's TOC and index formatting. They take a
bit of time to become familiar with, but you can achieve pretty much
anything you want. And TOC and indexing creation is bug-free and stable.


* By complex, I mean multi-chapter documents with complex tables of contents
and indexes, tables and cross-references, and flexibly-but-stably-anchored
images, with virtually any formatting the user wants. Such documents are
difficult to do in Word, but are a snap in Ventura.

** I find it amazing that people refuse to spend a few hours to learn how to
use a word processor _correctly_. Once you're proficient, the savings in
time and frustration are huge.

*** I am perennially annoyed by people complaining that a product has a
"steep" learning curve. As "learning curves" would be plotted as "amount
learned" against time, a steep curve is _exactly_ what you'd want.
 
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William Sommerwerck

Jan 1, 1970
0
I loathe MS Office. It's an UN-productivity tool IME.

I'm not sure what a "productivity tool" is.

Back in 1980, when I owned an Apple ][ and was discovering the wonders of
word processing, another writer said to me "The computer doesn't allow me to
get my work done faster. Rather, it lets me fall behind on more projects at
the same time." I suppose that's "productivity" -- of a sort.

In general, software doesn't make people more productive. Rather, it lets
them do things themselves that, in the past, they would have turned over to
someone else. Do secretaries still take dictation? People are expected to
create their own documents (including spreadsheets and business graphics),
rather than dictating them. This strikes me as a loss of productivity,
rather than an increase.

The reason, I suspect, that you "loathe MS Office" is that you don't have
any need for it. And if you did -- would you be willing to put out the
effort to learn it?

The one true piece of "productivity software" I've seen is instant
messaging. I find I spend less time discussing something and coming to a
decision using IM, than when using e-mail or the 'phone. (This assumes one
can touch-type.)

The real change computers have wrought is what I call "democratization".
People are now able to do things they didn't used to be able to do. For
example, I can design and create a complex, multi-chapter document -- then
deliver it to the printer, in a format suitable for creating offset
plates -- all on my own, at my desk. You couldn't do that 20 years ago.
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
William said:
Yes, they do, if they want a nice-looking letter.

No they don't. Good presentation does not require a bloated program.

Graham
 
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Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
William said:
I'm not sure what a "productivity tool" is.

It's what MS claim Office is. I find it more a frustration tool than anything
else.

Graham
 
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William Sommerwerck

Jan 1, 1970
0
William Sommerwerck wrote:
No they don't. Good presentation does not require a bloated program.

In this particular (and admittedly unusual) case, it's Write that's the
bloated program. It's a slow, low-performance product. And Word does many
things (such as table creation) not available from Write.
 
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William Sommerwerck

Jan 1, 1970
0
William Sommerwerck wrote:
It's what MS claim Office is. I find it more a frustration tool than anything
else.

My point was that I'm not sure most software actually enhances people's
productivity. I see no reason why any other other package would be better or
worse than Office at enhancing your productivity. They simply provide a set
of tools to do certain things.
 
D

Don Bowey

Jan 1, 1970
0
So why use Word in the first place ?

Graham

Because it does *everything I need to do, not just some of them. Regardless
of the incompatible .doc file versions, IMO it is still the best WP
available.
 
D

Dave

Jan 1, 1970
0
Bill Freeman said:
Must have been a long while since you looked at a Mac if you think they
still all come with a one button mouse.

I bought an iMac last week.

It came with a one-button mouse.

I purchased a bluetooth wireless Apple mouse at the time I purchased the
iMac (the ONLY mouse apple-branded wireless mouse) at the same time.

It also has (gasp!) one button.

Why should I have to go out and buy an aftermarket product to work with my
expensive new mac? If I'm shelling out an extra 30% for an uber-cool piece
of Mac modern art, I don't want a crappy-looking yet incredibly functional
peripheral now do I?
 
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clifto

Jan 1, 1970
0
Dave said:
Why should I have to go out and buy an aftermarket product to work with my
expensive new mac? If I'm shelling out an extra 30% for an uber-cool piece
of Mac modern art, I don't want a crappy-looking yet incredibly functional
peripheral now do I?

Eet ees bayter to loook goood than to work goood.
 
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Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
William said:
My point was that I'm not sure most software actually enhances people's
productivity.

I rather agree with you there !

I see no reason why any other other package would be better or
worse than Office at enhancing your productivity. They simply provide a set
of tools to do certain things.

There's certain things about the way Word operates that drive me truly nuts.

Graham
 
J

jakdedert

Jan 1, 1970
0
Eeyore said:
I loathe MS Office. It's an UN-productivity tool IME.

Has the message still not got around that Open Office is free ? If you HAVE to use
a full-fat Office application, at least save yourself the indignity of paying MS
for it !

http://www.openoffice.org/


Graham
The word 'has' gotten around.

If you'd taken the trouble to actually *read* the thread before you
spouted off, you'd have seen at least 'my' objection to OpenOffice.
It's slow...glacially slow, to open. Click on a *.doc file in an email
attachment...go have a smoke...pour some coffee, add cream &
sugar...come back to the computer...drink half the cup while waiting for
the file to open.

After that, it's a snap.

Click the same file--with Word associated as the default '.doc'
application--and before you can even get out of your chair--you're
reading it. I really wanted OpenOffice to be my default application for
biz docs, but it's not there yet. When dealing with corporations, you
use what they use.

I don't 'like' M$ products in general. It's the price I have to pay for
'real world' compatibility. M$ knows it...and I know it.

jak
 
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William Sommerwerck

Jan 1, 1970
0
There's certain things about the way Word operates
that drive me truly nuts.

When you have the time, I'd be curious to hear a few of them.
 
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