From nud!noao!ncar!gatech!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!fluke!moriarty Mon Jun 27 08:50:06 MST 1988
Status: R
Got a chance to see a demo of Microsoft Word 4.0 last night at the Word Processing SIG of the Seattle Macintosh dBUG (downtown Business Users Group) last night, and thought the net might like to hear about some of the things I saw. I'll just work from notes, and draw a few conclusions at the end.
John Reingold, the product manager for Word 4.0, demonstrated the program on a Mac SE and a Mac II. Many of the Microsoft programmers working on the project were also there (not to mention a few from Aldus and other local Mac software companies). Apparently, none of the people who worked on 3.0 are working on 4.0 (this seemed to be considered something of a "feature" by the membership). It was particularly interesting to see 4.0 on a color monitor, because color is used very well by the application -- particularly by the outliner, for differentiating between various outline items. The program was apparently an alpha version; suffice it to say that they were doing things on it that I'd hesitate to do with a beta version, i.e. they were *using* it, not running it through "safe" operations. Looked very solid -- overall, this preview reminds me a lot of the Excel demo MS gave us before it first came out. Smooth and very powerful.
STYLE SHEETS: Last month, I heard that style sheets are much "smarter" in 4.0. I think I complained on the net a few months ago about how frustrated I got when I had a font style (Bold) assigned to a style in 3.01, yet applying the style didn't change the font to Bold. Someone pointed out that in 3.01 I needed to change the text to Plain Text first, and then apply the style. That struck me as very counter-intuitive. In 4.0, styles are smart enough to figure out how to apply themselves onto other styles to get the proper result.
When 4.0 is first opened up, things don't look much different. The first change you notice, though, is a rectangle on the ruler labeled (I believe -- I was farther away than I wanted to be from the screen) "Styles". Clicking on the rectangle causes a menu to pop up from the ruler with all the various styles that have been defined for the document, just like fonts. Thus, to apply a style, you select your text, pull down the menu on the ruler, and voil... much faster. Apparently you can also define and modify styles from this menu also, though I didn't see this.
VIEW MODE: Basically, you can switch your document, at any time, to View Mode, which is basically WYSIWYG for each page. Or maybe WYSAWYTIWYG (What You See And What You Type Is What You Get). When in View Mode, all the tables and illustrations and columns show up as you would see them. However, what's really neat is that you can go in and edit them right there. No having to open the header, footer table or footnote items; you move your cursor into the header area and type away. VERY easy for a new user to understand.
I assume that typing volumes in the View Mode is slower than the normal mode -- otherwise, why ever have View Mode off? The changes to the headers and footnotes weren't noticeably slow from where I stood (that was watching a Mac II, however). I also didn't notice whether two-column modes appear in the same manner as they did in 3.0 in non-View mode. It strikes me that having View Mode on or off is akin to the discussion people were having about FullWrite having a "WYSIWYG off" mode for faster typing; but again, I didn't ask (ah, the questions I have *now* that I wish I'd asked last night!).
OUTLINER: The outliner can now preserve all the styles, fonts, etc. of the actual text in the outline mode (no more Geneva, unless you want it that way); you can physically drag outline items around the outline, like Acta. It also allows you to color-code outline items, which looks really good (if you've got a color monitor). Whole thing looks a lot cleaner.
ILLUSTRATIONS: Text, graphics and tables (oh boy! More on that later) can be placed on a page, like sidebars in FullWrite, though there are no "Floating Sidebars", outside of placing an illustration in text as a character. Also it only wraps in a rectangular manner -- no wrapping to the contours of an irregularly shaped/curved illustration. It appears that you can move stuff around in View Mode by clicking and dragging. Didn't get a chance to see them insert graphics and have it wrap -- they had a prepared document at this point.
TABLES: This feature is going to sell a LOT of copies of Microsoft Word 4.0. Basically, Word has an structure for doing tables, and it's very simple to think of. A table in 4.0 is basically a collection of cells in rows and columns, like spreadsheet cells. They hold text (or, I imagine, graphics if you store each graphic like a character). You can apply styles (style sheet styles too!), fonts, spacing, anything you can apply to standard paragraphs, to a single cell. Or a row of cells. Or a column. The rows can expand as you change information in a row. You can expand a column by dragging a "column pointer" that appears on the ruler for each cell division. You can change column sizes for all rows, or one row, so that you can have uneven columns for your table, or two-tier tables, etc. Same with row widths -- they can be even or uneven. You can drag columns to the left or right for the entire table, or for a single row. Same with dragging rows around columns. And I mean "dragging", i.e. dragging with a mouse (though I wouldn't be surprised if you can do it from the keyboard, too). In short, this is one of those things that causes people to say "Of course! How simple! Why didn't someone think of this before?" Immediately intuitive.
