More MS-Word Complaints

By Saturday September 11, 2004

“Dubious HTML creation”

I’m a professor and I use Word extensively for creating documents that eventually get posted in either WebCT or Blackboard as HTML documents. I write in Word because I’m comfortable with it and then Copy and Paste into FrontPage for final clean up. I also keep my grades in Excel and paste them into FrontPage to post for the students.

When Office XP came out, the XML caused me no end of problems. You can’t easily clean it out in FrontPage and it does not display correctly in either WebCT or Blackboard. It was a major pain until I figured out how to keep a copy of Office 97 on my machine so I could avoid these hassles.

I posted a detailed descriptions of all my XML-related problems to the Microsoft web site. When I never heard back, I sent them a very long letter on letterhead. I never heard back from that either. So much for the digital nervous system Bill Gates discusses in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought!

At home, I still use Office 97 exclusively. Other than the XML problems, I cannot even tell the difference when I go to work and use Office 2003. As far as I can tell, they have not added one single useful feature to either Word or Excel since 97. (Although, to be completely fair, they did fix a bunch of bugs in the Equation Editor in later releases. I use it a lot but I doubt you have ever even needed it.)

Dr. Ronny Richardson
Professor of Management
Southern Polytechnic State



9 Comments
  1. Stephane Rodriguez says:
    9/11/2004 at 3:32 pm

    Here are three differences between 2003 and 97 :
    – Office 2003 requires a fast PC with a lot of memory.
    – Office Word 97 has a simple vector shapes UI that doesn’t annoy users with that stupid canvas thing, resulting in floating objects that don’t work well with the pagination, indenting, placement, … even when told to do so. Huge productivity loss ; ease-of-use loss ; predictability loss.
    – Office Word 97 will insist on popping message boxes when opening documents (security provides you to open the document in full read/write access, so you open a copy of it, even though once opened you can actually save the document anywa) – probably the result of a change in the way Word documents are stored with more recent revisions.

  2. TomLaurelD says:
    9/12/2004 at 12:44 am

    I use MSword 2000 and I paste my words into
    Netscape Commincator 4.79 Composer and that seems to work fine.
    I do not use any fancy html I just paste it online very simply.

  3. John Ryle says:
    9/12/2004 at 3:57 am

    Well, there’s one thing that Word 2003 has that no other version of Word has ever had: the cool “half-barrel” button effects.

    Unfortunately, it is missing the “origami cat” Office Assistant that I relied on so heavily in Word 97.

    So I guess my definition of Word Paradise would be: cool “half-barrel” button effects PLUS “origami cat” Office Assistant. How about it, Microsoft? I’ve got to have SOME sort of excuse to want to upgrade to Word 2005!

  4. noderat says:
    9/12/2004 at 11:29 am

    Frontpage? FRONTPAGE? Excuse me while I kill myself. Anybody who uses Frontpage as a HTML editor must be shot. I’m tired of seeing that crap floating around the web. Gah.

  5. Robert Schwartz says:
    9/12/2004 at 7:06 pm

    I run my own business and pay for my own software. I use MS Word 97 for general word processing. I will stop using it when somebody sticks a gun to my head and says stop. I will then switch to Open Office, because I like the price($0.00) and it does everything I need it to do.

    I have no reason to switch to a more recent version of Word. They may have slick features, but I only write short letters and simple memos, and I do not need the features. I only switched from Word 95 to Word 97 a few months ago because I had to buy a new printer and the new printers drivers could not communicate with Word 95. Frankly, for my purposes, Word 2.0 was just fine.

    When I was using Word 95, I could not read .doc files from Word 2XXX. Open Office could. So can the free reader program from the Microsoft website.

    I do not code a lot of HTML. what litle I do, I do with the composer module of the Mozilla suite.

    For what the Professor wants, OpenOffice is the superior app and the price is right.

    TomLaurelD: Do your self a favor get rid of Netscape 4.79 ASAP. Netscape 7.2 has been issued. It is bassed on Mozilla 1.7 and is much, much better. More stable, faster and slicker.

  6. Tim Almond says:
    9/13/2004 at 4:14 am

    I’ll concur with Robert.

    In fact, I’ve just written a 20 page proposal in OpenOffice.org and apart from having trouble with numbering (a learning issue – although it looks more powerful than Word), it was fine for me.

    I then sent it to the customer as a PDF file (they don’t have OpenOffice.org, but I’m trying to spread the word.

  7. Manoel Guimaraes says:
    9/14/2004 at 10:43 am

    I´ve been using Word 2000 for two years. I use a lot of the “fancy” features of WinWord (style sheets, big macros for reformatting files and search and replace characters, characters counting, etc.). Last may I had to spend four weeks using Word 97 in an old machine (Pentium 100).
    I didn´t notice any important difference but that Word97+win95 runs fast on a Pentium 100 than Word2k+Win98SE on a Celeron433. And 2k hangs more frequently…

  8. Ed Dinovo says:
    9/14/2004 at 1:46 pm

    I agree with Stephane that the new canvas feature is a real pain. It is technically possible to get the canvas over what you want to draw on, but it is quite frustrating. Like Dr. Richardson my documents are filled with objects such as equation editor (math type) and objects pasted in from several different vendors of CADs, simulators, and development environments. For documents like these I have to say that Microsoft has drastically increased the stability of Word. Who remembers the bizarre, dreaded “cannot save document” errors of Word97? I used to have issues with work being lost; all these problems have been resolved with OfficeXP and up.
    Like most have noticed, Office2003 just seems to be a beautification exercise – but I like the results. In the future I hope Microsoft adds to VBA with some kind of C# for Applications to stay abreast with OpenOffice’s Java interfaces.

  9. thetracer says:
    9/14/2004 at 9:24 pm

    I agree about the Word thing. I use it professionally for documents. The canvas thing just kills me.
    But it is about just what we need and are used to. I have been dragged into the future and IT IS GOOD as soon as you figure out how to do it. Maybe different progs, etc.
    I don’t like MS but I depend on Word just for compatibility with all the stuff.


0

Bad Behavior has blocked 5003 access attempts in the last 7 days.