cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) (10/25/87)
I've received Microsoft Word V4.0. This posting contains my impressions of it, relative to Word V3.0, which I have been using for about six months. Note: I'm not sure I'm ever going to be wildly enthused about Word, but once you master it, it's a powerful product for word processing. 1. Speed: Yes, it's much faster. V3.0 was so slow on my 6 Mhz PC that it was positively unpleasant to use. V4.0 is quick enough that I never find myself waiting for it to catch up, except when putting up the "Gallery" display of styles. Even this is acceptable. 2. Keyboard macros: They work, and are about as friendly to use as keyboard macros in Epsilon. You can assign keyboard macros to particular keystroke combinations (even overriding built-in Word keystroke combinations), or you can give them names and invoke them through the Insert command. Keyboard macros can be nested, and there are IF...ELSE...ENDIF, WHILE...ENDWHILE constructs for testing if a Search found a string or not. 3. Graphics integration: Not as useful as I would have hoped. What you get is a command that allows you to specify where an encapsulated graphics file is be found, and how many inches long it will be. I've read in PC Week that only PostScript encapsulated graphics (like the ones produced by Adobe Illustrator) and output from Microsoft Chart work at the moment. The V4.0 documentation describes the requirements and limitations of such graphics -- I haven't found any graphics I can integrate this way. Clayton E. Cramer