Best of all, Word 3.0 tab-seperated tables (and, I would imagine, tab-seperated tables in other formats) can be converted to 4.0 cell tables. And there are tons of features you can define for your tables -- do you want a box around it, width of the lines between cells (or make 'em invisible), row heading options (I think -- it sure looked that way). Calculations appear to be done in the same manner that 3.0 did them, i.e. these may be cells but there aren't any formulas to them.
Amusing side note: someone asked whether PageMaker would be able to read tables from Word 4.0 files. One of the Microsoft programmers said "I believe so -- as soon as we give them the table definitions." He then turned to one of the chief Aldus programmers and said, "How about it?" The Aldus engineer said "As soon as we get the file format from you. It's at the top of the list." From the horse's mouth, folks.....
USER-MODIFIABLE MENUS. I think Microsoft is calling this something along the lines of a "changeable user interface"; I prefer "user-modifiable menus", as it is the menus which are modifiable, not the entire user interface. However, the menus are COMPLETELY modifiable... you can get rid of OPEN, you can move PASTE into the WINDOW menu, you can put up a menu for ANY Word operation, etc. You can save and load menu configurations, and there's a reset option that returns them to their normal style. This will be particularly nice for multiple people using menus -- each can save the configurations they use, or save configurations for various tasks.
The manner of adding menus is particularly nice: a selection box comes up with an alphabetical list of every operation that Word 4.0 can do (about 350 of them, apparently). You find the one you want to add/move, select it, and then move it to the position you want it at on a menu that pops up from the selection box, that reflects the state of the particular menu you're adding the function too. Also, for any of the 350 menu commands, you can select the command and hit a HELP button, which describes what the function does. Good place to put it.
This is the first Macintosh program that has really had "Have It Your Way" menus that I can remember, at least to this degree.
"WARM LINKS" TO EXCEL: I'm still a little fuzzy on this... I believe that 3.0 currently allows you to import a graph or chart from Excel. They now have what they call a "warm link" to the Excel document with the graph or chart you imported. The warm link (I believe) associates the Excel graphic you imported with the Excel document you grabbed it from. If you make changes to the Excel document (and thus change the graph or chart which is based on the document's data), you can open the word document, activate the warm link with Excel, and update the imported graphic in Word with a single operation. To update the graphic in this manner requires MultiFinder, however, and enough memory to run both Word 4.0 and Excel at the same time. BTW, they imported color Excel charts on the Mac II color screen -- nice.
OTHER STUFF:
This isn't a sure thing (they said it'd probably be in 4.0), but if you have two word documents, you can run a "automatic red-lining operation" which produces a third document that shows the differences between the first two with various editing marks, like crossed-out text and the whole works. Again, this isn't promised, but they say it's very likely.
Updates: If you bought Word 3.02 after May 1st, the upgrade to 4.0 is free. It's $75 to upgrade it, unless you got the Microsoft Newsletter that went out to registered Word owners with an offer of $50 upgrade if you "reserve" your upgrade by sending MS an enclosed card or giving them a phone call. New manuals will be part of it; they should be greatly "cross-referenced". My personal impressions are that manuals are going to be needed less in 4.0 than in 3.0.
EPSF and graphics: Basically, Postscript support is about the same as it was for 3.0. The major change is that by holding down the SHIFT key when selecting OPEN, you can open any file. And 4.0 will understand what to do with MacPaint, PICT (I believe) and EPSF (kinda) files. With EPSF, it strips off the graphics and allows you access to the postscript code, which you can dump in a 3.0 postscript window.
Dictionary: Nothing major, though they say that it should have the same dictionary as the IBM Word 4.0 program has (is this expanded?). They promise that "Francisco" will be spelled correctly in the dictionary with 4.0.
Memory Requirements: 4.0 will run on a 512K Mac! They said it will have full functionality in 1 Megabyte with room to spare, which is what everyone was really waiting to hear.
Full Menus/Simple Menus is still there (no features seem to have been eliminated from 3.0, mostly just easier methods for things), though you could simulate them with a Menu Configuration set.
SuperPaint 1.2 bundling: They couldn't comment on this, though they seem rather startled when we pointed out the MS Newsletter announced that SuperPaint 1.2 would be bundled with 4.0. Probably has to do with the complexities and restrictions of inter-corporation dealings. Word Finder and the macro package they distributed to 3.0 users will definitely be bundled with it.
