Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!wpg!tulane!barad
From: barad@tulane.tulane.edu (Herb Barad)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Reports (tm) for HyperCard
Message-ID: <119@tulane.tulane.edu>
Date: 24 Apr 88 12:25:14 GMT
References: <4536@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Reply-To: barad@tulane.UUCP (Herb Barad)
Organization: C.S. Dept., Tulane Univ., New Orleans, LA
Lines: 27
Keywords: merge, Xref
Summary: Yes, MS Word does break - arghh.

In article <4536@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> hartquis@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (E. Eugene Hartquist) writes:
>I tried using a mail merge file in much the same way as the 
>XREF stack does it, but MS Word is very fragile here and it 
>breaks when I try to list more than 100 or so addresses.  It 
>is also very good at hiding problems when you try to debug a 
>document/mail merge file combination.  You often get some 
>meaningless message and no information about where in your 
>merge to look for the problem.  (Take note Mr. Gates, here is 
>an excellent area to target for improving Word.)

Yup.  I have to agree.  Ever since I wrote Xref, I have been extremely
frustrated for the same reason.  MS Word chokes on any document
that is big.  I wrote and tested Xref with small documents (~10 pages),
and then I tried it on my thesis - BINGO!  Well, it's for this reason
that I have no longer tried to improve Xref.  I had a lot of things in
mind: more options to format bibliographies and cross-references
the way others might like it (not just the way I needed it), XCMDs
and XFCNs to speed things up, etc.

Maybe someday Microsoft will fix Word.  I'm not going to wait.  I have
seen a demo of FullWrite.  It doesn't handle bibliographies quite the
way I want, but maybe I can adapt Xref for FullWrite in particular...
Hmm, just a thought for now.

-- 
Herb Barad	Electrical Engineering Dept., Tulane Univ.
USENET:		barad@tulane.uucp
INTERNET:	barad@tulane.edu