It’s awesome, when you think about it.

‘s no Excel though is it?

Bill Gates didn’t get to be the richest man in the world by being a diddy.

Edit : $28 Billion to charity. THat’s one dollar a second for 924 years. Makes you think.

He’s also good a persuading other people to give money. $34.5 billion to charity though the Gates Foundation since it was founded.

I actually think it is the worst of all the MS Office applications. It drives me potty sometimes. It’s nowhere near as intuitive or slick as the others. I especially hate picking up documents that other people have created and trying to edit them. You get some really strage things going on by just making minor edits. Sometimes i’ve just resorted to re-creating the document from scratch – it’s easier sometimes.

I actually think it is the worst of all the MS Office applications.

How old are you? Were you there for Word 97? Word 6?

How old are you? Were you there for Word 97? Word 6?

Word for Windows 3.11.

WW3.11 – You weren’t there man!. You weren’t there!

I especially hate picking up documents that other people have created and trying to edit them

Fundamentally the problem there is other people. Word appears to be so easy to use that everyone assumes they can use it without learning how to use it.

But the document formatting tools are actually really powerful, and it you learn to use them properly you can produce some amazing stuff that’s really easy to edit. But nobody ever gets training in the Office suite.

I think a lot of people don’t use Word properly and miss out on a lot of really good formatting features.

edit – beaten to it.

Actually I was there.. I remember the horror of accidentally sending a postscript file to the Epson dot matrix printer (FX-80?) and spewing miles of fan-fold paper onto the floor. I remember having 11″ fan fold paper and a document set to A4, so the print and the perforations would get out of sync.. I remember howls of anguish as people struggled to deliver assignments…

I remember trying to run Word on an old 386 and it used so much processor making the letters jiggle on the screen and highlight mistakes that it couldn’t keep up with my typing even though I am a two finger typist.

WordPerfect rocked back in the day and Lotus 1-2-3 beat Excel hands down…

this has just reminded me my daughter asked me earlier about the cheapest way of running office, as theres a subscription now. is this right?

thought you just bought a laptop with it loaded and you were good for ever.
she qualifies for some sort of student edition i think, but didnt know the details to tell her.

but subs?? really?

Open Office – it does (most of) what office does but is FREE

I remember when this was a state of the art word processor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar

But the document formatting tools are actually really powerful, and it you learn to use them properly you can produce some amazing stuff that’s really easy to edit

Yep – even in an office full of tech-savvy programmers I still regularly see people manually formatting text with the Bold/Italic/Font/Size buttons and then adding in spaces or blank lines to get it spaced nicely 🙄

Wasn’t the Word project bought in and Excel developed from scratch?

Can’t recall when I first encountered it but did think “yuk’ 🙂

But the document formatting tools are actually really powerful, and it you learn to use them properly you can produce some amazing stuff that’s really easy to edit. But nobody ever gets training in the Office suite.

That. MS produce some really good tutorials online that take about 15mins a time to run through and make it so easy but people would rather mess around for hours trying to make it work their way 🙁

Word and Office in general is probably the most heavily used programme on our client’s PC, and somehow the biggest pain in the arse to ‘sell’.

A lot of people take it for granted – it’s so synonymous lots of our clients think that Word at least is “part of windows” and begrudge paying extra for it. “so let me get this right, I get video editing software for free, but I’ve got to pay, to write a letter???”

It didn’t help that back when Office 2010 was current, they would say “Don’t worry, we’ve got a disc” and no amount of explaining about licensing agreements would dissuade them that buying a single media disc doesn’t not mean you can legally install it 25 times.

Nowadays it’s a different challenge, you can lease it, or buy it and with the new rules you can install it on new machines as long as you take it off the old one, most of the time you can install it on multiple machines – but the PITA is you need to register it to a user, BillyBob@TimsBits.co.uk, fantastic – if you buy it, new starter Billy gets Office 2016 for life, or at least until it’s obsolete, probably 10 years from now, that’s 2-3 PCs worth for most business users – until Billy leaves the company 6 months later – really that licence belongs to him and he can take it over the road to his new job, but most employers don’t like that – so they tell the next guy, “oh you’ll need to use Billys log-in on office if you want to use Skype for Biz or if/when MS decides you need to log-in to Office again” far better to lease it via 365 – but that’s usually a concept to far for our clients.

Frankly, it’s murder – but we do at least get paid 87p a month per user to sell and manage it…

sadexpunk – Member

this has just reminded me my daughter asked me earlier about the cheapest way of running office, as theres a subscription now. is this right?

thought you just bought a laptop with it loaded and you were good for ever.
she qualifies for some sort of student edition i think, but didnt know the details to tell her.

but subs?? really?

See my long rant above for some detail, you can still buy office, but that’s on the way out – it’s a lease/subs model now – it’s the way the world is going.

