I despise MS too, but if you jokers want to suggest a word processor that works and doesn’t suck (cross out Mac’s Pages–ech) and works well with a bibliographic program like EndNote that doesn’t suck (cross out. . . most things. BookEnds seemed ok), feel free. Meanwhile take everything other than possibly. . . ‘i’ and ‘z’ off your list.
LaTex?
Not to start a holy war, but Lotus WordPro? Surely you jest. And while I believe that some people do like WordPerfect, I definitely am not one of them. It seems to have its own set of problems with stray codes.
I do agree that Word is unstable for large documents. But I would suggest either a) if your documents are only slightly large, break them up into multiple files or b) if your documents are truly large and getting larger, invest in something beyond a garden variety word processor.
Being opensource, OpenOffice has no trouble being issued for Mac OS X. I have heard rumours that MS Office for the Mac was historically more stable than MS Office for Windows, but that may be just a runour. Certainly the packaging was different…
[paperclip] Hello, it looks like you’re writing a letter…[/paperclip]
SWAT
Stupid bloody &?%!@ Smarmy Paperclip…
I would run MacWrite 4.6 in the vMac emulator under System 6, one document at a time with no endnotes or footnotes possible, and rejoice in it, before I would use Word.
Not only would I prefer WordPerfect of the modern vintage, I’d rather use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
I really really detest Word.
Other than a mild, not-very-dependable tendency for it to put onscreen the same letter that you typed immediately following what’s already up there, it doesn’t do anything that I like.
The list of things it does that I don’t like would probably be both long and familiar. The OP would be one observation in a very very long ugly list.
The WP app I actually use most often nowadays is the WP module of AppleWorks 6. Before that, MacWrite Pro (under 9.x), although if I’d still been an academic I’d probably have gone with either Nisus Writer or WordPerfect 3.5e or whatever it was called. Being by that point somewhat out of the business of writing term papers and journal articles, I stuck with an app whose behavior I knew well and which didn’t stick bells whistles and wizards in my way.
I’m not one of those rabid Microsoft haters (I like Excel and use it often), but Word really sucks. Compared to Word, Quark XPress is a user-friendly, standards-compliant, intuitive program that only does exactly what you tell it to while making all options transparently available. Compared to Word, the suite of Norton utilities / firewall / antivirus is inobtrusive, doesn’t tie up processor cycles unnecessarily, introduces no system instability, is exquisitely reliable, and plays nicely with all the other programs on your computer. Compared to Word, Adobe Premiere puts every one of the most useful commands right at your fingertip while keeping the incredible swath of seldom-used features out of your way so as to create a naturally self-explanatory environment that never confuses anyone.
The hard-wired word-processor on my 1986-vintage Smith-Corona electronic typewriter was better than Word.
I’ve had only very limited experience with Lotus WordPro, but I’ll say this: It shipped with the most elegant, powerful, and intuitive equation editor I’ve ever seen on a computer.
Just about every word processor can save in RTF (Rich Text Format), which supports most of the features folks actually use in a word processor, and it’s readable in absolutely everything. You just have to remember one extra step when you “save as…”.
It’s weird because none of the autocorrect options include anything about periods and semicolons. Are you sure it hadn’t been changed on the original save, not when you renamed it?
Hmmm, it certainly sounds like the grammer/spelling check went wrong but it shouldn’t have run and it shouldn’t change anything without user intervention.
I’d mock up a document (or take a section of the old one) correct the semicolons and try loading/saving it again and see if it does the same thing.
If not then it’s an odd word glitch, maybe something screwy in the document. If it’s screwing up everything then it’s a word setting or macro that’s set to run on load or save. Is this your computer? Should there be anything strange on it?
I’d run a decent virus checker on the computer as well although I’ve never heard of specific behaviour there are older viruses that randomly trash documents in a similar fashion.
And for what it’s worth I’ve had no serious problems with day-to-day use of the newer versions of Word, older version were much much worse. It’s not ideal for everything but it’s not bad. On the other hand OpenOffice is perfectly usable too. They’re designed for a task and they’ll pretend to do a lot of complex stuff, which is when you switch to LaTeX or FrameMaker (or similar) for the complex stuff but they’re both too heavy duty for day-to-day stuff.
SD
Seems to be just a onetime glitch. I’ve changed names of much bigger files before and I’ve tried again minutes ago as suggested by SpaceDog. No problems at all. My antivirus checkers are all updated.
Thanks everyone
OpenOffice Writer? It’s a piece of crap. It’s nowhere near the quality of MS Word. I’ve never seen a document produced by any of the OO programs that actually looks nice. If you think you have problems now, just wait till you switch to OO Writer.
Try LaTeX. It looks pretty complicated, but it’s very easy to use once you get the basics down and your finished documents look amazing. If you’re on Windows, try MiXTeX and download an evaluation copy of WinEdt.
LaTeX, a copy of emacs (or Xemacs) and you’re all set. Most standard LaTeX installations will include a copy of BiBTeX, LaTeX’s bibliography management software, and cross referencing is easy. Sure, its a steep learning curve to begin with, but once you know what you’re doing, its really easy, you don’t have to worry about Word’s stupid autocorrect and things like that, and like Dominic says, your documents look really good.