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Subject:Re: A Good Word for Word 6 From:Sue Heim <SUE -at- RIS -dot- RISINC -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 27 Apr 1995 09:59:25 PST
John Rennish wrote (and very condescendingly, I thought!!) in
response to Richard Davenport's message on Word 6:
> You must have *very* simple formatting. We routinely have major problems
> with documents less than half that long. Besides frequent crashes, we have
> the joy of spooling for over an hour for 12 minutes of printing on an HP
> LJIII, errors in finding bookmarks, dead slow performance on a 486-33,
> inability to save after one small text change (Word sometimes apparently
> makes the computer think the file is infinite in size), out of memory after
> one small text change in a header or footer, loss of style functions, and
> other bad things. I cannot recommend this product for larger projects,
> period. The only really good thing about Word 6.0 under Windows is that it's
> faster than Word 6.0 on a Mac. As for usability, our group intends to keep
> Word with greatly simplified templates as the standard for casual writers,
> but the professionals will be using something more robust.
First of all, I use Word 6 almost exclusively, for manuals that are
about 350 pages long. No, my formatting is not "simple." Nor do I
output to an HPLJIII anymore (if you want to speed up production, I
would recommend getting a better/faster printer). Yes, I too use lots
of bitmaps. No, I do not have memory problems, saving problems or any
other problems.Yes, I use several add-on utilities -- ClickBook and
Doc-To-Help. Yes, I use a wide variety of style sheets. And yes, I am
currently using a 486/33 (soon to upgrade to a Pentium).
I agree with Richard Davenport that Word 6 is more than adequate for
*my* needs. Please do not trash a product that is not "trash," nor a
product that is widely used.
I think that any "blanket" statement deriding the value of a product
does not serve anyone's interest. If you have memory problems, maybe
you should have someone look at your system. If you have printing
problems, maybe you should evaluate other printers. But blaming all
your woes on a word processing package is not the answer. BTW, for
your info, I also have Ventura and PageMaker available, should I
decide I want to play around with desktop publishing packages. I am
also familiar with Frame, so I am not making an uninformed response.
Wow! Did someone light my fire??
...sue
---------------------
Sue Heim
Research Information Systems
Email: Sue -at- ris -dot- risinc -dot- com
