Replies to post #76491 on Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Tex]

re MS Word

I still get instructions from time to time to submit things in MS-Word. An online tool asking for a document actually rejected a PDF last week as "unsupported". People are craaaazy.

I feel for you!

Take care,
--Tex.

[tfigs]

Jim, re versions of Word

I still keep a copy of Word5.1a handy and use it while I can (in Classic on a Cube at home and a G5 iMac at work), for a number of documents that I don't have to share with anyone else.

Unfortunately, I'm also in charge of maintaining various manuals etc. at work that get passed around, which are in a ("modern," "standard") .doc format. I'm in the middle of a 100 page course text right now -- a rather simple aggregation of text and diagrams really -- and once again I'm amazed at how painful Word is these days. (Save a .doc out of Word X/2000 for Mac at home, open it into Word 2004 Mac at Work, and all kinds of font & pagination nightmares appear, for example. Or, God forbid, open a document from someone else with diagrams done in Word's "Drawing" module.) I can't imagine using current Word for real technical work.

Two aspects of this Word degadation puzzle me:

- I've always found Excel to be fairly useful and sensible, and even improved from version to version. How can it come from the same factory that that produces Word?

- It seems that (outside of internet and multimedia applications, of course) there was somewhat of a software golden age around the early 1990's. Programs like Word5.1 and the later versions of the MacDraw lineage (and even HyperCard, with its HyperTalk programming language) were affordable, small, and simple, yet plenty powerful for general work. What happened? (What is there for general purpose diagramming/drawing nowadays, for example?)