moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer) (06/24/88)
Got a chance to see a demo of Microsoft Word 4.0 last night
at the Word Processing SIG of the Seattle Macintosh dBUG
(downtown Business Users Group) last night, and thought the
net might like to hear about some of the things I saw. I'll
just work from notes, and draw a few conclusions at the end.
----
John Reingold, the product manager for Word 4.0,
demonstrated the program on a Mac SE and a Mac II. Many of
the Microsoft programmers working on the project were also
there (not to mention a few from Aldus and other local Mac
software companies). Apparently, none of the people who
worked on 3.0 are working on 4.0 (this seemed to be
considered something of a "feature" by the membership). It
was particularly interesting to see 4.0 on a color monitor,
because color is used very well by the application --
particularly by the outliner, for differentiating between
various outline items. The program was apparently an alpha
version; suffice it to say that they were doing things on it
that I'd hesitate to do with a beta version, i.e. they were
*using* it, not running it through "safe" operations.
Looked very solid -- overall, this preview reminds me a lot
of the Excel demo MS gave us before it first came out.
Smooth and very powerful.
STYLE SHEETS: Last month, I heard that style sheets are much
"smarter" in 4.0. I think I complained on the net a few
months ago about how frustrated I got when I had a font
style (Bold) assigned to a style in 3.01, yet applying the
style didn't change the font to Bold. Someone pointed out
that in 3.01 I needed to change the text to Plain Text
first, and then apply the style. That struck me as very
counter-intuitive. In 4.0, styles are smart enough to
figure out how to apply themselves onto other styles to get
the proper result.
When 4.0 is first opened up, things don't look much
different. The first change you notice, though, is a
rectangle on the ruler labeled (I believe -- I was farther
away than I wanted to be from the screen) "Styles". Clicking
on the rectangle causes a menu to pop up from the ruler with
all the various styles that have been defined for the
document, just like fonts. Thus, to apply a style, you
select your text, pull down the menu on the ruler, and
voil... much faster. Apparently you can also define and
modify styles from this menu also, though I didn't see this.
VIEW MODE: Basically, you can switch your document, at any
time, to View Mode, which is basically WYSIWYG for each
page. Or maybe WYSAWYTIWYG (What You See And What You Type
Is What You Get). When in View Mode, all the tables and
illustrations and columns show up as you would see them.
However, what's really neat is that you can go in and edit
them right there. No having to open the header, footer table
or footnote items; you move your cursor into the header area
and type away. VERY easy for a new user to understand.
I assume that typing volumes in the View Mode is slower than
the normal mode -- otherwise, why ever have View Mode off?
The changes to the headers and footnotes weren't noticeably
slow from where I stood (that was watching a Mac II,
however). I also didn't notice whether two-column modes
appear in the same manner as they did in 3.0 in non-View
mode. It strikes me that having View Mode on or off is akin
to the discussion people were having about FullWrite having
a "WYSIWYG off" mode for faster typing; but again, I didn't
ask (ah, the questions I have *now* that I wish I'd asked
last night!).
OUTLINER: The outliner can now preserve all the styles,
fonts, etc. of the actual text in the outline mode (no more
Geneva, unless you want it that way); you can physically
drag outline items around the outline, like Acta. It also
allows you to color-code outline items, which looks really
good (if you've got a color monitor). Whole thing looks a
lot cleaner.
ILLUSTRATIONS: Text, graphics and tables (oh boy! More on
that later) can be placed on a page, like sidebars in
FullWrite, though there are no "Floating Sidebars", outside
of placing an illustration in text as a character. Also it
only wraps in a rectangular manner -- no wrapping to the
contours of an irregularly shaped/curved illustration. It
appears that you can move stuff around in View Mode by
clicking and dragging. Didn't get a chance to see them
insert graphics and have it wrap -- they had a prepared
document at this point.
TABLES: This feature is going to sell a LOT of copies of
Microsoft Word 4.0. Basically, Word has an structure for
doing tables, and it's very simple to think of. A table in
4.0 is basically a collection of cells in rows and columns,
like spreadsheet cells. They hold text (or, I imagine,
graphics if you store each graphic like a character). You
can apply styles (style sheet styles too!), fonts, spacing,
anything you can apply to standard paragraphs, to a single
cell. Or a row of cells. Or a column. The rows can expand
as you change information in a row. You can expand a column
by dragging a "column pointer" that appears on the ruler for
each cell division. You can change column sizes for all
rows, or one row, so that you can have uneven columns for
your table, or two-tier tables, etc. Same with row widths
-- they can be even or uneven. You can drag columns to the
left or right for the entire table, or for a single row.
Same with dragging rows around columns. And I mean
"dragging", i.e. dragging with a mouse (though I wouldn't be
surprised if you can do it from the keyboard, too). In
short, this is one of those things that causes people to say
"Of course! How simple! Why didn't someone think of this
before?" Immediately intuitive.
