On Aug 26, 2006, at 5:18 AM, Thane Sherrington wrote:
At 01:00 AM 26/08/2006, Anthony Q. Martin wrote:
You're pretty clueless here, Thane.
Anthony, once again, I've managed to personally offend you. I
apologize. I didn't mean to suggest that you and your school were
a bunch of people who just blindly followed the MS train because
you were unwilling to consider other alternatives. There are
probably very good reasons for a university to choose closed source
(and specifically MS Office, which arguably has one of the worst
word processors of any close sourced suite) that I'm not aware of.
Once again, I bow to your greater knowledge and wisdom and will
start campaigning for our local school to switch back to MS Office.
T
I've worked off an on for years at a publishing company. We get
documents in in every format imaginable. We primarily use WordPerfect
suite thanks to a large variety of legacy processing macros. (Of
course that's not an option of Mac--our primary production platform--
so we have to use PCs for part of the work.)
I have to say that WordPerfect is an absolute POS. You think MS is
bad with security updates? I installed WP on a new computer the other
day ... had to download Wordperfect suite SP1 -- ~90MB. Reboot. then
SP2 ... ~70mb ... reboot. SP3.... ~60mb. (and I JUST had WP
installed out of the suite--no Paradox or Quatro pro.) Reboot. Not to
mention it was years before WP Suite worked properly with non-admin
rights (we actually STILL run all our domain users as admin between
WP suite was so messed up, and maybe still is). It crashes far, far
more often than MS Office and while it does have some extremely nice
features, imho it is a hundred times more of a PITA than Word (which
CAN be a PITA in many other ways).
What's the closed source competition then? Pages for Mac? Sure it's
nice for very basic and very amateur work--not suitable for us. I
installed OpenOffice for people at work who don't work in production
(marketing, accounting, etc)--universally they hated it and wanted MS
Office back. That was a year or two ago--maybe things have changed
for the better, but even then OpenOffice.org seemed to suffer from
bloat almost worse than MS Office.
~shrug~ I mainly wish that MS Office for Mac would be a bit more
feature complete with the PC version and faster...
And just to be clear--I'm basically saying that all the options suck...
Scott
