Archive: Word Processors 1: Inside Fred's World

Our First Look at the New Word Processors (July, 1997)

Volume 1

I intend to post my experiences with and explorations of the latest crop of word processing programs: Word 97, WordPerfect 8, and WordPro 97. Since this is my website, my comments and reviews will be highly subjective. You need to keep in mind that my experiences may differ significantly from other people who may have taken the time to read the manual or call customer support! Nonetheless, I believe my experiences may help other people not only in deciding which word processor to use, but also to solve common problems. On the other hand, you may be able to steer me in the right direction. To that end, I invite your comments (oldfield@nas.net). I will eagerly anticipate my first e-mail that goes something like this …

Fred, you idiot, don't you know that if you just do …. You'll save yourself hours of frustration and your computer will stop crashing too!

Boy, would I like to get an e-mail that told me how to stop my computer from crashing! (Now before you put your fingers in high gear, let me tell you a few suggestions I don't want to get:

Leave the computer turned off
Don't try to install three major office suites on the same machine (along with two major and one minor web-authoring packages, two desktop publishing packages, two major graphics programs and a whole host of other programs, games and .. well who knows what?)
Don't try to do all this on a 486 DX2-66 machine, even if it has 32 megs of RAM.
Buy a Macintosh. I've been tempted, but after watching Atari self-destruct (ten years ago Atari had the state of the art computer but couldn't or wouldn't market it), I've decided to keep to the mainstream. Actually, I'm about to depart somewhat from the mainstream. My (un)trusty old 486 is about to be handed along to my son while I replace it with an AMD K6 machine.

But I digress (I do a lot of that. Indeed, it may be a toss up as to whether I digress more than my computer crashes. In fact, I would win, hands down).

As of mid-July, 1997, I have:

spent a fair bit of time with Word 97
been frustrated by an incomplete install of WordPerfect 8 Suite (and consequent bombing of the program as I'll explain later)
failed to even start up WordPro 97 (that is, I haven't had time to start it up - not that it wouldn't start up!) This first edition will, of necessity, deal mainly with Word 97.

When Windows 95 was released back in August, 1995, there, right beside it on the shelf was Microsoft Office for Windows 95. My first reaction was that it was probably little more than a recompilation for the new 32 bit operating system of the Windows 3.1x version. I decided not to acquire that version. Since then, I've had some experience using both the last Windows 3.1x version and the first Windows 95 version. While the W95 version is more than just a recompilation, it's not a whole lot more. So, what about Word 97?

The icons on the toolbar have been face-lifted with icons that reveal their squarish outlines only when the mouse pointer is over them. There are a couple of new buttons and menu items. Hopefully, it has been improved "under the hood". But the most significant change, at least for me, is the improved Internet features.

Word does a fairly good job of importing, converting and displaying HTML files and vice versa. However, it isn't perfect. I had one unfortunate experience. I imported an HTML document which contained a number of spreadsheet formulas displayed as text (and enclosed within quotation marks). These formulas contained the expression "E7>0". Word mistakenly stripped out the greater than sign assuming it to be the ending of an HTML tag. Unfortunately, I did not discover this until after I had had fifty copies of the document printed. Needless to say, neither I nor my students were impressed when I discovered the error and a number of their formulas had to be corrected. Understandably there can also be problems aligning text with graphics when moving from one type of document to another.

The other major problem I have with Word 97 (and it applies to all versions as well, I believe, to AmiPro/Word Pro: It can be extremely frustrating trying to a) decipher what was mistyped and b) correcting the problem when a document does not format as expected. The problem is that the user entered the wrong formatting commands. Unfortunately, the solution can be most vexing. Also vexing is changing the font size at the beginning of a document. Because the command indicating the previous font size is still there, sooner or later, the document is bound to revert to its former font size. These problems are regrettable, but the real frustration is the difficulty in correcting them. The same or similar problems can crop up in WordPerfect, but its "Reveal Codes" function makes it much easier to spot and correct the problem. With Word, you never know if you have positioned the cursor correctly until you actually delete something.

Still, Word is currently the word processor I use most. This is partially because the computers I use at work run either Win3 or Win 95 versions of Word, and also because I have had the best luck going back and forth with HTML using Word.

When I first started fooling around with HTML a little over a year ago, I tried converting using the then new WordPerfect 7. I was unimpressed with the results. To be fair, I haven't tried it since which means this isn't really a fair statement because I was very inexperienced with HTML, and I also don't really remember what I disliked about the results. On the other hand, I tried to import HTML with WordPerfect 8 with even worse results. The import itself, appeared to go well, but, as soon as I attempted to scroll around the new document, the program died. To be fair, as I stated earlier, the program did not install completely (I tried installing it several times, but it always bombed the computer just before completing the process). Also, I wasn't doing a straight conversion: I was attempting to insert the HTML document into a "master" document that featured much narrower margins. Once the "new" computer arrives, I'll try installing WordPerfect 8 on it and do some more experimenting.

I'm not going to "recommend" a particular word processor - at least not yet. If your needs are modest, you should be happy with any one of these programs. The usual commands are common to all of them. More advanced formatting commands are located under different menus, but most are easy to use on any of these programs. I'm trying to use Word's "master document" feature with my latest student text book and - well I've got to save something for the next installment!

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