TRX
As far as I can tell, Word's "help" function is far from being useful for the
average user. The last version of Word I personally used ran on MSDOS, but at
least it shipped with real paper documentation.
If they're going to ship without a manual, they can't bitch because people
can't drive the program.
Of course, if Microsoft put the manuals back in the box, they'd lose the
revenue stream from their training courses and "authorized" book sales.
Incidentally, the publisher of the first book, back in the 1980s, couldn't
accept files on diskette. I had to print the whole thing out on a dot-matrix
printer and mail the big box of paper to them. Presumably, it went through the
usual markup->typesetter stage after that.
The second book, the publisher would only accept files in the latest version
of WordPerfect. When I balked at paying $400+ for a program to format text to
send to them, they proposed that I upload the files to CompuServe and use the
"fax" function to send it to their fax machine. That was in 1993...
Back in the early 1980s, when there was more than one platform and OS, there
was a book by Stewart Brand, "The Whole Earth Software Catalog." In it was an
article where Brand described users as baby ducks, imprinting on the first
software they learned, and it was very hard to change them after that.
There's a bit of truth to that. After evaluating about a dozen text editors
and word processors, and learning about proprietary file formats the hard way,
I picked an editor that suited me. It ran on MSDOS, which is what I was
running then. That was... 28 years ago, now. And I still run that same editor,
from DOS to OS/2 to (briefly) Windows to Linux, running under a DOS emulator.
Yes, it's a text-mode program with fairly severe limits by modern standards,
but after almost three decades, it's basically a direct brain-to-screen
interface. On the (very rare) occasions I need to do something outside its
capabilities, I just root around in the menus to see what the current
operating system offers. Each time, it's pretty much a one-shot deal; learn
just enough to do what is needed and no more, since I'll probably never see or
use that particular program again.
And, yes, there are still files on my computer, that have followed me across
machines and OSs for almost thirty years... there were character coding
systems before ASCII, but ASCII is so ubiquitous any replacement will have to
support it for long after my expected lifetime.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/cmap-why-do-you-use-microsoft-.html
TRX
To run a current version of Word, I'd not only have to buy a copy of Word or
Office, I'd probably have to buy a copy of Windows to run it on and set up a
new VirtualBox session for it, unless it would run under WINE.
It's not so much that the industry has converged to a monoculture, as that
monoculture is so clunky and ugly...
October 13, 2013
111:
@53:
And then we have people: Nobody knows how to use styles,
---
And why should they? The last copies of Word I installed on a client site were
a CD and a 5-user license. The only "documentation" was the registration card.
TRX
October 14, 2013
222:
@167:
What is the consensus about what we should we be using for archival
purposes?
---
I use straight ASCII with no formatting codes. It was good enough to write and
sell two books and various articles, lots of code, and everything else I've
needed to do with an "electronic typewriter."
[in a different thread]
November 19, 2013
73:
Back in the late 1980s I sold a few technical articles to computer magazines.
Most of them would take straight ASCII text, but a few would only take Word
Perfect "document" files. I think the street price of Word Perfect was around
$400 then, bearing in mind those were 1980s dollars, and that was about a
month's rent and utilities for a nice house.