On Jan 14, 2010, at 23:49 , Keith N. McKenna wrote: > > James; > I have never heard of Works being shipped with any Microsoft OS > distribution. It is however shipped pre-installed on systems from many > manufactures including, HP, Dell, etc. It is the manufacture that installs it > on there systems, not shipped with the OS. Now, that being said, to the > average user it amounts to the same thing.
You're right, Keith, and I phrased it badly. It's as you say, OEMs add it. That's how it was with my source. > Not sure why you think it is bad. I use works for certain things on my > systems. Depending on what it is you are doing and the complexity involved, > Works word can a usable tool. If I want more complex formatting for a > document or I need multiple sheets for a spreadsheet I use OOo. You need to > keep a few tools in the toolbox as there is no one size fits all. The 'bad' thing about Works was that nobody as far as I can remember ever had a conversion routine for Works->their product and absolutely not their product->Works, so that a Works user was totally isolated from the rest of the population. Even on the same system, if you have some of your documents in Works format and some in another - Office or OpenOffice - you can't easily convert from one to the other. I don't know - since I haven't used Works since the beginning of the nineties - how easy it is to cut and paste from a Works spreadsheet to Excel, or even whether Works can save its spreadsheet in Excel format, so I am in a sense talking from ignorance. (I have, however a vague memory that Works could not save in Word or Excel format.) But it is the small user base and lack of exchangeablilty that I don't think one can argue with. For simpler formatted stuff one has Wordpad and Notepad or whatever text editor your OS supplies. Although having said that, I'm finding myself using Writer more often for things I would formerly have done in Notepad - simple lists or notes and so on- since I have now moved to a Mac, and the Mac is as likely to open a text document in the terminal as in a text editor! //J --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