Best of all, Word 3.0 tab-seperated tables (and, I would
imagine, tab-seperated tables in other formats) can be
converted to 4.0 cell tables. And there are tons of features
you can define for your tables -- do you want a box around
it, width of the lines between cells (or make 'em
invisible), row heading options (I think -- it sure looked
that way). Calculations appear to be done in the same
manner that 3.0 did them, i.e. these may be cells but there
aren't any formulas to them.
Amusing side note: someone asked whether PageMaker would be
able to read tables from Word 4.0 files. One of the
Microsoft programmers said "I believe so -- as soon as we
give them the table definitions." He then turned to one of
the chief Aldus programmers and said, "How about it?" The
Aldus engineer said "As soon as we get the file format from
you. It's at the top of the list." From the horse's mouth,
folks.....
USER-MODIFIABLE MENUS. I think Microsoft is calling this
something along the lines of a "changeable user interface";
I prefer "user-modifiable menus", as it is the menus which
are modifiable, not the entire user interface. However, the
menus are COMPLETELY modifiable... you can get rid of OPEN,
you can move PASTE into the WINDOW menu, you can put up a
menu for ANY Word operation, etc. You can save and load
menu configurations, and there's a reset option that returns
them to their normal style. This will be particularly nice
for multiple people using menus -- each can save the
configurations they use, or save configurations for various
tasks.
The manner of adding menus is particularly nice: a selection
box comes up with an alphabetical list of every operation
that Word 4.0 can do (about 350 of them, apparently). You
find the one you want to add/move, select it, and then move
it to the position you want it at on a menu that pops up
from the selection box, that reflects the state of the
particular menu you're adding the function too. Also, for
any of the 350 menu commands, you can select the command and
hit a HELP button, which describes what the function does.
Good place to put it.
This is the first Macintosh program that has really had
"Have It Your Way" menus that I can remember, at least to
this degree.
"WARM LINKS" TO EXCEL: I'm still a little fuzzy on this...
I believe that 3.0 currently allows you to import a graph or
chart from Excel. They now have what they call a "warm
link" to the Excel document with the graph or chart you
imported. The warm link (I believe) associates the Excel
graphic you imported with the Excel document you grabbed it
from. If you make changes to the Excel document (and thus
change the graph or chart which is based on the document's
data), you can open the word document, activate the warm
link with Excel, and update the imported graphic in Word
with a single operation. To update the graphic in this
manner requires MultiFinder, however, and enough memory to
run both Word 4.0 and Excel at the same time. BTW, they
imported color Excel charts on the Mac II color screen --
nice.
OTHER STUFF:
This isn't a sure thing (they said it'd probably be in 4.0),
but if you have two word documents, you can run a "automatic
red-lining operation" which produces a third document that
shows the differences between the first two with various
editing marks, like crossed-out text and the whole works.
Again, this isn't promised, but they say it's very likely.
Updates: If you bought Word 3.02 after May 1st, the upgrade
to 4.0 is free. It's $75 to upgrade it, unless you got the
Microsoft Newsletter that went out to registered Word owners
with an offer of $50 upgrade if you "reserve" your upgrade
by sending MS an enclosed card or giving them a phone call.
New manuals will be part of it; they should be greatly
"cross-referenced". My personal impressions are that manuals
are going to be needed less in 4.0 than in 3.0.
EPSF and graphics: Basically, Postscript support is about
the same as it was for 3.0. The major change is that by
holding down the SHIFT key when selecting OPEN, you can open
any file. And 4.0 will understand what to do with MacPaint,
PICT (I believe) and EPSF (kinda) files. With EPSF, it
strips off the graphics and allows you access to the
postscript code, which you can dump in a 3.0 postscript
window.
Dictionary: Nothing major, though they say that it should
have the same dictionary as the IBM Word 4.0 program has (is
this expanded?). They promise that "Francisco" will be
spelled correctly in the dictionary with 4.0.
Memory Requirements: 4.0 will run on a 512K Mac! They said
it will have full functionality in 1 Megabyte with room to
spare, which is what everyone was really waiting to hear.
Full Menus/Simple Menus is still there (no features seem to
have been eliminated from 3.0, mostly just easier methods
for things), though you could simulate them with a Menu
Configuration set.
SuperPaint 1.2 bundling: They couldn't comment on this,
though they seem rather startled when we pointed out the MS
Newsletter announced that SuperPaint 1.2 would be bundled
with 4.0. Probably has to do with the complexities and
restrictions of inter-corporation dealings. Word Finder and
the macro package they distributed to 3.0 users will
definitely be bundled with it.
Repagination: I assume that it's completely gone, with View
Mode on or off. I heard it was gone, but I didn't check the
menus to see.
