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Subject:Re: WORD97: is it worth upgrading? From:Beth Friedman <bjf -at- WAVEFRONT -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 29 Aug 1997 10:24:07 -0500
In our previous episode, JIMCHEVAL -at- AOL -dot- COM said:
> << I am particularly concerned about having to convert my macros>>
> You should be. I believe Word 95 was already converting them to Visual Basic
> (not sure - I skipped that step). Supposedly they convert cleanly, but (oh
> surprise) certain things don't. There's a table of equivalences between Word
> Basic and Visual Basic in Help, but at times the fundamental structure of
> Visual Basic is so radically different from Word Basic that you're still
> lost.
Word 95 uses WordBasic, so it doesn't convert the macros.
I agree. Mostly they convert cleanly, but when they don't, it's a
real pain. Anything that has legacy Word 2.0 code (including
something as simple was WW2_Insert) chokes the converter. If I hadn't
kept Word 6 around when I installed Word 97, I would have been out of
luck.
> I'm an ex-programmer myself. But I'm floored that they expect a simple word
> processing user to plunge into an object-oriented language.
Yes, yes, yes! I've been using WordBasic at an advanced level for
five years; and now there's the brand new language with NO
DOCUMENTATION INCLUDED that I have to learn from scratch. I'm not a
programmer, except what I've picked up from doing macros in
WordPerfect 5.1, Sprint, and Word. It's not the commands that are
driving me nuts -- it's the concepts behind the commands.
And I _hate_ the debugging window.
> << Any functional advantages to the new macro language? >>
> Well, if you can master the fundamental approach of Visual Basic, it's far
> more generalized than straight application-bound macros. Basically, you'll
> have learned to program.
In the meantime, I'm back to recording a process and looking at the
code to see what it looks like. I thought I'd gone beyond that
process several years ago.
Grump.
*********************************************************************
Beth Friedman bjf -at- wavefront -dot- com
"What happened to the kippers left from breakfast?
Or maybe there's a bit of cold roast pheasant.
I am the king now, and I want a sandwich." -- John M. Ford
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