Re: Sodding Word
- From: Elliott Roper <nospam@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:41:50 +0100
In article <1i29qjl.zgchiw13zbchxN%%steve%@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, Steve Firth
<%steve%@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tim Streater <timstreater@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Why is Word such a POS
You have to ask? The answer is M$.
From time to time Word has shown signs of working, although never as a
whole. For a brief period, Word for Windows 2 I think, it was almost
usable with the ability to flow text correctly around images and to
include documents at print time. It broke because including an external
document then screwed up page numbering and at that time Word did not
support custom counters.
The current implementation is, on balance, about the worst ever.
Most of the time, your assertions are reasonable as well as amusing,
but this one is simply not true.
You can't be serious in claiming that Word 2004 is worse than v.X (its
immediate predecessor) or that either of those is worse than Word 6.
I don't have personal experience with 2001, which had a reputation for
being a bit of a bug festival.
I'd have Word 2004 and Word 5.1a fight it out as the best Word for Mac
ever. Right now, I'd claim the winner is 2004, but mostly because I can
no longer live with anything related to the old Mac OS.
Word 6 was deffo the worst. By a country mile.
Word 2004 easily flows text round images and does permit included
documents without barfing on page numbering.
I agree that 2004 has dozens, nay hundreds, of idiosyncrasies of
varying levels of charm. It is a complex mess, and has to be, if for no
other reason than it has to be as bad as the Windows version. Bug for
bug compatibility is important to all kinds of PHBs
It won't be a bad thing if it comes out better and cleaner than having
And the good news from M$ is that Office 2008 won't be released for the
Mac in December as promised but "first quarter" next year which in M$
speak probably means "August 2008 or later".
a mess dumped on you too early.
That works in some environments. I'm sincerely happy for you. In
FWIW, I'm using NeoOffice (only) nowadays to cope with all the Word
documents I receive and have to supply to clients. Not one of my clients
has noticed and it works much better than Word.
others, with multi-authored tracked changes and baroque number regimes,
you could understand PHB reluctance to stray too far from Redmond. I
have worked in that situation, and there is no way you would use
anything but Word.
Simply make sure that you have all the Windows fonts installed on yourThat's always a good idea in a multi-author, multi-reader environment.
Mac.
I'd add that you might want to go to some trouble to make sure that
what you think are the compatible Microsoft fonts really are. They
don't make it easy, with misnamed version numbers and unbelievable
issue dates, especially TNR from v.X (non-unicode) to 2004 (unicode)
(Hint: look at the file size of the font)
You have to allow for the incredible number of numpty-Wordistas out
there. I think Microsoft made it too easy to create crap documents, and
are paying some of the price. The bulk of the price is paid by end-user
organisations after they have skimped on hiring, training and
preventative quality control.
Academic or not, LaTeX is a much more disciplined document creation
environment, yet, as has been state elsewhere, even professional tech
authors are either unaware of it, or avoid it.
I know a few big time tech authors who earn a decent living managing
massive complex doc sets in Word. Part of their armoury is shoving good
working practice down their clients' collective gullets. Ever so
politely.
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