CRONEJP@UREGINA1.BITNET (Jonathan Crone) (07/11/88)
I'm at my wits end..... Can ANYONE suggest anything that would help me improve the absurdly sluggish performance of Excellence???? the thing is a DOG!!! I'm only a 50 wpm typist, and i can get a line and a half ahead of the stinking thing.... I'm just wondering how they can call this program a word processor. Help. anyone... ANYTHING!!!! jPC -------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan P. Crone Vice President, AURA, (Amiga Users of Regina Associated.) (Regina, Sask. Canada ) (eh???) CRONEJP@UREGINA1.BITNET ....uunet!mcl!cronejp come on now.... does ANYONE give a damn about what i have to say? --------------------------------------------------------------------
brant@alberta.UUCP (Brant Coghlan) (07/11/88)
The message started out as a reply to Jonathan Crone's message about excellence! but soon evolved into a review. There are some useful hints in this posting if you are willing to wade through the review. I must say that I like excellence! even with the problems it has, but you can judge for yourselves. In article <8807102329.AA04364@jade.berkeley.edu> CRONEJP@UREGINA1.BITNET (Jonathan Crone) writes: >I'm at my wits end..... > >Can ANYONE suggest anything that would help me improve the absurdly >sluggish performance of Excellence???? Try these: reduce the colours to two, don't use the interactive spell checker, load the dictionary into ram, keep the glossary small, when you enter text enter it at the bottom of the document (no spaces or new lines after the insertion point), and/or get a 16MHz 68030 :-) >the thing is a DOG!!! Agreed it is slow, but it has some nice features. For example, the last Computer Chronicles (likely taped many moons ago) demonstrated an IBM-PC program which evaluates your writing and makes suggestions. The list price was $90 US. Those features are available from one of the menu selections in excellence! >Jonathan P. Crone >Vice President, AURA, (Amiga Users of Regina Associated.) >(Regina, Sask. Canada ) (eh???) > >CRONEJP@UREGINA1.BITNET >....uunet!mcl!cronejp I like excellence! but I do have some complaints, bugs, and hints to help others. The program is slow while typing as Jonathan mentions, but it almost grinds to a halt when executing a glossary (excellence!'s version of a macro). The program is a memory hog (only two colours may be used if you have only 512K). The version provided uses overlays to save on memory, thus forcing people to swap disks when excellence! needs to load the next part of its program. For people with 1M or more, Micro-Systems Software offers an upgrade to a version without overlays. They require that you phone them to get an RMA number (save your dime, the RMA # is 1 Meg Upgrade Offer), return your original disk, a Repair/Replacement Card, and pay them $14.95 US (its just out of the box and it is already costing me more money!!!, come on MSS get a decent upgrade policy. Statements like "Your package will be returned unopened without a proper RMA #" are very discouraging (more slurs on MSS later)). MSS offers phone support and a BBS (which I can't seem to connect to, has anyone had any luck?). I have found a few bugs in the program, but in general it is solid. The manual is very well done, if incorrect in places. I would have liked a description of some of the special files used (the grammer files, thesaurus files, glossary files, and the preference file). It is not possible to change some of the settings without saving them in the preference file, a major mistake I would say. The bugs I have found so far are: - Tab followed by BackTab causes a crash (sometimes BackTab alone) - Continuous spell checker does not check misspellings of two characters or less, but the normal spell checker does. - Cut and Paste to other programs does not seem to work reliably (but the standard clipboard is used) - To have WYSIWYG when sending your output in draft or NLQ, you must use an 11 point font (or use a smaller font and a line spacing of 12 points). The manual states you should use an 8 pt, but it is wrong (I read the manuals appendix to the tech support person as he tried to convince me the manual was correct). - If you have only one disk drive, the program will not find the excellence!.prefs file so your preferences will never be saved (actually they are saved but never loaded). The tech support guy claimed that was a "FEATURE". I have a fix for this feature below. This feature will prevent the loading of your user dictionary and the glossary file if you have only one drive. - The spell checker did not recognize the following words: AMIGA, NLQ, EMAIL, SUPERCOMPUTING, BBS. It really does not like the amiga's technical words. Its startup glossary does not pass its own spell checker (words like CLI, Startup, double-click,re-boot are flagged). - Printer output in draft and NLQ mode is right shifted by two characters (it may be a problem with my printer driver, the program comes with V1.3 printer drivers, but I only have a V1.2 driver for my program). Graphic output is OK. - For a program with a grammer checker, they have a lot of nerve calling it excellence! (starts with a lower case letter, ends with an punctuation mark). The title of the program is always flaged for these reasons. - The programs grammer checker generates lots of stats but the manual is very skimpy on indicating which stats are meaningful. (If you have the same number of words in sentences as an insurance policy, is that good or bad?). You can't compare stats between documents (only comparisons with three fixed documents are allowed, a Hemingway short story, a life insurance policy and the Gettysburg Address (not only is this text old but it is not very interesting to a Canadian). - The program imports most IFF files but not HAM. - Files bigger than memory are not supported. For those who are still reading, here is a solution to the "one drive" bug. The problem is the workbench disk is in the drive when the program checks for the excellence!.prefs file. When it does not find it on the workbench disk, it does not ask to see the excellence! disk. The program assumes that you don't have an .prefs file (as well as a .gloss and .udict file). You need to make these files available on device named excellence!:. One way to fix this is (on a copy of your disk, never touch the original) to rename the disk excellence:, copy the stack program from C: to the disk (unless you keep it resident or in a ram disk), copy the following 8 lines to a file called startup on the excellence: disk. To run excellence! you only need to execute the startup file. copy excellence:excellence!.udict ram: copy excellence:excellence!.gloss ram: copy excellence:cmd.gloss ram: copy excellence:excellence!.prefs ram: assign excellence!: ram: assign doctools: excellence: excellence:stack 16000 run excellence:excellence! Only one .gloss file is needed. Specify its name in the preference requester for excellence! When you make changes to your .prefs, .gloss, or .udict files you have to copy those files from ram: back to excellence: after you are finished with excellence! You can create an execute file for this also (left as an excercise for the reader :-) ). If you have any other hints, bugs, or just comments, please send email I will summarize if there is interest. -Brant If the address below does not work try brant@alberta.UUCP or brant@alberta -- Brant Coghlan (403) 487-3619 ...{ubc-vision,sask,ihnp4}!alberta!brant Dept. of Comp. Science, 615 GSB, U of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada