[X Newbies] expired MS office trial

[Alex]

On Saturday, Jan 24, 2004, at 09:40 Canada/Eastern, Bruce Klutchko 
wrote:

> I had to get Office X for work, but I understand why people
> want to avoid it. One big issue with Office X is that it is *not* a 
> Cocoa
> app but a poor Carbon version

Office is Carbon, but so are BBEdit, all major Adobe apps, Apple's 
FileMaker Pro (AppleWorks too, isn't it?) -- virtually all major apps 
not written specifically for OS X. Is it a "poor" version? I disagree 
(of course, de gustibus...). It's not the best thing since sliced 
bread, but neither is it the Edsel.

> so it does not allow Services in OS X. That is a real limitation when
> you get used to using a large number of services in X.

The fallacy of cum hoc, propter hoc. Carbonized apps can offer and 
access OS X services (e.g., BBEdit, FileMaker). But it's considerably 
more difficult to implement than in Cocoa, which is why most of them 
(including, if I'm not mistaken, AppleWorks) don't.

It seems to me that much of the anti-Word feeling is based on the 
superstition that anything Microsoft is bad. In fact, they've done a 
much better job with Office X than I expected, and Word is powerful and 
flexible word processor. If you have sophisticated word-processing 
needs, everything considered (including the price for the 
Teacher/Student version) I don't see how you can do better on the Mac 
than Word. Does this mean it's perfect? Hardly, but neither are 
InDesign, Photoshop, etc. A major flaw in Word is lack of support for 
international features (e.g., Unicode input) and OpenType, but some of 
the alternatives to Word have the same problem.

My favourite word processor (I don't think it's been mentioned so far) 
is Mellel <http://www.redlers.com/>, which offers what Word doesn't at 
a reasonable price (I strongly recommend it if you need to deal with 
languages such as Romanian, Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, etc.), but 
I wouldn't qualify my word-processing needs as sophisticated...

In October, Randy Singer posted a number of very pertinent comments on 
Word on the Mac OS X for Users list -- I suggest consulting the 
respective archives.

f