[softwarelist] Re: O-Pro's future - (Word v EW sideline)
- From: John Harrison <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: davidpilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:41:50 +0100
> > Word is a lot easier to understand than RISC OS's EasyWriter, which
> > works on similar principles.
I've used Word for 20 years, on Mac and PC, and I have also used Easiwriter
for at least 10 years. In both cases, I probably use and understand
considerably more of their capability than the vast majority of users
(certainly in the case of PC users).
IME, very few people understand Word, and it is most certainly not 'easier
to understand than EasiWriter'. Back in the days of Word 4 and 5 on the
Mac (long before there was a half decent PC version) it was easier to
understand, but in terms of comprehensibility, Word has gone steadily
downwards since then.
Both Word and EW can be used like typewriters (but if that's what you
want, why use a powerful word processor).
Both can get you into a fix if you use their more powerful facilities
without understanding how they work (which many people do) and then
compound things by manual tweaking to try to get what looks right (but
which underneath is a confused mess). The fixes you get into with Word are
different from those you get into with EW, because they use different
structural models for documents.
Word has some very useful features that EW doesn't have, and vice versa, so
if you have got used to using one, then trying to use it on the other will
either frustrate you because you can't, or cause you problems because it
doesn't work.
Of course if your brain has been conditioned by use of Windows to expect
things to be laid out with Windows-style menus, then anything different
will feel alien, but that is hardly a valid measure of what is 'easy to
understand'.
But this thread was about the future of O-Pro. I bought O-Pro to write a
book that would have been impossible with either EW or Word, because of the
way we wanted to organise the content. (Actually I might have bodged it
with Word, but it would have been a nightmare to manage). O-Pro is not
'better' than EW; it is different. I would not dream of using it for the
things I use EW for.
John
--
John Harrison - http://www.jaharrison.me.uk
Message sent from a British built Iyonix PC running RISC-OS 5
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