Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!sri-unix!weems%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa From: weems%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Newsgroups: net.micro.pc Subject: Microsoft Word Message-ID: <17390@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Tue, 6-Mar-84 22:15:00 EST Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.17390 Posted: Tue Mar 6 22:15:00 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 13-Mar-84 00:56:43 EST Lines: 30 From: Charles WeemsI was allowed to play with Word at a local dealer for several hours. My general impressions are that I like it but it has some definite shortcomings. Some problems I ran into were: Very slow start-up, very slow file writes to floppy. The screen area is only 19 lines long because they use fixed, rather than pop-up, menus. The style sheets are difficult to deal with and poorly documented (however they are also very powerful -- probably a good design choice if only the help info and manuals would explain them). The command system is a bit baroque without the mouse. With the mouse I found editing to be very quick and easy. The editor shows you exactly how the document will appear except for page breaks, headings, line numbers and so on. Word has a number of very nice features. The mouse works very well. It does cut-and-paste very quickly. You can do multiple columns. Italics, boldface and underlines all show up on the screen. It can also be used for writing raw text files (like source code). It has a built in glossary system that allows you to write with abbreviations that it fills in for you. It supports a good collection of printers. The new version (due out real-soon-now) will allow you to define your own printer driver through an interactive driver-builder. They specifically claim that this will make it possible to use laser printers. In summary, I really liked a lot of the things that they did. I can deal with most of the faults. I would only recommend using it with the mouse.