🚀 go-pugleaf

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