D
David Nebenzahl
Sorry for reviving an old, dead thread, but I ran across something I'd
like to respond to. In a thread entitled "Which Os is better among the
Windows Vista", William Sommerwerck wrote, regarding Microsoft Word:
I'd like to challenge that by saying that Microsoft Word *can be* a
quite usable desktop-publishing program, in fact a very powerful and
flexible one.
That is not to say that it's not without major problems. But let me tell
my story:
I worked for a company as a technical writer, producing user manuals
among other things. Full-blown, long manuals. I started out using
Ventura Publisher, the old GEM versions that you described above. It
worked OK, and at the time was really the only thing available (for the
PC, at any rate) that would even do the job I needed to do.
Then Ventura decided to Windows-ize the program. You probably remember
this. Without wasting too many words on the subject, they basically
broke it beyond recognition. I remember throwing my hands up in despair;
the new version sucked so badly that it was unusable.
I have a minor claim to fame, in that the owner of the company I worked
for was friends with Rick Altman, who you may remember as the Ventura
"guru"; Rick published several books and software add-ons for VP. I was
actually able to talk to the guy. I don't think he liked me very much,
because I basically vented upon him my utter frustration with the
abominable new version. He did agree with me on most of the complaints I
had, but of course he was pretty powerless to do anything about it.
Anyhow, to make a long story less long, this began my search for another
tool to write my manuals with. We briefly toyed with PageMaker: another
utter failure. Sure, you could coax a long document out of it, but it
was a pain in the ass. (Just one example: tables in PM are embedded
objects, not native, so anytime you want to change anything in a table,
you basically have to invoke a whole 'nother application, edit the
table, save it, then re-embed it in the document. No thanks!)
Because of my antipathy to all things Micro$oft, it hadn't even occurred
to me to try Word, and I had simply assumed that it wouldn't cut the
mustard. I don't remember how I ended up using it; probably total
frustration at every other available publishing program drove me to it.
In any case, after getting over my initial distaste for it, I discovered
that not only could it do everything I had done with Ventura, but it
could do many things better, and it could do a lot of things VP couldn't do.
The latter category includes such things as text references, like "for
more information, see _______ on page X". With VP, I had to do these by
hand; I put in the text, replacing the page number with a certain
string, then when I got ready to print the manual, I'd go through the
document with a seach and replace, find the referenced page number by
hand, and type it in.
Pain in the ass! With Word, I could insert a bookmark in the text. Then
when it came time to print, I simply did the "update fields" command,
and voila! instant page numbers.
Before I go too far, I should acknowledge that Word does indeed have
many, many flaws. You talked about "unstable image placement"; how about
images disappearing entirely? For an extreme example, imagine you have a
120-page document with hundreds of images in it, as mine did. Then
imagine opening your document to work on it and discovering that each
and every image had been replaced by a red frame with a big red "X"
through it!
This did happen to me, but it was with an older version of Word (pre-97,
forget which one exactly) that also had bad problems handling EPS
images, which I used extensively. But these problems were fixed in the
next release.
Regarding your experiences with image placement, it's true that images
can be a bitch to position correctly, and can move mysteriously. But it
turns out that this behavior is correctable. The problem is that most
people don't know how to correct it, and that the default,
out-of-the-box settings can cause this kind of behavior.
Out of the box, Word is *not* ready for handling long documents. But it
can be tamed. The first thing I do upon installing Word is to go through
the option settings and, for the most part, disable all the automatic
crap that causes so many problems. Things like autoformatting tables,
bullets, etc.; automatic text substitution (although I do like a few
things here, like turning "--" into real typographic em dashes,
formatting fractions, a few other things). I certainly don't want Word
turning things like "(O" into smiley faces, or inserting hyperlinks for
URLs or email addresses. All this is settable through the Options dialog.
But I have to say that I came to respect Word's functionality for
creating long documents, including tables of contents, indexes, tables
and cross-references. Its use of "styles" for global formatting is
extremely powerful and sensible, and helps immensely in long document
creation. (Pity 99% of Word users have no idea how to use styles: ever
tried to "fix" a document where people changed fonts, boldface, etc.,
every other word or so, inserted tabs to format text, used dashes to
create tables?)
A very useful skill in using Word is knowing what doesn't work and
either staying away from it or working around it. I never had the
problems with automatic pagination you described (maybe you were using
an earlier version that me: I used 97 for a long time, now use 2000),
but there are lots of things that don't work as well as they should or
just plain don't work at all. But for the most part, its features work
well enough to make it an appropriate tool for long documents.
One thing I wanted to do but never could make work was master documents
and subdocuments, which would have been nice, as my manuals were divided
into chapters. I never did determine if this facility even worked at
all, and just gave up. It made for very large (multi-megabyte)
documents, but they were still manageable.
I'd summarize Word by saying it's an extremely powerful program (you
might not realize just how powerful it is until you start playing with
VB and macros) with a very badly-designed user interface that is quite
suitable for documents of any length.
--
Made From Pears: Pretty good chance that the product is at least
mostly pears.
Made With Pears: Pretty good chance that pears will be detectable in
the product.
Contains Pears: One pear seed per multiple tons of product.
