Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!todd
From: todd@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Todd Ogasawara)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: WordPerfect 5.0 & 5.1 VS Microsoft Word
Message-ID: <7936@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 29 May 90 08:00:45 GMT
References: <90123.173417LAIH@QUCDN.BITNET> <1990May3.231155.18625@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> <54571@microsoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: todd@uhccux.UUCP (Todd Ogasawara)
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 41

In article <54571@microsoft.UUCP> georgem@microsoft.UUCP (George MOORE) writes:
>I personally find that nothing compares to Winword in the amount of
>malleability it provides.  I've been really disappointed in what the

I use Windows Word and found that it lacks a bunch of features that are in
the older Word 5.0.

1. It cannot shade paragraphs, etc.
2. You cannot arbitrarily place lines around paragraphs (try this.. How can
   you place lines above and below the same paragraph?).

There are other oddities.. I find it odd that Windows Word cannot do a
number of things that are easy to do in Word 5.0. Conversely, there are
things that Winword can do that are terribly hard to do in Word 5.0 (table
creation comes to mind).

>To me, as a C programmer, the most powerful aspect of Winword is the
>fact that the entire program sits on top of a BASIC interpreter.  Now
>I know a lot of you shudder at the mention of the word "BASIC", but

I happen to think that WordBASIC is a neat idea myself. But the darn thing
sure is slow (and I use Winword on a 25MHz 386 with 32K of instruction
cache and 5M of expanded RAM).

BTW.. If you want to see WordBASIC die real bad, try this... Go through the
motions that are needed to send a document to the printer. When you get to
the point where Winword wants either "Ok" to send it or "Cancel" to abort
the print request, select "Cancel". Then have fun watching Winword totally
barf while trying to get out of printing. You will also find that a number
of parameters are set very oddly (view is set to "all" and measurement is
set to "points" no matter what the settings were before you entered the
print request).

I find that I like Winword a lot, but it sure is a buggy piece of software.
It feels more like a beta version than a production release...todd

-- 
Todd Ogasawara, U. of Hawaii
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