Re: Real World News.."And so it goes"

["Erick Andrews" <eandrews@star.net>]

On Wed, 15 Apr 1998 12:24:11 -0400 (EDT), Mitch Stone wrote:

>In reply to Linux Idiot's message sent 4/15/98 6:08 AM:
>
>>A lot of it is educational issues.  I'm responsible for a segment of the
>>AT&T HR Intranet development.  When I suggested to one person that they
>>should quite sending word document versions of their newsletter via
>>email and publish it on the Intranet, she said that there would be
>>people who could not access it.  Think about it.  We're talking about
>>people who obviously have email and MS word.  I'm still fighting this
>>one.
>
>I fight this one constantly, also. I don't own Word, don't care to own 
>Word, and certainly don't care to use Word. What's so strange about that? 
>But I'm forever being shipped documents in Word format, or asked to send 
>them. I always ask for RTF (ironically, a Microsoft format) or text 
>documents, but more than half the time, people simply don't know how to 
>Save as... in formats other than the default Word format. Honestly -- I 
>need to patiently explain it to them. We gotta learn to chew gum and walk 
>here, folks, even if Microsoft makes it difficult.
>
>What I find genuinely disturbing is the trend towards making public 
>government documents available in Word format. The time is coming where 
>we'll need to own Microsoft products in order to compete for government 
>contracts and the like. Who's minding that particular store? Nobody, so 
>far as I can tell.

One of the biggest and confusing aspects about Word, perhaps I should say
a "cute trick", is when someone new to Word does bring in a file other than
the "current *.doc" type, makes changes, saves the changes, then exits Word.
A message window now pops up that warns you that the current one is not
a Word document:  Do you want to save it??  <yes>  <no>  <cancel>.

What's confusing to newbies is that they've made changes to it (say it's
a text only file) and they're afraid they'll lose their changes.  So they click on 
<yes>, and lo'n'behold, now they have a Word *.doc when they only wanted 
the plain old text version.

A small point perhaps, but certainly a coercive one that's bugged me for years.

Erick

>
>   Mitch Stone
>   Editor, Boycott Microsoft
>   http://www.vcnet.com/bms 
> +---
>   Windows NT 5.0 is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, release 
>   of the Windows NT operating system. While there are important 
>   new features in this release, version 5.0 will build on a proven 
>   system architecture and incorporate tens of thousands of bug 
>   fixes from version 4.0. --- Microsoft press release
>