On Feb 16, 2004, at 3:56 PM, Andy G wrote:
On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 22:18:56 -0000, David P <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm trying to "de-Microsoft" my Mac...
Ok - I'm going to stick my neck out here, I foretell much sucking of breath and muttering in the dark corners of the [PCI] list but to Hell with it ;)
I'm a firm believer in using the best application for the job.
If this means using an M$ app then so be it.
As far as I'm concerned one of the best things that M$ has ever done is
the Office suite.
I'm not talking the extended bloatware that the new Office 11 has become
but the key apps - Excel, Powerpoint, Word & Outlook.
In general Office is a prime example of why Monopolies Are Bad.
It is a bloated, buggy, low quality product that gets along in the market only because people are scared to change, and because of that it has no real competition anymore. Were there real competition I suspect it would be very, very good. Microsoft *used* to be able to do that.
Excel, alone, rocks (and remember, it was the spreadsheet that accountants were buying Macs to get back when it was Mac only) and is, imo, the only really 'top of it's class' application Microsoft has done for the Mac (or the PC for that matter), but it's bloating out pretty fast.
It's too bad Apple dumped Resolve; that was good spreadsheet app; I have an old copy I still use it on my laptop.
Word is adequate (imo Word 3 was the high point of that app as a fast, intuitive and usable word processor).
Again, there aren't real competitors out there.
People use Word, not because Word is all that great, but because 'everybody else has it'. (If only Novell hadn't completely borked Word Perfect, then sold it to the soulless heathens at Corel to die a lingering death, we might still have some competition for Word.) Back when Word and WordPerfect were going 'mano a mano', both companies were forced to make their products better, not just bigger.
I cannot count the number of graduate students who have come to us, sometimes in tears, because Word decided to barf all over their thesis or dissertation because Word is not meant for long, complex documents.
Powerpoint sucks giant green donkey ones.
Keynote is so much better than Powerpoint it's not even funny. Just about anything is so much better than Powerpoint it's not funny.
Crayons on a white board are better.
Powerpoint is an app that's been 'enhanced' by a lodge brother with a case of the Handyman's secret weapon.
Powerpoint is the picture in the dictionary next to the word "kludge".
Powerpoint still exists only because MS has driven any other competitor out of business. I suspect that the dotcom crash wasn't caused by anything other than continual exposure to Powerpoint sapping the minds of businessmen.
Milk sours when exposed to Powerpoint, and small children scream in terror.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Powerpoint has some hand in global warming, the heartbreak of psoriasis, the break-up of the Beatles and the death of Elvis. (yes, decades before it even existed it was extending it's evil influence over the world!)
(you might have gotten the impression that I don't like that program very much, and you would be correct...)
When Open Office finally gets ported to the Mac, it's should be a serious contender to MS Office.
It won't. of course. On the PC the main reason people don't switch is that 'It's not MS Office.' and they're terrified of changing; I expect nothing more of the Mac market, even though 98% of then could switch and almost never notice it.
But it's free, it's *very* powerful and it even has stuff that Office doesn't, like a decent drawing application, and PDF output without paying for Adobe Acrobat.
(and it doesn't eat it's own files like Office does, and even opens files Office cannot, like the aforementioned self-eaten files) Why big corporations aren't telling MS to stuff it and going for the free alternative, I have no clue. Perhaps it's all that exposure to Powerpoint presentations...
Outpuke, is, well Outpuke. The application that has facilitated a thousand viruses onto the world gets no quarter from me.
(And don't EVEN get me started on Access...trust me, it's truly a blessing that MS hasn't ported that obscenity to the Mac.)
--
Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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