Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 10:33:26 -0500 (EST) From: Marco Radzinschi <marco@radzinschi.com> To: Roger Merritt <mcrogerm@stjohn.ac.th> Cc: FreeBDS-Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: MS-Word (Was: Feeding the Troll) Message-ID: <20011129100851.G528-100000@mail.radzinschi.com> In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20011129164633.007a97b0@stjohn.stjohn.ac.th>
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Roger: We do this sort of thing at work all the time. We export data from our client database to a text file, and then do an appropriate mail merge. Mail merges are done with Word Perfect, but for ten of thousands of records instead of hundreds as in your case. If Word does everything you need though, I don't see why you should change. Unless of course your license is about to expire. :-) I personally have hit Word's limits, and since I have been using Word Perfect since version 5 for DOS, I have become so used to its features that I do not work very efficiently without them. For me, this means that typing anything other than relatively simple text takes me forever in Word, and fixing a screwup is out of the question. There are also some *behavioral* things about Word that I do not like. For example, I select double space, and it is not applied to subsequent paragraphs. I do a CTRL+A to highlight all paragraphs to fix this, select double space, then go back and type some more. It always switches back to single space at some point, and since Word doesn't have a reveal codes feature, I cannot figure out where in the document it switches back to single space. Additionally, Microsoft changes the file format for Word documents with every release it seems. Word Perfect has had the same file format since version 6 for DOS, which means I can write a document in Word Perfect 10 and open it on a 286 machine with 1 MB of RAM running Word Perfect 6. Word also feels like it is directed at the home market, and Word Perfect feels like it was designed for the professional maket. Of course, this is subjective, but they are major annoyances which get in the way of getting work done. As I said, however, if Word does what you need it to, there may be no reason to change, as it may very well be counter productive. Marco Radzinschi E-Mail: marco@radzinschi.com AOL IM: CrackedBoy Running FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE i386 10:08AM up 17 days, 18:37, 1 user, load averages: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00 On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Roger Merritt wrote: > At 11:12 PM 11/28/01 -0500, you wrote: > > > >Microsoft Word is a pathetic excuse for a word processor. There are still > >things that cannot be done in Word that could be done in Word Perfect for > >DOS! > <snip> > > Maybe so, but I can't think what kind of formatting you might have in mind > -- obviously it's something I've never used. It might be something I'd > like, but I have about everything I can use now and a whole bunch left over > that I have no need for. > > But let me put the question this way. I use M$ Word to create a form letter > for each one of our 120 students, twice a term, giving their grades. The > grades themselves are kept in an Excel spreadsheet, which uses formulas to > convert from a raw percentage score to a letter grade, and then to a > numerical grade from 1 to 4, which is then multiplied by a value at the top > of the column and summed at the end of the sheet to give me hours earned, > Grade Point Average, etc. All these values are linked to my mail merge > which also uses conditional fields to decide what to print depending on > which alternative courses the student took. > > Now I won't say it was easy to get this all working, but now that it *does* > work I can't afford to give it up. Can WordPerfect or any other word > processor that you know about do the same job for me? As it is now it takes > me an afternoon to enter all the grades and teachers' comments and the next > morning I can give the head teacher the grades for all our students. I'd > cheerfully drop Word, although I don't particularly dislike it, if I found > a substitute. > > -- > Roger To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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