(with apologies to Dorothy L. Sayers)
like to respond to. In a thread entitled "Which Os is better among the
Windows Vista", William Sommerwerck wrote, regarding Microsoft Word:
I'd like to challenge that by saying that Microsoft Word *can be* a
quite usable desktop-publishing program, in fact a very powerful and
flexible one.
That is not to say that it's not without major problems. But let me tell
my story:
I worked for a company as a technical writer, producing user manuals
among other things. Full-blown, long manuals. I started out using
Ventura Publisher, the old GEM versions that you described above. It
worked OK, and at the time was really the only thing available (for the
PC, at any rate) that would even do the job I needed to do.
Then Ventura decided to Windows-ize the program. You probably remember
this. Without wasting too many words on the subject, they basically
broke it beyond recognition. I remember throwing my hands up in despair;
the new version sucked so badly that it was unusable.
I have a minor claim to fame, in that the owner of the company I worked
for was friends with Rick Altman, who you may remember as the Ventura
"guru"; Rick published several books and software add-ons for VP. I was
actually able to talk to the guy. I don't think he liked me very much,
because I basically vented upon him my utter frustration with the
abominable new version. He did agree with me on most of the complaints I
had, but of course he was pretty powerless to do anything about it.
Anyhow, to make a long story less long, this began my search for another
tool to write my manuals with. We briefly toyed with PageMaker: another
utter failure. Sure, you could coax a long document out of it, but it
was a pain in the ass. (Just one example: tables in PM are embedded
objects, not native, so anytime you want to change anything in a table,
you basically have to invoke a whole 'nother application, edit the
table, save it, then re-embed it in the document. No thanks!)
Because of my antipathy to all things Micro$oft, it hadn't even occurred
to me to try Word, and I had simply assumed that it wouldn't cut the
mustard. I don't remember how I ended up using it; probably total
frustration at every other available publishing program drove me to it.
In any case, after getting over my initial distaste for it, I discovered
that not only could it do everything I had done with Ventura, but it
could do many things better, and it could do a lot of things VP couldn't do.
The latter category includes such things as text references, like "for
more information, see _______ on page X". With VP, I had to do these by
hand; I put in the text, replacing the page number with a certain
string, then when I got ready to print the manual, I'd go through the
document with a seach and replace, find the referenced page number by
hand, and type it in.
Pain in the ass! With Word, I could insert a bookmark in the text. Then
when it came time to print, I simply did the "update fields" command,
and voila! instant page numbers.
Before I go too far, I should acknowledge that Word does indeed have
many, many flaws. You talked about "unstable image placement"; how about
images disappearing entirely? For an extreme example, imagine you have a
120-page document with hundreds of images in it, as mine did. Then
imagine opening your document to work on it and discovering that each
and every image had been replaced by a red frame with a big red "X"
through it!
This did happen to me, but it was with an older version of Word (pre-97,
forget which one exactly) that also had bad problems handling EPS
images, which I used extensively. But these problems were fixed in the
next release.
Regarding your experiences with image placement, it's true that images
can be a bitch to position correctly, and can move mysteriously. But it
turns out that this behavior is correctable. The problem is that most
people don't know how to correct it, and that the default,
out-of-the-box settings can cause this kind of behavior.
Out of the box, Word is *not* ready for handling long documents. But it
can be tamed. The first thing I do upon installing Word is to go through
the option settings and, for the most part, disable all the automatic
crap that causes so many problems. Things like autoformatting tables,
bullets, etc.; automatic text substitution (although I do like a few
things here, like turning "--" into real typographic em dashes,
formatting fractions, a few other things). I certainly don't want Word
turning things like "(O" into smiley faces, or inserting hyperlinks for
URLs or email addresses. All this is settable through the Options dialog.
But I have to say that I came to respect Word's functionality for
creating long documents, including tables of contents, indexes, tables
and cross-references. Its use of "styles" for global formatting is
extremely powerful and sensible, and helps immensely in long document
creation. (Pity 99% of Word users have no idea how to use styles: ever
tried to "fix" a document where people changed fonts, boldface, etc.,
every other word or so, inserted tabs to format text, used dashes to
create tables?)
A very useful skill in using Word is knowing what doesn't work and
either staying away from it or working around it. I never had the
problems with automatic pagination you described (maybe you were using
an earlier version that me: I used 97 for a long time, now use 2000),
but there are lots of things that don't work as well as they should or
just plain don't work at all. But for the most part, its features work
well enough to make it an appropriate tool for long documents.
One thing I wanted to do but never could make work was master documents
and subdocuments, which would have been nice, as my manuals were divided
into chapters. I never did determine if this facility even worked at
all, and just gave up. It made for very large (multi-megabyte)
documents, but they were still manageable.
I'd summarize Word by saying it's an extremely powerful program (you
might not realize just how powerful it is until you start playing with
VB and macros) with a very badly-designed user interface that is quite
suitable for documents of any length.
--
Made From Pears: Pretty good chance that the product is at least
mostly pears.
Made With Pears: Pretty good chance that pears will be detectable in
the product.
Contains Pears: One pear seed per multiple tons of product.
(with apologies to Dorothy L. Sayers)
