MS word should use ami pro built in macro page & style formatting

[South40]

MS Office should adopt Lotus ami pro's system of setting dialogue boxes to
activate macros to accomplish needed tasks.
MS requires you to go through a task to make a macro, whereas lotus menus &
cascadeing dialogue boxes make everything simple to set up & save as a style
sheet.

Page & style changes for Lotus ami pro are very simple because the style or
page change menu pops up dialogue boxes set up in a logical manner that
allows these changes to be saved under a style name of your choosing & re
used at will.

F2 to F11 are used to switch back & forth as needed to give two different
font styles with accompanying choices of name, size, normal, bold etc ;
paragraph indent, spacing above & below; sentence spacing etc; Header;
Footer; Numbering,
Bullets; Head, subhead and on & on. Page set up with left, right, margins,
etc is also done this way & saved in the style.

Making changes to the style sheet are as simple as going to STYLE, CHANGE
STYLE, & ticking changes in the dialog boxes and saving the changes !

MS should seriously consider incorporating this group type user programming
thru simple menu driven grouped dialog boxes to make setting up styles easier.
I guess MS wants you to use a wizard, but this seems to require a lot a work
to set up & seems a very complicated way to do things. Why do we have to keep
asking experts to make us a Template when a lot of those items could
automatically be generated thru the menu with cascading dialog box system ??

Remember that ami pro had all this ability built in, on a word processor
program that came on 5 floppies !!!



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[garfield-n-odie]

Hmmm... so you think this, despite Lotus' copyrights on their
user interface and intellectual property? Obviously a case of
liking better that which you know better, and b!tching about that
which you don't know how to use. If you like AmiPro better than
Word, then please please please feel free to use AmiPro.

 

[Brainless_in_Boston]

dear garfield -

not to flame, but given MS's penchant for monopoly, Excel and Word have
become de facto standards, and yet with Excel they FAIL MISERABLY at having a
user-friendly macro creation process. I spent 6 effing hours trying to write
a very simple maco, and having it be functional. 6 HOURS!!!! I'd love to
bill them for that time lost to their arrogance and unwillingness to make a
good product.

In this day and age, having such hard-to-use software is INEXCUSABLE.

MS seems way to carried away with the same arrogance you display (again, not
to flame you). They have become too big, too successful, and too unwilling to
revise and improve their software so it makes it easier to use. Try writing a
macro (without 60 hours of instruction). I dare you! Really - I mean it,
garfield - I dare you.
(this assumes you're not trained in VBA, or creating macros - and HOW LONG
would that take, anyway?)

Taking an attitude, and saying, "Well - if you can't hack it, use ami-pro,
ya wimp" - is not a functional argument when Excel and Word are the industry
standards. Want to share files? Use MS products. Yet MS (again) FAILS
MISERABLY with Excel in providing a simple to use product that functions at a
reasonable level.

MS can easily buy the ami-pro rights and incorporate those processes into
the macro creation process, if that would work well. They've bought all the
competition (basically), and yet fail to provide easily usable products. Ever
search for help? Their search alogrithm is unbelievably crappy. It has been
for years, and yet CONTINUES to be CRAPPY!! I have complained about it for
years.

MS seems to have deaf ears when it comes to their products. They will NOT
tell you what it can't do. Ever try to merge cells in a shared Excel
workbook? Good luck. With their help-search algorighm, they bare tell you
what it WILL DO! They don't respond, have no easily accessible complaint
process, and generally are a bitch to deal with.

It's very discouraging. I'm tempted to see if the open software like LINUX
is any better. If there have functional macro and file sharing capatibility,
I'll use it.

BTW, MS products are so bad even MS was using Linux in their servers when
they came out with NT!! Says something about what works, eh? Take care.

Mark
Boston, MA
617-816-9024.