Re: Forced to use IE

["Kendall G. Clark" <kclark@computek.net>]

  On Mon, 10 Nov 1997, Joan Van Tassel wrote:
  
  >Problem:  There's something in Word 7.0 that demands IE.
  >Everytime I launch Word, I get a notice that there is a
  >problem with Word in the 'registry' file. I can get past
  >the nag screen but Word is indeed somewhat unstable, freezing
  >every once in awhile so that I lose my latest changes and have
  >to reboot.
  
  Joan,
  
  How would that be different than when Word wasn't integrated with IE?
  
  In my own experience with MS Word (from 2.x to 6.x, more or less), it has
  always been a bug-ridden piece of crap. I tried to work on a 100 page essay in
  MS Word once, on a very capable PC, and the time it took to go from the first
  to the last page was so long, that I often would forget why I was moving to a
  different place in the document in the first place.
  
  Word is popular with people who:
  
  	1. like bells and whistles and singing paper clips
  	2. don't know of any alternatives
  	3. like to spend lots of time futzing around with formatting instead
  of with content
  	4. have very modest document processing needs
  	5. don't care much about the aesthetic aspect of documents (i.e., Word
  full justification is so ugly, it makes me want to puke)
  	6. don't need robust indexing or cross-referencing
  
  If you have more robust work that needs to be done, look into Framemaker or a
  version of TeX or LaTeX. They are both infinitely more powerful than Word.
  
  By the way, another plus in TeX/LaTeX's favor: it's freakin' FREE! That's
  always nice. It's also cross-platform in a way that Word will never be.
  
  Best,
  
  	Kendall