On Word Pro...

[julesjones]

I decided to go and look up that Lotus Word Pro Fan Club exchange on rasfc. :-) Ironically, this was a thread that started with me grumbling about a (very rare) glitch I'd had when saving a file, but segued on one branch into a discussion of why some of us much preferred Word Pro to Word and Wordalikes. The Word Pro worship shows up elsewhere in rasfc (as Jacey once pointed out, it lacks Word's irritating tendency to try and take over and second guess what you want to do and how you want to format something), but this was pure quill.


Me:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.composition/msg/f811ebc7db51db86?hl=en

In my case it's not "it's MS, therefore it's Evil". (I'm a VMS girl, so
I never bought into the 'nix-fetishists' reasons for hating MS just
because it was aimed at the lusers.) And no, it's not because it's A
Different Program, either -- I've used a number of word processors over
the years. I like Wordpad as a quick-and-dirty rich text editor.

There's simply some basic incompatibility between my mindset and the
mindset of the Word designers. I suppose if I had to use it on my own
machine, I could eventually get it set up to remove some of the things
that annoy me (most software I have control over very rapidly gets some
defaults changed), but some of the things that drive me nuts are a basic
part of the implementation. Its attitude to stylesheets, for example.

Patricia Wrede:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.composition/msg/fc8655c85be69e4e?hl=en

Sister!

I have exactly the same problem. I'd *like* to be more comfortable with
MSWord, because practically everyone I need to send stuff to in the way of
business (publishers, libraries, students, etc.) either uses it as their
default, or *can* use it and therefore assumes it as the default for
exchanging important files. But it just doesn't think the same way I do.
Someday I'll have to take a class, in my copious free time...

Me:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.composition/msg/9e31d50ca4505780?hl=en

It's a relief to know I'm not the only one who feels this way about it.
I would also like to be more comfortable with it, for exactly the same
reason. And I have used it on occasion when I had to be able to read an
incoming .doc file in a later version than LWP can import. But I really
cannot deal with it as my primary word processor, for reasons that have
nothing to do with OS Holy Wars. I've stuck with Word Pro all these
years because it thinks the same way I do.

Fortunately my editor at Loose Id works with rtf files, and her Word and
my LWP can read each other's rtf output, even unto the "mark up edits"
features.

Carl:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.composition/msg/15b2b35cf0b0036a?hl=en&dmode=source

AGreed. I detest the "you must do it our way!" mindset of Word, and the
"jump through hoops because we find it amusing" mindset of WP, but I have
them both installed because both are needed for my day job.

But even using LWP 97, there are things that are very easy and simple to
do that I have *never* been able to convince the other two programs to
do. Too bad IBM screwed up Lotus so bad. :(

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

As you point out, I'm a Lotus girl. I've never understood why people pay three figure sums for MS Office when Lotus Smart-suite does the same job, but better, for £9.99. I'm more or less forced to have a version of Word because so many people use it as standard, but I'm still on Word 97 and have no intention to upgrade. I use Lotus WordPro for preference. My (music agency) business relies on a Lotus Approach database which does everything I require from all the usual database functions to writing invoices and contracts. The MS database with Office is a nightmare for me. My brain is just not compatible with it.

[julesjones]

There's just something about the mindset of the Microsoft designers that works wonderfully well for some people and is utterly incompatible with another group's way of thinking about files.

I've used Approach to track story status and submissions ever since I started writing fanfic. I've barely scratched the surface of the functions available, but for me it Just Works.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I tried MS Access, expecting that if I was proficient in Lotus Approach I'd be able to get the hang of Access, but I couldn't actually make it work. I mean that literally. I couldn't even get the hang of the layouts let alone make it jump through the kind of hoops I make Approach jump through every working day.

And I have some shared database files that I need to exchange with a few other people and the only one who had problems importing standard dbf files into their own preferred databases were the MS Access users. We had to import them into the spreadsheet, jiggle about with them and then import again as MS database files.