[X4U] MS Office 2008 delayed

[David Ledger]

At 15:03 -0700 4/8/07, x4u-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com wrote:
>From: "Randy B. Singer" <randy at macattorney.com>
>As for learning how to "use this new crap", Word, and Office as a
>whole, are high end products.  I don't know of any high end programs
>that can be used without some reading and/or some training.  You
>can't expect to be proficient using Illustrator, Express, FinalCut
>Pro, Photoshop, GoLive, etc. without being trained to do so first.
>If you aren't prepared to learn how to use a high-end program, stay
>away from them.  Stick to consumer level programs.

And therin lies the problem. Many users would love to use consumer 
level programs, but have to work with content that requires Word. 
This happens for me just a few times a year, so there would be no 
point in me learning it. Emailers, 'vi', and TextWrangler + 
occasional AppleWorks do everything I need to generate.

Being a techie, I'm prepared to do some messing about to avoid having 
to buy it. Every month I have to extract words and pictures from a 
Word doc to add to a web site. Textedit gets the words, Pages gets 
the pictures. None of the Open Office derivatives get both. Havn't 
tried Nissus or Mariner. Not all the text is 'copy'able in Pages, and 
none of it drags.

Companies tend to produce complex standard (to them) layouts. I 
recently received a contract with embedded tables with MailMerge 
stuff. Nothing I have would handle their layout. Ended up 
re-generating their layout in something else, printing it, and 
posting it rather than emailing it back. I doubt they have an in 
house Word expert, so the design would be sub-optimal. Some of the 
content probably came from a database. Does anything else handle this 
sort of stuff? I'm reluctant to try paid-for alternatives unless I 
know they'll work.

There are not two 'classes' of user (high end users and 
letter-to-grandma users), but at least three. The third being those 
who are forced by third parties to use the high-end user's product to 
read letter-to-grandma level documents from the third party (not 
suggesting for a moment that my line-manager is my, or anyone's, 
grandma - he wouldn't like it). Luckily for me, clients provide a 
machine (usually PC) with Word on it for this purpose.

David 	 - feeling I've had the same conversation with Randy and this 
list before.


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk