SUMMARY: upgrade to Word97?

Subject: SUMMARY: upgrade to Word97?
From: John -dot- Cornellier -at- PARIS -dot- IE -dot- PHILIPS -dot- COM
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 21:08:19 +0200

Greets from Paris,

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about Word97, public and private.

Here's the deal:

You're probably going to have to upgrade eventually.
Upgrade NOW if you want: hypertext links in docs, vertical alignment (and other
stuff) in tables, the ability to save truetype fonts in docs, easier-to-use
revision functions, and want to get started on VBA.
WAIT to avoid: bigger files, slower operation, learning a new macro language,
spending money.

Here are the details (other techwr-lers' words in quotation marks):

Whether you upgrade depends on what features you use. Upgrading costs a lot of
time and money so it pays to take a long look at whether the functionality
justifies the cost.

The main difference between Word6 and Word7 (aka95) is that the latter is 32-bit
and seems to be more stable and faster on a 32-bit OS (Win95/NT).
Word97 (aka Word8) is part of Office 97 and so includes VBA and the Office
Assistant. "A 7MB (sic) patch is necessary. It's at
http://www.microsoft.com/kb/articles/q172/5/27.htm or on CD by post."

Following are some functional difference between Word6 and Word97:

The Office Assistant seems to be of "little use to power users". Mr Paperclip is
"annoying", "antagonising" "a nuisance". But "damn good company when nights are
late and writers are lonely" and transmogrified into Scribbles the Cat it's
"really cute"!

You can save Truetype fonts in the doc, useful for sending docs to people who
don't have the fonts installed on their systems.

The file size of Word6 docs seems nearly to _double_ when I save them as Word97.
And no, I didn't have fastsave enabled. Example: I saved a 278K Word 6 doc
containing nothing but text to Word97, and it now takes up 537K! Somebody,
please, say it ain't so!

Obviously the prog files are bigger. Techwr-lers wrote that Word97 processed
more slowly, but this probably isn't a problem if you have a Pentium with 32MB
RAM.

The drop-down style list shows a representation of what the style looks like,
which has an obvious use, but hogs pixels, is slow to drop down, and displays
styles in "no particular order"! (I always define kbd shortcuts for defining
styles -- much quicker).

Hypertext links to other MS Office objects are useful and "seem very robust".
Revision functions are "definitely better".

The new table features are "lovely (vertical merge, align to bottom), but the
interface is clunky, and if you have table-related macros, a lot of them will
break".

And so to VBA. This stands for Visual Basic for Applications.
If you only use macros to record the odd keystroke, fear not. You can import
your Word 6 macros and you can record new macros in the same old way. Any legacy
Word2 code hanging around causes the filter to "choke", however.
VBA is not an advanced version of the old Word Basic. It is a
Quasi-Object-Oriented programming language and globally replaces Word Basic,
Excel Basic, Access Basic, etc.
If you are used to coding in Word Basic, then you had better be prepared to
spend a long time learning VBA before you get up to speed. This learning period
may be more than compensated for by the fact that skills learned developing Word
macros can be used anywhere VBA is used -- Access, even Visual Basic itself.
Also code you write in Word is more easily used by other apps.
Having said all that, I don't know how we're going to learn this stuff. Trial
and error? Several techwr-lers lamented that there seems to be no equivalent of
the old Word Developer's Kit. Anyone seen any good guidebooks to VBA for Word?

John
mailto:john -dot- cornellier -at- paris -dot- philips -dot- ie -dot- com

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