Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!ox.com!yale!cmcl2!esquire!esquire.dpw.com From: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps Subject: Re: merge quotes in Word 4 -- Try Nisus' Mail Merge Keywords: mail merge nisus word Message-ID: <2859@esquire.dpw.com> Date: 28 Nov 90 21:43:15 GMT References: <14864.9011201902@s4.sys.uea.ac.uk> <4088@network.ucsd.edu> <1990Nov28.145957.10136@rodan.acs.syr.edu> Sender: news@DPW.COM Reply-To: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten) Organization: Davis Polk & Wardwell Lines: 66 In-reply-to: rsholmes@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Rich Holmes) In article <1990Nov28.145957.10136@rodan.acs.syr.edu>, rsholmes@rodan (Rich Holmes) writes: >Is anyone else as sick and tired as I am of seeing this BLATANT ADVERTISING >for Nisus any time someone asks a question about MS Word?? I feel like I should come to Mr. Matousek's aid here. True, telling someone that another product will solve his or her problems isn't always helpful -- but sometimes it is. If you've got something that just has to be done, and Word can't do it (or it can, but it requires hours of tedious manual labor to set up), perhaps getting a copy of Nisus would be a good idea. Jon isn't selling them, you know. You could just as well find a friend with a copy, or perhaps a sympathetic dealer. Let's say I asked the net: How do I align things *precisely* in PageMaker? Not just by eye, but exactly. If someone were to answer, "You can't," that would be informative, but not very helpful. But an answer that said, "You can't, but did you know that both Quark and DesignStudio will let you do this?", would tell me a little more, and maybe pique my curiousity about those products. Such an answer does two things. For one, it tells me one way to solve my problem. For another, it lets me know that not everything out there is PageMaker, and that there are other programs with different -- and sometimes greater -- capabilities in certain areas. If someone were to ask me how to turn fonts into outlines in Freehand, I'd say that I didn't know, but that I knew you could do it in Illustrator 3.0, and that it works like a charm, with almost no effort at all. It wouldn't occur to me that just because that person might not own Illustrator 3.0 that he *wouldn't* want to hear that answer. Perhaps he *does* own Illustrator, but just didn't realize that he could do that! Last point. The Mac world has started making the unfortunate assumption that word processing on the Mac is Word and Word is word processing on the Mac. It just isn't so. I used to use Word all the time, but having switched to Nisus I dread ever going back to it. It really is *that* much better. It's one of the few products that do some things *so* much better than its competition that it's a shame more people don't know about it. Things people struggle doing with Word (or can't do at all), Nisus does with very little effort. So, while it seems like Mr. Matousek is constantly hawking Nisus, I think he's really just doing his best to make people aware of the alternatives that are out there. It's a relatively little-known and little-used product, but it's really so good that I think people should appreciate hearing every now and again that there are choices other than Word for word processing tasks. The fact that a demo is available makes it that much more attractive, since it can be tried without risk and at very little cost. Hope that wasn't too long or too much of a diatribe... By the way, are you all too young to remember the days when all Mac fanatics did was go around telling people, "You know, you could do that in about 2 minutes on a Mac...", no matter what the question was? I remember them fondly. Nothing like constantly telling people how great a little-known and little-used product is... :-) -- Steve Baumgarten | "New York... when civilization falls apart, Davis Polk & Wardwell | remember, we were way ahead of you." baumgart@esquire.dpw.com | cmcl2!esquire!baumgart | - David Letterman