I find Word X to be stunningly, mind-numbingly, almost awe-inspiringly bad. I literally can't believe what a turd it is.
Quote:
When you use the simplest graphics in a document of any size, they take about two minutes to appear when you scroll to the page they?re on! And if you click on them while they?re brewing, Word will quit! And that?s a guarantee!
I tried to extract a graphic from a document and it took me a half-hour. Each time I'd try to scroll the document I'd get about a minute or two's worth of spinning beach ball. Until I could get to the page with the graphic in question... oy.
I have a one-page invoice I work on, it's basically some text with a 3 column x 15 row table. Just tabbing from cell to cell in the table takes about 2 seconds. Holy crap.
The other Office X apps are not exactly sprightly, but Word is completely in a class by itself.
BTW, I'm not exactly a fan of Word on the PC either, but at least you can get work done in it, if you can learn to ignore the smell.
When I say "high quality", I mean that (La)TeX is the de facto standard in production of scientific documents, thanks to its virtually unlimited capabilities, robustness, portability and customizability of the processing engine. In comparison, MS Word is real rubbish. I am wondering why people are still using Word.
A friend of mine introduced me to a word processor called Mellel. He says it's exactly what Apple would make if they did a word processor. The only difference is that Apple would have the ability to read and write in .doc format, whereas Mellel can only read .doc and a few others, but it can't write to .doc. It uses a proprietary format, .mel, for most things but I think you can also use RTF and TXT.
Word can theoretically open RTF files, but it slaughters them. I wrote up my résumé in TextEdit (after setting it to Wrap To Page) and it was very tab intensive. Anyway, once I got everything lined up perfectly in columns, I decided to open it in Word. Mistake! Word screwed it up. I tried typing it up in Word and saving as an RTF (which is probably more compatible than even .doc), but only Word would display it correctly. TextEdit made it look like crap.
I ended up typing up the résumé in AppleWorks, saving as a CWK file, and taking a screen capture to get a PDF file of the résumé. PDFs are the most compatible of all so I figure that's a good way to go.
It is quite a shame that there isn't a good, powerful, elegant, highly compatible, widely used word processor for the Mac. On the other hand, PCs aren't much better... Mac users are just used to GOOD software.
Comments
When you use the simplest graphics in a document of any size, they take about two minutes to appear when you scroll to the page they?re on! And if you click on them while they?re brewing, Word will quit! And that?s a guarantee!
I tried to extract a graphic from a document and it took me a half-hour. Each time I'd try to scroll the document I'd get about a minute or two's worth of spinning beach ball. Until I could get to the page with the graphic in question... oy.
I have a one-page invoice I work on, it's basically some text with a 3 column x 15 row table. Just tabbing from cell to cell in the table takes about 2 seconds. Holy crap.
The other Office X apps are not exactly sprightly, but Word is completely in a class by itself.
BTW, I'm not exactly a fan of Word on the PC either, but at least you can get work done in it, if you can learn to ignore the smell.
Originally posted by stupider...likeafox
LyX may be worth looking at for some people, though it doesn't sound like it fits Hassan's needs.
http://www.lyx.org
Well, LyX is based on LaTeX, the only 100% free and high quality word processing solution. For more information:
TUG
LaTeX
When I say "high quality", I mean that (La)TeX is the de facto standard in production of scientific documents, thanks to its virtually unlimited capabilities, robustness, portability and customizability of the processing engine. In comparison, MS Word is real rubbish. I am wondering why people are still using Word.
Originally posted by PB
I am wondering why people are still using Word.
I forgot the consequences of the (in)famous MS monopoly
Word can theoretically open RTF files, but it slaughters them. I wrote up my résumé in TextEdit (after setting it to Wrap To Page) and it was very tab intensive. Anyway, once I got everything lined up perfectly in columns, I decided to open it in Word. Mistake! Word screwed it up. I tried typing it up in Word and saving as an RTF (which is probably more compatible than even .doc), but only Word would display it correctly. TextEdit made it look like crap.
I ended up typing up the résumé in AppleWorks, saving as a CWK file, and taking a screen capture to get a PDF file of the résumé. PDFs are the most compatible of all so I figure that's a good way to go.
It is quite a shame that there isn't a good, powerful, elegant, highly compatible, widely used word processor for the Mac. On the other hand, PCs aren't much better... Mac users are just used to GOOD software.
Originally posted by Luca Rescigno
It is quite a shame that there isn't a good, powerful, elegant, highly compatible, widely used word processor for the Mac.
I think my previous remarks show that LaTeX meets or exceeds these requirements...well, except the "widely used".