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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 Weems 

I 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.