Hello John,
Exactly. A $150 upgrade of Office every year or two, forever. I'm so
po'd at the bugs, I fork up the cash. And they load a new set of bugs
to make sure the cycle continues.
You can actually pay Microsoft to attend seminars on how to write
robust code.
As others have said before try Open Office. I just did. The word
processor is quite bloated and I can't say much about its behavior yet.
But I prepared a presentation using its "Impress" part, kind of like
Power Point. This was much more stable than Power Point, didn't crash once.
One reason why I currently stick with Word is the preview feature before
opening a file. Very handy. However, I have learned the hard way by
experiences just like yours to write documents very plainly and only at
the end do the "fancifying". Then it'll crash a lot but at least I have
the core text saved. I do this last bit of work in a file that is
temporarily saved as "temp.doc". When that gets corrupted, oh well. Only
when completely done will it be saved via my file numbering system.
BTW I finished a project and thus a document for a client an hour ago.
Just as I inserted a schematic things became like molasses and a gray
box popped up "Word has generated errors and will be....". Oh man.
Luckily it took out just that temp file. Lost about 5 minutes of work.
Regards, Joerg
