Comments on: Word X: Stalls still there in Panther

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

With all due respect, I don’t think you can assume that you know exactly what every other Mac user needs in terms of word processing.

As far as I know, German doesn’t have any accented characters.

TextEdit is OK (including Panther’s version), but no substitute.

X11 and OO are awfully clunky, and are only able to match Office’s “look-and-feel” circa 1995. They’ve got a long way to go…

I don’t see myself asking every computer user at my employer’s place to download and install and use RagTime for Windows on their machine, just because that’s what *I* would like them to use.

I fully agree that people need to be informed of the alternatives, in case these alternatives might be suitable for their situation. But the fact remains that there are many Mac users out there who have to share Office files with Windows users (back and forth) on a daily basis and for whom no Office alternative does a decent enough job.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been through all this “stop using Word” time and time again.

Why So Many Mac Users Need Microsoft Word

In a nutshell, we each have our own needs. May I ask:

- Do you ever type in French?

- Do you ever have to edit existing Word documents created by other people?

- Do you ever need to use tables?

I sincerely wish I didn’t have to use Word. But I do. That’s all there is to it.

By: Ortwin Zillgen

Ortwin Zillgen — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

that’s what I wanted to point out:
- nothing really changed since Word 5.1 Mac (that’s 10 years ago)
- my written french is poor, but some suppose german to be a 2-byte language and I use that, most of the time
- TextEdit for Panther is quite good at reading and writing Word-documents
- there are alternatives, beside X11 and OpenOffice, like RagTime supporting more than just Word and preserving the Word-tables as working spreadsheets

I think that information is worth spreading, because to many Mac-users think they really need Word. That’s not true, neither for Mac-users nor for Windows-users, nobody is really tyed to that.

By the way office.xml (DTD, Schema) was announced today, interesting parsing.

By: Ortwin Zillgen

Ortwin Zillgen — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

ah, still at Word? My newest one is 5.1, suppose that was in 1991 and the only reason to switch from 4 to 5 was the outliner build in. Later Word-versions didn’t add anything worth upgrading, nothing. 5.1 runs fine in classic (X.2 and X.3), no stalls.
If I’m urged to deliver a “.doc”-document, I’m using 5.1 on my Mac, add an “.doc” to the documentname and nobody ever found out yet that
a) it’s a Mac-document and
b) it’s an elder Word-version.
Next time I’ll use TextEdit and ‘ll wait for the reactions. As far as I tested, nobody will know or care either.

Suppose it’s time to abandon Word X. Use RagTime (Solo is free) for a complete office-solution the Mac-way (Text, Spreadsheet, Layout, Chart, Presentation, Drawing, Import/Export Word and Excel and an array of graphics) Did I forget something. Ah yes, geography is an addon (GeoInsight) and RagTime is Mac and Windows and colour-separation is build in, AppleScript-able/-recordable and – forget it, everything.
http://www.comgrafix.com/ for the Americas.

By: Ortwin Zillgen

Ortwin Zillgen — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

1 no I don’t know … and I’m missing the included outliner of Word

2 no accents but Umlaute äöüÄÖÜ and ß which is SS in uppercase. Depending on circumstances you might need different glyphs depending where the letter is in a word, start – middle – end, but that is not very common nowadays.
Umlaut is easy on german keyboards, but on american ones you need option-u-u für ü. You might consider two keyboards at your Mac.

3 d’accord

4 dito. Will they ever reach?

5 exactly what I recommend. If the recipient uses Word, I send them a word-document exported from my RagTime-text, or a native Excel-doc exported from the RagTime spreadsheet.

6 agreed, I do that all the time. In difficult cases – content structure beyond formatting aka outlines, 1 out of 100 Word-users – I need to use Word 5.1.
I still have Excel 4.x, but RagTime substitutes Excel very well.