Who uses MS Office 200x?

[hop-frog]

Everytime I use MS Office 2002 (at school) it suprises me that this is the majority of the world's office program of choice. It has already chewed up and eatten 2 homework assigments and a nearly took a 3rd. It is like MS added a "random autoformatting" feature where it literally randomly moves and formats my text exactly where I don't want it, even changing the fonts in places that I didn't select. Try using Publisher and images have a magnetic repelling affect on each other. Add a new image and it pushes all of your other images around, sometimes not even letting you place it until you make room for it. I copied and pasted some dollar amounts from an accounting program into word and it rounded them to the nearest 10 cents! Sure, you can turn it all off: if you want to spend the day un-checking a hundred check boxes. :rolleyes: :mad:

[carrja99]

Heh, I heard that it's not backwards compatible either, or something like that. Thank God I don't need to use it.

[GeekGuy]

I used to use it - until a year ago when a friend put me on to OpenOffice.org :D

Now I make fun of those who use it out of free choice. BWUAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!

[Penrich]

Yeah - i use win2K at work with Office 2000. Mainly just Word. Just had a fresh re-install of the OS (of course), and so everything that i had gotten the way I like it is all messed up again. I have absolutely no idea as to why the default language was French, or why for a week now setting the default to English (US) has no effect... And the picture thing is the same in Word - word wrap isn't quite there properly, the picture either wants to butt right up against the top of the paper (not the margin, the paper) or float somewhere in the middle where you don't want it...

I haven't used Open Office much yet, but I am seriously thinking about d/l it for work...

[elderdays]

For some reason my company thinks we have to use Office XP because of the fact that "everybody else" in the business world uses it. You'd think they'd see excessive licensing costs as a BAD thing. Guess not. They love to give Bill Gates money instead of using a free alternative and giving me a raise. Go figure.

[Tempus77]

I use Office 2000 at work, and sometimes at home........i guess it's not too bad for normal usage, but Word really isn't that great when it comes to writing articles or documents with lots of symbols and/or formulas......i use Latex for that.

[redneckbrit]

I use Office 2000 at work. I don't mind excel but I hate Word with a vengence. Trying to amend a document that has already been formatted is a nightmare. When starting a new document I find writing it and doing all the formatting at the end is the only way to avoid temper tantrums :D

[grandmasterjoel]

downloaded openoffice1.0.1 at work. completely compatible with office 2000 and can be altered to save in m$ formats.

word adds these random table breaks but when i open the same document in openoffice its fine :D

[El_Cu_Guy]

My Win box still chugs along running Word 97 and Works 4.5a

[mrussel1]

I have to agree with you about Word, and MS's crappy AutoFormatting (which always seems to do what you don't want) in general.

Here's a nice little experiment you can try at home to prove that Word sucks: open WordPad; type one short sentence; save the file (it will be small; mine was 152 bytes). Open the same file in Word; type two words; save it again (to be generous, keep it as an .rtf, not a .doc) - suddenly, the file is 2.69 K! Despite not reformatting the file, Word has increased its size nearly 20x to append two words (in my case, I used "blah blah"). Open the same file in NotePad if you want to see all the needless crap that was added. Give me NotePad over Word any day.

...that being said, I am a big fan of Excel! If OpenOfficeCalc does everything Excel does, I'll be a happy Linux convert... I kind of like Access, too. Sure, it's a pipsqueak compared to real database engines like Oracle or SQL, but for quick jobs it does the trick. I like not having to remember SQL syntax! Does anybody use a database app on Linux? Which one?

[Stween]

Originally posted by mrussel1
Here's a nice little experiment you can try at home to prove that Word sucks: open WordPad; type one short sentence; save the file (it will be small; mine was 152 bytes). Open the same file in Word; type two words; save it again (to be generous, keep it as an .rtf, not a .doc) - suddenly, the file is 2.69 K! Despite not reformatting the file, Word has increased its size nearly 20x to append two words (in my case, I used "blah blah"). Open the same file in NotePad if you want to see all the needless crap that was added.

Bear in mind that Word is a document processor - the extra file size is being used to store all sorts of information on the formatting of the document and so forth. Wordpad and notepad are simply storing plain text. You're comparing apples and oranges. Even saving as RTF isn't gonna give you great results, I never liked RTF when I had to use it. These days I write all my documentation in Latex :)

[bwkaz]

Did you see the Windows RG (that's "Really Good edittion") Flash movies that were floating around a couple years ago?

