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Form: Memo
Text: (33 lines follow)
On 22 Jun 1995 Kelly Burhenne wrote about problems with Microsoft Word.
My experience has been that once a document gets larger than 60-pages (with
an average number of simple graphics), Microsoft Word starts to show signs
of serious strain. It simply isn't meant for heavy duty book building (This
is an open admission by Word tech support). The "master document" feature of
Word is a poor (a very poor, I might add) cousin of Frame's "book" feature.
Updating, editing, and printing a "master doc" takes much longer than a
comaprable Frame book.
My horror story: I was working on an 80-page master doc with 8 files and a
few simple line diagrams. After an editing session I saved and closed the
document. After an hour or so I go back to open the document and I get the
message: "Not enough memory to open this document." By the way, my machine
is a Pentium-90 MHz with 16 Mb of RAM. I tried every possible thing
(including phone calls to Word support) to fix this problem but Word just
wouldn't budge. I even had my IT dept. add another 48 Mb of RAM !! But Word
had decided that there wasn't enough memory and that was that. I could not
open the document ever again.
My troubles didn't end there. I always have the 'automatic backup' option
turned on just in case... Well, even the backup file refused to open. Tech
support had a simple answer for all this: " Looks like your file got
corrupted." I ended up opening it as a "text" only file, lost all the
graphics, formatting, styles and a healthy chunk of time.
Frame has been a much stabler program for us. I've had little or no problem
with 500-page documents. I wish there was a program that has the guts of
Frame and friendlier features of Word (Autocorrect, AutoText, Sorting data
in tables etc.)
