Tonight was a family affair in computer learning. My daughter spent hours Sunday transcribing 3x5 card notes into an outline for an English paper. She used the iMACs graciously provided by Henrico County. Problem with the iMACs is that the county schools do not allow addition of printer drivers for printers one might have at home. Printing is accomplished by copying the text into an email, sending the email and copying the text into a word processor on a Windows-based machine. This time, Word wouldn't allow selective indents in an outline format. You couln't even copy text and paste it into Word Perfect. It turned into a family (me, wife, daughter) trying all kinds reformatting to get it to work. Just before retyping the thing we found a solution: MS word saved as ASCII DOS, open in Word Perfect, selectively indent each line (not quite as long as retyping).
I switched to Word because everyone else had. I've cussed every version because it does what it wants today no matter what you tell it to do. Hours are spent doing useless work on formats or just fixing problems. If it weren't for sending stuff to others and the need of doing it in Word, I would have never left Word Perfect. (Still keep it around for real work).
Microsoft isn't bashful when it comes to charging a bundle for its products. It looks like with that cost they could add a little value for folks who want to do more than write a memo and do it easily.
Double cannister and double grape to the coders of Word. Here's hoping they have to use their product for years of non-productive no fixes.
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