"Today, I want to take you on a journey. A journey that starts back into the cold recesses of the mid-1980s, back into the days of EGA and serial port mice and the MS-DOS Executive. Microsoft Word 1.0 for Windows shipped in 1989 after a long development cycle and was designed to run on Windows 386. There's not much more to the program than what you see here, but it gives you an idea of how far Word's come."
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2005-09-13
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If you could make Word 2 look like Word 2003, would most users notice any missing features that they could not live without? I bet 90% of people could get by with Word 2 and do most of what they need to...why spend so much on an upgrade that will add so little to most people... save it for gasoline. :^)
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2005-08-02
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I'd actually go for Office XP myself. That was the release that finally promoted the use of Styles in Word, with a styles sidebar and an easy way of modifying the style definitions.
Speaking as someone who creates lots of long complex documents, styles are a lifesaver.
Office 2003, despite not including and significant improvements, that I could see, actually performed much worse than XP on the same hardware (it used an obscene amount of memory).
Member since:2005-07-12
Yep, I'll agree. Of all the iterations of MS Office I've used throughout the years, Office 97 is the best. It is the only version I bought for my personal use at home (Office 97 Professional, back in, well, 1997!).
I now use OpenOffice.org for the majority of my word processing and spreadsheet needs, but I still have to go back to good old Office 97 on occasion. I'm hoping that OpenOffice 2.0 will be good enough to all me to retire Office 97.
(But I still miss WordPerfect and Quattro Pro!)
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2005-07-06
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2005-07-08
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I agree with the above - in some ways, Office 97 was the high watermark. A cleaner new look, but with all the functionality you could want and no more. With 2000, they started the 'hidden' menu thing, which was almost an admission that the menus were too huge and deep.
The menus and toolbars look nicer on XP and 2003, but really, I've not found any functionality I can't live without. This applies mostly to Word/Excel; Outlook is a different matter, and I actually think the 2003 interface is great once you're used to it.
Having said all that, I'm mostly a Linux user and OpenOffice does the job, albeit slowly....
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Don't confuse slow startup time with over all slowness. Once up and running OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta2 is much faster than the latest offering from Microsoft. It also have some features that really spead up work that is not available in the Microsoft product. One such feature is text autocompletion. Once you get used to it, it speeds up your work considerably.
As for the startup time, on my five year+ old hardware OOo2 beta2 starts in six seconds. This is not that bad.
If the startup spead really annoys you you could probably speed it up by recompiling it with some optimization options for your platform turned on. I did that with version 1.0 and it almost cut the startup time in half. I have no idea what would happen if you did it for 2.0 butit could be worh a try.
Onother thing you should could do would be prelinking. You could also let some user run it in ivisible mode, that way it will be preloaded in memory just like MS-Office in windows.
Then of course I have only tested the beta versions of OOo 2 extensively. I suspect the release candidate is even faster, as it most likely contains less debug code.
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It was my first word processor for the PC. It was also so awful that it drove me to use WordPerfect for DOS. Well, maybe it wasn't that awful. But I do remember being ticked off about it not printing in colour and not having scalable fonts, like the screenshots on the box suggested. (Microsoft must have used third-party extensions when they took the screenshots.)
Perhaps I didn't read the text carefully enough, but that page seems awfully Windows-centric. If I recall correctly, Word was available for MS/PC-DOS first, then the Macintosh, then Windows. Word 5.1 for the Mac also had a boatload of less-used features: mail-merge with an incorporated scripting language, voice annotation, etc.. Oddly enough though, it didn't let you zoom in on the page (I never really used it because it was too hard on the eyes).
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2005-07-06
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2005-10-02
I think it's funny to watch the versioning of Word :p
Word 3 was renamed Word 6 to catch up with WordPerfect (which was superior at that time). How many times haven't we seen that happening.
The article was way to overhyped with superlatives, but quite interesting to read.
However, I'm a bit worried about the lack of changes in the GUI. This could be a hint that the User Interface of textwriters haven't been reconsidered at all.
