I'm not trying to defend Microsoft or anything but it can be configured to
make it a bit more metric friendly.
The following instructions are for Office 2000, I'm not sure about other
versions but I imagine they too have similar options although the menus and
dialogs may not be the same.
The measurement units
(i) Click on the Tools menu and select Options
(ii) Click on the 'General' tab
(iii) Towards the bottom is combo box (drop down list) labelled
'measurement units'
(iv) Click that and select 'millimetres'
(v) Click on OK
The ruler will unfortunately display dots at intervals of 2.5 mm with
numeric indications every 20 mm and tick marks every 10 mm. I appreciate
they can't display individual millimetres at normal magnfication in but it
would have been better to display them at 2 mm intervals when the display
resolution allows. Not too big a deal though, just focus on every other dot
which is 5 mm (midway between tick marks and numbers). (Not as bad as some
applications I've come across though where the rulers absolutely hopeless!)
However there is better news on the page margins front.
(i) Click the file menu and select Page Setup
(ii) Set the margins how you prefer them (you'll be able to use mm after
taking the above steps)
(iii) Do all the settings you want throughout the 4 tabs (including paper
size)
(iv) Go back to the margins tab where you will see a 'defaults..' button
at the bottom left.
(v) Click on that and you'll be asked of you want to save the settings to
the NORMAL template.
Click on Yes and it is done. From then on all new documents will default to
those page settings.
I hope that's useful
Phil Hall
>Jim Elwell
Pat Naughtin wrote:
I have set the default ruler to metric and the Microsoft Company has,
by default, divided the ruler into quarters of centimetres.
I had never noticed this before, but I hate Word and rarely use it.
WordPerfect divides the ruler into millimeters,
Another choice is the office suite from Openoffice. It is open source and
free just like the Firefox browser. Version 2.0 has just come out.
The menus and commands are similar to Word. It is metric by default. For
example the default margins are 20 mm rather than 25.4 mm.
I have been using it for a few days now and am very pleased with it.
http://www.openoffice.org
Terry