Thankfully it’s usually free or at least very cheap for kids via their school – it’s free updates for life (well as long as you pay the subs) and 365 comes with a lot of cool/useful cloud based tools over and above Word/Excel PP etc/

Compared to the price of Office suites in the past, £75 a year for a 5-device licence for Office 365 seems quite competitive to me and is oh-so-relevant in this day and age of cloud computing and multiple devices.

I definitely prefer Word to Apple’s Pages, which seems to be a page layout tool more so than a slick work processor.

the ribbon is still stupid.
and the front page bit where you go to print.
and some things are just plain annoying. bullet points. language features (I know I might work for an international organisation, but that doesn’t mean I want a document in the superset of all the member nation languages).

might be awseome, but it’s also totally ess h one t.

Logica VTS anyone?

You young whippersnappers.

Edword for the BBC.

Edword

Fundamentally the problem there is other people.

This. Word can be quite obtusely counter-intuitive, so it’s quite easy to create a shit document. Things like, you’d think that changing the font would be a case of, y’know, changing the font; but if you don’t apply it to a style then it keeps trying to revert back to normal and you end up with various fonts scattered all over. It’s always a joy to have to work on a document started by someone who had a clue what they were doing.

I’d wager most people don’t know how to use Word anywhere near properly and efficiently, and outside of the workplace most people could make do with Wordpad.

she qualifies for some sort of student edition i think, but didnt know the details to tell her.

http://www.software4students.co.uk/t/categories/microsoft-office

Fundamentally the problem there is other people. Word appears to be so easy to use that everyone assumes they can use it without learning how to use it.

Which fits in with the fundamental problem of businesses giving everyone a PC or laptop and just assuming they know how to use it and how to manage their files.

Word for Windows 3.11.
WW3.11 – You weren’t there man!. You weren’t there!

Nor were you, there’s no such thing.

There was “Word for Windows” which worked on Windows 3.1 or Windows 3.11, there was nothing 3.11-specific to my knowledge and “3” never appeared in version numbers*, it jumped straight from 2 to 6.

(* – not until 2003 anyway)

Excellent geekery Cougar. Double points if you did that without looking anything up.

Open Office – it does (most of) what office does but is FREE

Yeah, kind of.. It’s like using Office 97, but that’s not the worst thing in the world considering it’s free.

However, interoperability is shite. Don’t try and have two people sharing a document when one’s on MS and one’s on OO. Just don’t.

the ribbon is still stupid.

I think the ribbon’s great, and I also think bullet points work really well 🙂

Double points if you did that without looking anything up.

I’m afraid I am that sad. (-: My earliest memory of Word was WFW 2.0, it’s what we had on the PCs at University. I tried to avoid using the PCs at the time as I thought they’d never catch on and was too busy hacking the PR1ME minicomputer. Hindsight, hey.

It gets a bit confusing because in the early years the versioning wasn’t aligned, so Office 4.3 contained Word 6, Excel 5 and other randomness I don’t even remember now. When Office 95 came out they bumped everything to version 7 and then later started using the years as marketing names, but that numeric versioning still exists internally to this day. The Office 2010 installation I have running here is version 14.

Curiously, this year’s outing (Office 2016) is version 16 internally, which I think is the first time the internal versions and marketing names have all lined up.

Anyone want to buy a copy of WordPerfect ? Pretty sure I’ve got a disc here somewhere

it was the best by far 🙁

I like Access. Not as much as Excel but more than Visio. Then Word. Then the destroyer of souls…

Anyone want to buy a copy of WordPerfect ? Pretty sure I’ve got a disc here somewhere

it was the best by far [/i]

Nah. Ami Pro was far better, along with Lotus 123.

I worked for a global outfit that decided to standardise on MS, when the UK had just installed SmartSuite.

Thing with WordPerfect was, you could do View Codes and it would show you where all the format markers were, that was so useful. Hated Word when we switched from that.

Ami Pro was far better, along with Lotus 123.

Yep, all running on Os2

I do all my writing with a thing called Scrivener. It’s a glorified WordPad, with hardly any formatting options, but it’s ace at organising docs and arranging your work.

But nobody ever gets training in the Office suite.

My biggest gripe at work. It’s pretty easy to crate documents and spreadsheets that work nicely but certain people just don’t get it.

Also, you’re all wrong about the best Office app.

That honour goes to OneNote.

tjp1980 – Member
I like Access.

Ah, the good old data virus. Not the fault of Access per se, but again, lack of training. Every manager has their own Access database which is incompatible with every other manager’s database…

Should never have been included in Office

I hated Lotus Amipro/Wordpro and 123.

WW3.11 – You weren’t there man!. You weren’t there!

I liked the version of Word I used in Windows 3.11. Well, at least until Office ’97 came along! 🙂

Access was a decent idea until I tried to paste 50,000 rows into it.