16 years and basically the same behaviour (not just in Word(pad)). SCARY!
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Word 3 was renamed Word 6 to catch up with WordPerfect (which was superior at that time).
I think it was also called Word 6 to get the Mac and Windows version numbers to the same point. The Mac version of Word was already at 5.1. The change to Word 6 is largely regarded as the worst Mac version of Word ever, (interesting to me, since the article called Word 6 a big hit.)
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2005-07-06
I agree here that 97 was probably Office's peak. Though one thing I really love is the font/style sidebar which is brilliant at keeping control of the fonts in a Word document (I think that was introduced in Office XP). There was something similar before but it wasn't nearly as good.
Member since:
2005-07-06
The last MS office suite that I actually liked using was an ancient version of Works (2.0, I believe) that ran in Win3.1. There was also a nearly-identical DOS version that I used in high school. If it had the underline spellchecking, table support, and did away with the archaic stuff (like the need to manually paginate documents), I'd probably still use it. Oh, and if modern versions of Word had the ability to read the WPS file format.
I long since found that programmers text editors are ironically much better writing tools in that they have more features for the manipulation of text, as opposed to the formatting of text. I think the ideal writing tool would be something like Pe/Pepper/EditPlus/BBEdit with basic formatting options (bold/italic/font, and basic margin settings) along with RTF export.
But lacking that, I generally find that a good text editor + HTML & CSS is often less hassle than dealing with the quirks of Word.
P.S.
Rather OT, but my favourite silly thing about Word/Office: you know that typically horrible-looking Word clip-art? A year or two ago, I discovered that they can be copy-pasted - as vector graphics - into Adobe Illustrator. And what's more, Illustrator actually displays them much better than Word does - all nicely anti-aliased instead of hideously jaggy. Webdings/wingdings + Illustrator also makes good quick-n-dirty clipart too.
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The reason why it looks the same by and large is that you're doing the same thing.
You need to type text in a text field. That's what it is. In Office 2003 you have more buttons than on the Space Shuttle [I would hazard] and features that nobody knows they are there -or can find-.
In the end, you need to type your text, you want to save it and find it back, you want to be able to print it and to send it over the internet.
The rest of the features are actually song and dance you can do without.
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When I used Word 2.0, I could use about 90% of its functionality. That makes me feel like a Word Expert. Even now, this 90% of functionality is enough for me to do most of my document work in any version of Word.
Word 97 is the best overall and I am still using it on my XP machine. It is one of the best software I have used and I am always using everyday. ( It is judged by its quality, not which company made it or its price ).
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I remember using Word 2.0, while it was limited, I could do what I needed. I think Word 6 was the best version.
You can see the splash screens for all the versions of Word, here http://www.guidebookgallery.org/splashes/word 
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2005-07-06
I remember reading the results of a contest a certain PC magazine did. The contest was to 'imagine' what the future of computing would look like. One of the winners was someone who made a mockup of Word as it would be in the year 2010. It featured rows upon rows of buttons. Reading this article I realized where the perception came from, as new Word versions up to that point had one big feature over the previous one: more buttons.
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In my personal opinion, nothing drastic has changed in newer versions since Word 2.0. I use Word 2000 (in Office 2000) on Windows 2000 and it is stable, dependable, and quick. The same Word 2000 on Windows 98, ME, and XP is rather quirky.
I still have my copy of Word 2.0 and use it. Other than the spell check and correct as you type, there are no new features in Word that I "must have" since Word 2.0. Later versions are designed to work with different versions of the OS, possibly. Microsoft throws in new and different "bells and whistles".
My main gripe (and the reason I keep Word 2.0) is the changing templates. With 2.0, Microsoft had some good templates; every one I used went aweay with the next version and I had to convert. Almost every template I used in Word 6.0 went away; another conversion job.
It is, I admit, a minor point, but it has griped me for over 20 years.
By the way, I also use OpenOffice on a daily basis. Good software, if a bit on the slow side. I use what is necessary to interact with customers.
Later,
Mike
Member since:
2005-07-06
