Microsoft undoubtedly has excellent programmers, who, unfortunately, often have to cope with their client's wishes - in their case the client is probably their marketing department, whose demands are for a do-everything product so they can tout the perceived benefits that will bring. In essence though, most users only want to type some text, paragraph it, add some underlining, bold or italic formatting so it looks pretty when they put it on the boss's desk, and maybe some pictures and graphs as well. There are other users, a relative few in number, who do want all the bells and whistles, and use it almost like a publishing program: these guys love it, but they will use it for everything instead of picking a more appropriate tool. My granddaughter learnt to use MS Publisher at school for her projects, and now wants to use it for any text job - not the right tool at all!
The worst problem I have had with Word have been disentangling RTF format code from text for one client who needed to export the text into a non-compatible application: fortunately, MS programmers were consistent in their structure of those formatting blocks, making the job relatively simple to complete. The continuing problem with Word is when users design web pages with it: in one instance, the resulting HTML had 546 lines of CSS styling against 90 lines of actual page design! I used to use Samna's Ami which became Ami Pro after Lotus bought it: I still do for some documents which rely on a template, but now use Word for some of its features such as its superior interactive spell-checking, for example. The default styles I can use or remove as I like, and I can design new styles and make them part of the system easily enough to make it worthwhile doing so. I worked on the very first release of Access: my co-director wrote a very ambitious database program for our state health authority, which worked but was a bit creaky in parts. The same basic program design, forms tables, code etc., has been upgraded through versions 2-2007 without significant work, and is now running under Vista and Office 2007. That's not a bad record for Microsoft. Where they did drop the ball was with Excel - there were, IIRC, two changes where macros had to be completely rewritten. Lotus, on the other hand, like Pentax, has maintained compatibility from version to version, so that macros I wrote in version 1a still work in Lotus 1-2-3 version 97( the latest I have kept), and you can mix keyboard macros with LotusScript code in the same project. I don't subscribe to the view that MS is some sort of market-stealing demon: if the products didn't work well enough, millions of organisations across the world would have turned to something else long before now. After all, WordPerfect had the market share for a very long time, but blew it with the awful interface even before WYSIWYG. Along came Ami and Word, and pfft!, WordPerfect died. Just like Ashton-Tate and Borland, who could not get a good database design like dBase into the WYSIWYG world, and whose design interface was much harder to work with than the Access or VB models. John Coyle Brisbane, Australia -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
