atw: Re: Which version of Office to use with WIndows XP
- From: Michael Edward Granat <megranat@xxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 14:14:13 +1100
A fascinating discovery, Peter F.
Had never even heard of, let alone tried that "feature" before.
Most disconcerting and distracting to use, though
Nothing at all like Word Perfect's reveal codes, which was like giving the
author a pair of X-ray bifocals, with the bottom third of the screen
showing the entire structure of the part of its document universe nearest
the text cursor. Plus you could edit in the codes screen and watch your
edits happening in real time above, as they would look. Quite stunning.
...and yes, a precursor to the better HTML Web page editors of today.
Hey, maybe if you played the first Matrix movie from your PC DVD-ROM,
while running WordPerfect, you'd only have to press Alt+F3 to reveal the
Matrix itself and make the whole thing make sense from the beginning. ;-)
...and yes, indeed, Warren L, Word has nothing to match the power and
fluidity of the WordPerfect reveal codes system. (More a system of
operation than just a feature.) Something that was a real bonus for us
technical authors but really freaky for the beginner user. I'm afraid that
Microsoft went for the old populist appeal approach with (deeply) hidden
functionality, so as to not scare off the plebs.
Not a totally unreasonable compromise in usability terms but, with Word,
everything became so deeply nested that the marketing view seems to have
buried the author view, making Word so confounding to use, unless you use
it all day every day and get used to most of its quirks.
I must admit that I loathed both WordPerfect and Word (in their MS-DOS
and early WinDoze forms to begin with, only because I had absolutely loved
using the then seemingly awesomely powerful Wordstar clone text processor
"Scribble!" on the Amiga, back from 1986, then Final Writer, WordWorth
(graphical word processors that were later also available free for the PC
in the early days of Windows 95) and PageStream (an object oriented
desktop publishing tool that gave 360x360dpi output from a dot matrix
printer!) years before the PC word processors started to get their graphical
act together.
So much fabulous software has gone by the wayside or has been forgotten
and we are stuck with only a couple of mainstream choices on which local
MS systems based businesses insist. That is why, for me anyway, it is so
encouraging to see people on this list talking about competing word
processing tools again. It almost feels like the MS marketers haven't won
complete dominance of everything, just yet.
But remember, it is oh so rare for engineering excellence to ascend, under
the pressure of so much entrenched marketing might. Just like with the
Internet Exploder Web bruiser, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Microsloth will only keep it free until they can kill off their competition
then, as with Word (which used to be far more affordable when it had
some mainstream competition) they can charge what they want and do as
they like, regardless of how unusable, unsuitable and unstable their
product becomes.
Still, it seems that, from these recent discussions, we have started to come
full circle, which is healthy for the software industry and for us, because
it gives us back something that seemed lost for far too long - a viable choice.
Regards,
Michael Granat
Write Ideas
At 15:36 2/3/2005, you wrote:
>View format settings for a paragraph
>
>1. On the Help menu, click What's This?
>2. When the pointer becomes a question mark, click the text
>you want to check.
>3. When you finish checking your text, press ESC.
Michael E. Granat
(QGTWD) (FOTROTWYB!)
T/as Write Ideas
E-mail: mailto:writeideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: <http://home.pacific.net.au/~megranat/>
Without Prejudice.
E&OE.
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