Open up the word processor, and you get a bad imitation of Clippy, that says:

It seems you aren't writing a letter! I really like letters! I think you should be writing one! Here, I'll help you start! etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

[wapcaplet]

...type one short sentence; save the file (it will be small; mine was 152 bytes). Open the same file in Word; type two words; save it again (to be generous, keep it as an .rtf, not a .doc) - suddenly, the file is 2.69 K!

Stween's right, you're kind of comparing apples and oranges here. With plain ASCII text, two words will be even smaller than 152 bytes. Word (and any other document processor) has to save additional overhead such as fonts, styles, and so on.

Though, I did just try an experiment - using OpenOffice and the two-word test, saving as native OpenOffice (sxw) format is 5K, MS Word format is 8K.

To the topic at hand: I use OpenOffice almost exclusively over MS Office now. Though, I am still somewhat disappointed that there isn't a good MS Access replacement - I love Access! MySQL, PostGreSQL and the like are great but just way too powerful for the day-to-day stuff that Access is good at.

[wapcaplet]

Open up the word processor, and you get a bad imitation of Clippy, that says:

http://www.vaxer.net/~jeeves/AssistedSuicide.gif

[Penrich]

I use Filemaker Pro over Access. (On Win, obviously!) That, and a good Literature Reference database (currently using RefMan) are two reasons why I'm still on Windows at work (that, and my IT dept. don't support Linux...)

[mrussel1]

Originally posted by Stween
Bear in mind that Word is a document processor - the extra file size is being used to store all sorts of information on the formatting of the document and so forth.

I do understand that - I just think it's funny that if you start with an RTF - that has all the required formatting already - and add two words in plain text, with no additional formatting - and save back to RTF, you get this huge increase of formatting. This would be understandable if you were saving it as .doc, or adding extra formatting - I guess my point is just that all that bloat does not in any way even change the appearance of the document!

In looking through the plain text, it looks like Word has included definitions for the named styles at the top of the file, in case they are used later in the doc. This might be a space saver for a style junky, who used named styles all over the place, but for a one-sentence document, it's ludicrous.

Of course, you would never open Word to write one sentence... I'm just pointing out my dislike for such a bloated system.

[Penrich]

Originally posted by wapcaplet
AssistedSuicide.gif Love it!!!

[wapcaplet]

Originally posted by mrussel1
Of course, you would never open Word to write one sentence... I'm just pointing out my dislike for such a bloated system.

Yep. I'm a big fan of ASCII myself :)

It's kind of surprising how many people do not understand what plain-text ASCII is. I've had people ask me how I write HTML, and I tell them I use a plain text editor. They say, "Oh, like Microsoft Word?"

And of course, this makes it hard to explain to them why editing HTML in Microsoft Word is not really a good idea :)

[Hena]

Originally posted by Stween
Bear in mind that Word is a document processor - the extra file size is being used to store all sorts of information on the formatting of the document and so forth. Wordpad and notepad are simply storing plain text. You're comparing apples and oranges. Even saving as RTF isn't gonna give you great results, I never liked RTF when I had to use it. These days I write all my documentation in Latex :)
That is true and all. But so many times people use html (emails) or word (attached to them emails... argh) to write a simple paragraph. I mean yes its bigger an' neater an' all that, but why it must be used, when its not needed.

Besides notepad is bad, use pfe (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe). Too bad its not GPL.

[Stween]

Originally posted by wapcaplet
Though, I did just try an experiment - using OpenOffice and the two-word test, saving as native OpenOffice (sxw) format is 5K, MS Word format is 8K.

Now that's a fairer comparison. Even at that though, it's difficult to really say what's being stored by each format.

[wapcaplet]

Originally posted by Stween
Now that's a fairer comparison. Even at that though, it's difficult to really say what's being stored by each format.

I think OpenOffice does some kind of compression on its documents, which could account for the smaller size. The larger .doc format might also be due to OpenOffice trying to save in a format that is not native to it. Who knows :D

[Penrich]

OK - so I just d/l Open Office 1.0.2. Seems pretty good so far. Opened some 60 + page documents w/lots of formating OK, some others not so well (but only moinor changes needed). Need to look into RefMan though for my citations....

Powerpoint Presentations open well too, with my minor animations.

[torvalds]

I have had the same problems with Word's auto formatting features. It is amazing at how accurately Word can figure out what you dont want to do and start formatting your document that way.

I miss the days of using Word Perfect. I gave up using it because where I work uses Word and it would screw up anything done in Word Perfect.

[misty]

Originally posted by wapcaplet
I think OpenOffice does some kind of compression on its documents, which could account for the smaller size.

Yep, it is XML in a ZIP.