dgraham@kean.ucs.mun.ca (David Graham) (09/12/90)
Sorry if this has been abundantly discussed before, but I'm so enraged at Microsoft I just have to say something. After an incredible wait I just got my multilingual dictionary package for MS Word 4.0. So I looked at the documentation and cannot believe that you have to QUIT WORD AND RESTART IT EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO CHANGE DICTIONARIES! What a colossal unforgivable pain. Most of my documents have more than one language in them, and this is just completely unacceptable. Also, the *^%& French dictionary doesn't even work properly (it's the only one I've tried so far). It chokes on a huge number of legitimate French words, seems to have an equally huge number of inexistent French words in it which it tries to suggest, and half the time offers to replace a 'misspelled' word by the same word! AAARRRGGGGHHHH!!! All I can think of is that maybe it's choking on my French-Canadian system software (C-6.0.3), but a *French* dictionary that can't handle *French-Canadian* system software? Gimme a break, Microsoft. I can't believe that money is being charged for this apparent garbage. My revenge, however, is that I've been invited to speak on "Electronic writing aids for non-English-language word processing" at the convention of the Modern Language Association. Since several thousand people attend the MLA every year, maybe I can do some real damage, even if only a tiny percentage of them actually attend my talk... I hope my first impressions are not accurate, and I'd love to hear from someone at Microsoft that I'm wrong... *************************************************************************** David Graham dgraham@kean.ucs.mun.ca ***************************************************************************