MS Office/Word 98

[Macflyer]

So, got a bit into a retro mood this past weekend and decided to use my 1400er with Word '98 to type an endless paper for school.

So far, so good. Neither Word nor OS 8.6 has let me down for the whole 17 hours marathon on Sunday (talk about deadlines and procrastination)

Any objections with Word '98? I heard 2001 was so much better but wasn't able to locate it yet. Don't know if it would run on this machine but certainly on my clamshell.

 

[PackingTape]

I think I have to take this opportunity to promote TeX / LaTeX for word processing. Really, the workflow is so much better, especially on older hardware. Since you do all your editing in a lightweight text editor, there's no added frustration coping with long document loading/page scrolling times and all the other cruft that goes along with a full-featured word processor. Much more significantly, LaTeX makes editing the document SO much easier, because it automates the generation of your index, table of contents, title page (if needed), and footnotes.

Also, the pages it produces are much prettier than what you get from any word processor! You really should try it out if you haven't yet.

 

[Scott Baret]

I use Office 98 on my clamshell and find it to be a fine software product. I've never had any issues with it over the years I've owned it.

I don't have 2001 (I've thought about getting it since it came out but never have). In general, think of the improvements made in Office 2000 on Windows if you're looking for differences between the two. Office 98 is the equivalent of Windows Office 97, but it's a lot more stable than Office 97 (especially Word 97) was. (I find Office 2000 to be very stable on the Windows side).

Make sure you use AppleWorks alongside Word if you have a bunch of older, non-MS files to convert. Word 98 has a lot of translators, but it can't handle a lot of the older Mac stuff (e.g. MacWrite Pro). To me, this is the only drawback of the program.

 

[ianj]

I've thought about getting into TeX at some point, but I have too many other projects going on to try learning something else right now, and to be honest I don't compose enough, or complex enough, documents to justify it. Just had to throw out that I'm not opposed to the idea.

For the past several years, I've been doing all my word processing with Nisus Writer 4 on my Quadra 840AV (the version Nisus offered for free on its website for a while). I used Nisus Writer 6 while my main computer ran OS 9, switched to Word for a while after upgrading to OS X became necessary, and then went back to Nisus when I got the Quadra as a sidekick machine.

This is the setup that got me through college (I went for history, so lots of writing there). I'd use all the screen space on my G4 for arranging sources and doing research, writing the paper itself on the Quadra. When I started out, most everything was printed, but by graduation most professors were asking for electronic submissions and I was churning out files with PrinttoPDF. One or two specifically requested submissions in Word format, so I installed Word 5.1 just for those assignments. I don't do as much writing since graduation, but when I do, it still all happens on the Quadra, which now has a 21" SGI monitor to help things along. I also have ClarisWorks 4 installed, partly for nostalgia purposes because it's the first productivity software I used in school, but it's also good for throwing together a quick spreadsheet.

I used Office 98 for a while. The toolbar icons were kind of ugly, but it was a good suite of applications that seemed to play well in the Mac environment. 2001 was even more polished (mostly in terms of having nicer icons)... I would have kept using it if I hadn't gotten hooked on Nisus Writer.

One last shill for Nisus Writer - the Nisus document format keeps all formatting information in the resource fork, so if it ends up in the hands of someone without Nisus Writer, they still get a clean text file. Try doing this with a Word document and you get a garbled mess.

 

[Macflyer]

While LaTex sounds interesting, I do need some basic .doc compability when papers are to be turned in electronically. What I did with my Sunday project was to email it from the 1400 to myself, fire up Wordperfect 14, and to be on the safe side, save it as a Word 2003 doc. Then email it to the prof.

Haven't looked into LaTEx compability and .rtf may be just fine.

 

[beachycove]

Lyx, which is an OSX implementation of TeX, will export to (among other things) .doc , .rft and open office xml standards. You do need to be a unix type to get it working correctly, mind you, as some of the add-ons are not even distributed as binaries, and the GUI leaves a thing or three to be desired, but the logical arrangement of the documents it produces is interesting.

I think if I were starting a thesis again I might use it. But these days all the people I work with want to see straightforward Word files.