Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!apple!oliveb!pyramid!lll-winken!uunet!cs.dal.ca!aucs!peter From: peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: MS Word 4.0: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Message-ID: <1860@aucs.UUCP> Date: 4 May 89 12:12:58 GMT Organization: School of Computer Science, Acadia Univ., Nova Scotia Lines: 116 I've been using Microsoft Word for a few days now and my general impression is that I really like it. They've fixed up some things I felt were missing or poorly implemented and they added some nice brand new features. Here are some random comments. The GOOD 1. Background repagination I *love* it. It great being able to see those page breaks *now*. And if there is a reason that background pagination is slowing things down, you can turn it off. How many wordprocessors can do this? 2. Page View Very nice as well. This sort of thing can be very helpful when making up transparencies--you get a better "feel" for how much info you're packing on a page. My biggest complaint is that there seems to be no way to have half of one page on the screen and the half of the next page immediately below it. It always snaps the next page to the top of the screen (I'm referring specifically to a full page display, although the same is true for smaller screens). The only reason I can see that they would do this is for better performance. I also noticed that when I turned page numbers on with the Section command they did not appear on the screen in Page View. Putting page numbers in headers or footers does work however. Is this behaviour the way it's supposed to work? 3. Tables Luv'ly. I have a document with some very large tables created in Word 3 using column tabs. From what I can tell, Word 4's table feature will be ideal for me to use instead. They appear to be *very* flexible, although the dialog to set them up is a little awkward. 4. Paragraph Borders I always *hated* the way this was done in version 3. I hardly ever need to box just a single paragraph. More often, I had to put a box around several distinct pieces of text. This usually meant I had to use side by side paragraphs and that looked ugly on the screen. The way they do it now is exactly the way I've felt it should have been done in the first place--select the paragraphs you want to box, and a box appears around the entire group, not each paragraph separately. The user interface for this is also nicely consistent with the table feature. 5. Customization I like this. I know some people have complained, but let's fact it. You can't put every command in a menu, and this at least let's you pick which ones you want. It will be a pain if I have to go to another person's machine and use their Word 4.0 with different menus but it's no different when I go to a machine that doesn't have an extended keyboard or does have an extended keyboard but doesn't have their macros set up like mine. That's the price of individuality. 6. Double clicking... They've added a few little things to the user interface to make things a little nicer. For example, double clicking on the page number window asks you to enter a new page number; double clicking on the split screen spot splits the screen and double clicking on it again closes it; double clicking on a footnote number automatically opens the footnote window with the cursor on the corresponding footnote. Little things like that were sorely missing in the previous version. 7. Support for standard printer dialogs! That was one thing that burned me a lot in version 3. Now I can tell Word I want tall adjusted on by default and we won't get students printing their whole thesis with messes up margins. This will save be a lot of headaches. That enough good points. I could add more, but who really cares. So now for the BAD: 1. Find/replace command What if I want to find all occurrences of Bookman bold and replace it with Times italic. I couldn't do it before and I can't fo it now. Accept of course by using the awkward cmd-option-R/cmd-option-A sequence, but that can be pretty time consuming in a large document and I don't really see it as the same thing. It's annoying to have to keep Fullwrite around just to use its powerful find/replace command for this purpose. I can't believe it would be so difficult to at least let you look for a piece of text that in a particular font. They obviously have the logic implemented in a fashion with the cmd-option-R command, so why not make it more accessible? 2. Superscripts/Subscripts on/off The joke here is that there is no "off" option, just "on". You can turn everything off, and return to the "plain" for the current style, but what if I'm doing something in italics bold and start a superscript. Switching back to plain not only turns off superscripts, but italic and bold as well. It even switches the font if that's something other than normal. Am I missing something here or is there in fact a sub/superscript toggle like in Fullwrite (and many others)? 3. Custom page sizes They seem to have gotten rid of this, or at least buried it somewhere I can't find it. You apparently can still do it for the imagewriter, but I have a document that I wrote in 14 point times on a 10.5 by 12 page which I then printed at a reduction on the laserwriter to give 8.5x11. Can this still be done? Enough for the bad. Now the UGLY: 1. Using negative numbers in the page margin to indicate you want footers/ headers to overlay the main text is the ugliest user interface feature Word has (in my opinion). Why not have a check box that says "Overlay header/footers" on the document or section dialogs. It was ugly in version 3. It's ugly in version 4. 2. I'll let the rest of you fill the rest in... -- Peter Steele, Microcomputer Applications Analyst Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada B0P1X0 (902)542-2201x121 UUCP: {uunet|watmath|utai|garfield}!dalcs!aucs!Peter BITNET: Peter@Acadia Internet: Peter%Acadia.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU