My wife is a trainee teacher, so finally after 5 years of studentdom, she's experiencing things like "Having to work on the weekend". While this annoys her, it pleases me no end since I've been the one that's had to make the excuses before now.
At the moment she's doing some sort of lesson planning, presentation writing, and other stuff. She has spent most of the day so far swearing at Bill Gates for the abomination that is MS Office XP. "Why does it have to assume it knows what's best for me???" I hear. And "Why won't it let me put that there?". And the best so far: "I'm going to take a gun, and drive to Seattle".
I really feel for authors who have to use Word. I'm really hoping Star Office 6 can open a new world of simpler word processing.
There are days when I want the SysAdmin edition of The Inmates are Running the Asylum (That'd be the version with 6" metal spikes, set on a 4' stick) and just start thwacking people with it until they understand.
If you've never read it, you should.
Re:Ah, Word...
hfb on 2002-01-20T17:38:47
Another fine book is Why Things Bite Back which is in a similar vein as The Inmates are Running the Asylum but not focused on software/computers as much.
SO will likely never replace MSO not only because it still sucks in very annoying ways and isn't completely compatible with all office documents but MSO has the critical mass of humans who use it. MSO for the Mac OS X is also a major step forward for them...it's quite reasonable actually. AppleWorks was useful but it never really caught on due to file exchange and compatibility problems. Noone wants to go back to those awful programs we all used to use in the late 80s to read each others documents.
Re:Ah, Word...
Elian on 2002-01-21T02:53:38
AppleWorks (ex-ClarisWorks) is, at this point, really nice. Well, it's always been really nice, but it's file format support used to be a bit dodgy. Much better now. I've set books in it, though I much prefer either FrameMaker or PageMaker for that.That's one thing I will give StarOffice/OpenOffice. It's got sweet filter support--I've not found anything else that'll read All-in-1 files. (Even if the filters crashed at random times during file conversions, though I suppose after the 1000th file in a run it's not too surprising to see it fall down and go boom...)
StarOffice is a farce. The only difference between StarOffice and Office is that Office is faster and has different bugs.
--Nat
Re:Word
vsergu on 2002-01-20T19:49:30
Do you have all the autocorrect and autoformat stuff turned off? Aside from the damned paperclip, that seems to be the biggest problem with MS Word. Hell, even the "smart quotes", which seem like a reasonable idea (except for the nonstandard way MS does them for HTML), are annoying because they try to handle single quotes too, so now the majority of occurrences of "class of 'xx" or "'tis the season" I see seem to start with an opening single quote instead of an apostrophe (that is, the ones that don't say 'class of "xx"' or "t'is the season"). Smart quotes for single quotes should just replace ' with closing quote and ` with opening.
Re:Word
Matts on 2002-01-21T10:26:38
I guess this happens when you spend day-in day-out in a word processor. However Word XP seems to me to be very unfriendly to the uninitiated. What surprised me is the times I got asked for help, Word seemed harder to use than previous releases.
Ah well, glad I know XML. Suits me just fine:-)