Repagination: I assume that it's completely gone, with View Mode on or off. I heard it was gone, but I didn't check the menus to see.
Numbering of paragraphs, table items, etc. seems to be the same as 3.0, i.e. it's not dynamic, you have to do a Renumbering operation on it.
Word Count; Yup, call up an operation and find out the number of characters, words, sentences and paragraphs in the document. I asked if you could do it for selected text, instead of the whole paragraph, and Jeff said no, but "that's a neat idea", and looked at one of his engineers. Maybe...
If you store your main and usr1 dictionaries in a folder, Word 4.0 remembers where the folder is between sessions (after you've found them the first time). Since you have to manually open user-defined, they don't remember where you stored those...
No promised release dates were made, but September or October were discussed. Sounds like they'd like a month or two of intense beta testing beyond what they've already done. I think you can be pretty sure that a Word 3.0 bug fiasco is not in the cards for 4.0, simply due to the precautions they're taking.
GENERAL CONCLUSIONS:
First of all, this was an alpha demo which I did not get my hands on, so remember that I'm only speaking from what I saw. I think this is a good tool, but demos like this always bring out enthusiasm untempered by personal experience with the product. Only fools and financial analysts speak of the future as a certainty...
4.0 Overall:
It seems to me that everything possible has been done to allow 4.0 to be as visually-oriented as possible while still keeping the general Word look. Commonly-used features like style sheets have been made more convenient, many more things can be moved by dragging or moving a mark on the ruler, etc. As opposed to 3.0, which I felt was very derivative of it's IBM antecedents, Word 4.0 is a *Macintosh* application, not a converted IBM program. It appears that the designers have listened to their customers complaints and suggestions, and have taken them to heart, while bringing a dose of common sense to the product as well.
When someone releases a new version of a program which is more powerful AND much easier to use than it's previous version, I want to shake their hand. From the demo I saw, it looks like Reingold and his people deserve applause all around; this is the kind of update that shows a lot of people were thinking about what they were doing. Between Excel 1.5 and Word 4.0, it appears to me that Microsoft's Macintosh division has decided to stay competitive in the market through performance instead of company recognition. Let's hope this continues...
4.0 vs FullWrite:
Since I have FullWrite and Word 3.0, and have been one of FW's biggest boosters, I feel I should say something about them in comparison. I chose FW over Word 3.0 because of two things. The first is that I like FullWrite's immense range of abilities and it's (to my mind) pretty successful attempt at being a be-all, end-all document processor; it does things for me that no other word processor on the Mac (or on any other micro or workstation I know of, for that matter) can do. The second was that I found much of 3.0's interface to be very frustrating, particularly the style sheets and the outliners. I'll want to work with 4.0 for a while before saying anything definate, but it looks to me as if the latter objection can be put to rest with 4.0. I still like FullWrite interface better, but I admit that's I'm using graphics and citation functions more, and tables less, than other people I know. If I had to recommend a high-end word processor for general use or business use (ignoring for the moment FullWrite's memory demands, which isn't a issue for me but will be for the average 1 MB user and for Ashton-Tate's market in general), AND if Word 4.0's release version shows all the promise this demo has, it's a case of deciding between two very good products -- it depends on what tasks the writer wants to put the application to. Generally it seems to come down to 4.0's tables vs. FullWrite's tons of graphic extras, and I suspect that, for a lot of business people, tables will be a feature worth choosing.
Of course, I'll have to reevaluate the two when FullWrite comes out with their new version. Right now, I'd look at FullWrite as a word processor with a visionary user interface and enormous scope, that has some problems with speed and graphics placement. Word 4.0, on the other hand, is a full-featured word processor that has sanded down all the rough spots until it has an immensely smooth, very intuitive user interface. Word 4.0 doesn't have all the power and features of FullWrite, but it *does* fit the market it's aiming for -- business and high-end general purpose document processing -- almost perfectly.
A few weeks ago, a graphic designer friend of mine went to see Illustrator '88 demoed. He came back fuming. I asked him why he was so frustrated, and he said, "I bought Aldus's Freehand a few weeks ago, and was really pleased because it did everything Illustrator did, and I was able to toss Illustrator away. Now Illustrator '88 just added auto-tracing, Freehand doesn't have it, and I have to use both programs!" I think I understand how he feels now... Two excellent products competing against one another is good for the user, because each has to keep up with, and top, the other in features that the user wants to buy. However, if you're like me and hate to wait for "your" application to catch up, you need to buy both. Impatience is costly in the software industry...