Numbering of paragraphs, table items, etc. seems to be the
same as 3.0, i.e. it's not dynamic, you have to do a
Renumbering operation on it.
Word Count; Yup, call up an operation and find out the
number of characters, words, sentences and paragraphs in the
document. I asked if you could do it for selected text,
instead of the whole paragraph, and Jeff said no, but
"that's a neat idea", and looked at one of his engineers.
Maybe...
If you store your main and usr1 dictionaries in a folder,
Word 4.0 remembers where the folder is between sessions
(after you've found them the first time). Since you have to
manually open user-defined, they don't remember where you
stored those...
No promised release dates were made, but September or
October were discussed. Sounds like they'd like a month or
two of intense beta testing beyond what they've already
done. I think you can be pretty sure that a Word 3.0 bug
fiasco is not in the cards for 4.0, simply due to the
precautions they're taking.
-----
GENERAL CONCLUSIONS:
First of all, this was an alpha demo which I did not get my
hands on, so remember that I'm only speaking from what I
saw. I think this is a good tool, but demos like this
always bring out enthusiasm untempered by personal
experience with the product. Only fools and financial
analysts speak of the future as a certainty...
4.0 Overall:
It seems to me that everything possible has been done to
allow 4.0 to be as visually-oriented as possible while still
keeping the general Word look. Commonly-used features like
style sheets have been made more convenient, many more
things can be moved by dragging or moving a mark on the
ruler, etc. As opposed to 3.0, which I felt was very
derivative of it's IBM antecedents, Word 4.0 is a
*Macintosh* application, not a converted IBM program. It
appears that the designers have listened to their customers
complaints and suggestions, and have taken them to heart,
while bringing a dose of common sense to the product as
well.
When someone releases a new version of a program which is
more powerful AND much easier to use than it's previous
version, I want to shake their hand. From the demo I saw, it
looks like Reingold and his people deserve applause all
around; this is the kind of update that shows a lot of
people were thinking about what they were doing. Between
Excel 1.5 and Word 4.0, it appears to me that Microsoft's
Macintosh division has decided to stay competitive in the
market through performance instead of company recognition.
Let's hope this continues...
4.0 vs FullWrite:
Since I have FullWrite and Word 3.0, and have been one of
FW's biggest boosters, I feel I should say something about
them in comparison. I chose FW over Word 3.0 because of two
things. The first is that I like FullWrite's immense range
of abilities and it's (to my mind) pretty successful attempt
at being a be-all, end-all document processor; it does
things for me that no other word processor on the Mac (or on
any other micro or workstation I know of, for that matter)
can do. The second was that I found much of 3.0's interface
to be very frustrating, particularly the style sheets and
the outliners. I'll want to work with 4.0 for a while
before saying anything definate, but it looks to me as if
the latter objection can be put to rest with 4.0. I still
like FullWrite interface better, but I admit that's I'm
using graphics and citation functions more, and tables less,
than other people I know. If I had to recommend a high-end
word processor for general use or business use (ignoring for
the moment FullWrite's memory demands, which isn't a issue
for me but will be for the average 1 MB user and for
Ashton-Tate's market in general), AND if Word 4.0's release
version shows all the promise this demo has, it's a case of
deciding between two very good products -- it depends on
what tasks the writer wants to put the application to.
Generally it seems to come down to 4.0's tables vs.
FullWrite's tons of graphic extras, and I suspect that, for
a lot of business people, tables will be a feature worth
choosing.
Of course, I'll have to reevaluate the two when FullWrite
comes out with their new version. Right now, I'd look at
FullWrite as a word processor with a visionary user
interface and enormous scope, that has some problems with
speed and graphics placement. Word 4.0, on the other hand,
is a full-featured word processor that has sanded down all
the rough spots until it has an immensely smooth, very
intuitive user interface. Word 4.0 doesn't have all the
power and features of FullWrite, but it *does* fit the
market it's aiming for -- business and high-end general
purpose document processing -- almost perfectly.
A few weeks ago, a graphic designer friend of mine went to
see Illustrator '88 demoed. He came back fuming. I asked
him why he was so frustrated, and he said, "I bought Aldus's
Freehand a few weeks ago, and was really pleased because it
did everything Illustrator did, and I was able to toss
Illustrator away. Now Illustrator '88 just added
auto-tracing, Freehand doesn't have it, and I have to use
both programs!" I think I understand how he feels now...
Two excellent products competing against one another is good
for the user, because each has to keep up with, and top, the
other in features that the user wants to buy. However, if
you're like me and hate to wait for "your" application to
catch up, you need to buy both. Impatience is costly in the
software industry...
"There will always be survivors."
-- Robert Heinlen
---
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, microsoft}!fluke!moriarty
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