Grappling with Word 2003
Oct. 18th, 2009 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteI'm a "late adopter" of technology, for a variety of reasons. Some of it is simple discomfort with change, which is a normal human reaction to things that change so rapidly we feel we've lost control of the ability to keep up. Some of it is voluntary simplicity combined with pragmatism: if something works well enough to get the job done, why upgrade to something glitzy and with dozens of new features just to have access to the latest technology? Some of it is prudent caution, learned by watching the grief that others at the bleeding edge of technology experience when they upgrade before all the glitches have been worked out.
Only the first point really explains why I'm only now starting to use Word 2003 (about 6 years after most of the rest of the world did) to replace the increasingly frustrating Word X (which I'm still using nearly 8 years after its release). The Mac versions of Word after Word X were simply too buggy to tolerate (Word 2004) or lacked key features (Word 2008 didn't support macros), and it's only been in the last year or so that running Windows on my Mac was easy enough to become an acceptable solution. Now that I'm running Parallels 3.x and Windows XP alongside Mac OS X, I've begun using Word 2003. (Based on historical trends, I'll probably upgrade to Word 2007 by around 2013. I've heard that Parallels 4.x, which I also have, probably isn't stable enough yet to use as a full-time solution, so I haven't installed it. Contrary opinions welcome!)
On the whole, the upgrade process has gone well: Word 2003 is immensely more stable than Word X, runs at least as fast and possibly faster (haven't benchmarked the two versions), and it restores features I'd forgotten how much I missed. The best of these is the ability to use the Alt key plus the underlined letter in a menu name, followed by the underlined letter in a command name, something that's tremendously liberating to a keyboard fascist like me who resents having to move back and forth between keyboard and mouse. You can sort of use that feature on the Mac (press F10 to move the cursor control to the menus), but because Apple never adopted Microsoft's menu design guidelines, you have to scroll through the menus using the arrow keys—too slow and tedious for work. I imagine that with a lot of work, I could fake this effect using macros and keyboard customizations. Too much effort in my opinion.
It only took a couple hours to copy all my autotext entries from Word X to 2003, transfer or re-record macros, and recreate keyboard shortcuts. Things would have gone faster, except that on the Mac, I used the Control key (used heavily in Windows) for most of my custom shortcuts, and had to spend some time finding new keyboard shortcuts to replace those I couldn't afford to sacrifice in Word 2003. On the whole it's been a pleasant experience, and I'm glad I invested the effort—though it's frustrating trying to rewire fingers that have spent 8 years learning other shortcuts. Still, the more I switch between the two versions of Word, the easier it gets.
There are frustrations, of course. Autotext doesn't work in the Reviewing Pane, and since I rely so heavily on this feature for editorial comments, I've had to use comment balloons—which I dislike less intensely than I used to, but still don't love. (Useful tip, thanks to Jack Lyon of the Editorium: If you want to escape from a balloon when you're done revising its text, simply press the Esc key to return the cursor to the document window. That makes balloons almost pleasant to use.)
There are many other things that are more difficult to achieve in Word 2003 than they should be, largely because of some re-engineering of the interface and the plumbing, but on the whole, I can't see going back to Word X for my editing work. I'll still use Word X for writing so I don't have to load Windows each time I need Word, but on the whole, life with Word 2003 is much more pleasant than life with Word X. I've recommended Word 2003 as the best solution for anyone doing onscreen editing on the Mac, and I'll stick with that recommendation until I find time to play with Word 2007 and see whether it does the job better.
Only the first point really explains why I'm only now starting to use Word 2003 (about 6 years after most of the rest of the world did) to replace the increasingly frustrating Word X (which I'm still using nearly 8 years after its release). The Mac versions of Word after Word X were simply too buggy to tolerate (Word 2004) or lacked key features (Word 2008 didn't support macros), and it's only been in the last year or so that running Windows on my Mac was easy enough to become an acceptable solution. Now that I'm running Parallels 3.x and Windows XP alongside Mac OS X, I've begun using Word 2003. (Based on historical trends, I'll probably upgrade to Word 2007 by around 2013. I've heard that Parallels 4.x, which I also have, probably isn't stable enough yet to use as a full-time solution, so I haven't installed it. Contrary opinions welcome!)
On the whole, the upgrade process has gone well: Word 2003 is immensely more stable than Word X, runs at least as fast and possibly faster (haven't benchmarked the two versions), and it restores features I'd forgotten how much I missed. The best of these is the ability to use the Alt key plus the underlined letter in a menu name, followed by the underlined letter in a command name, something that's tremendously liberating to a keyboard fascist like me who resents having to move back and forth between keyboard and mouse. You can sort of use that feature on the Mac (press F10 to move the cursor control to the menus), but because Apple never adopted Microsoft's menu design guidelines, you have to scroll through the menus using the arrow keys—too slow and tedious for work. I imagine that with a lot of work, I could fake this effect using macros and keyboard customizations. Too much effort in my opinion.
It only took a couple hours to copy all my autotext entries from Word X to 2003, transfer or re-record macros, and recreate keyboard shortcuts. Things would have gone faster, except that on the Mac, I used the Control key (used heavily in Windows) for most of my custom shortcuts, and had to spend some time finding new keyboard shortcuts to replace those I couldn't afford to sacrifice in Word 2003. On the whole it's been a pleasant experience, and I'm glad I invested the effort—though it's frustrating trying to rewire fingers that have spent 8 years learning other shortcuts. Still, the more I switch between the two versions of Word, the easier it gets.
There are frustrations, of course. Autotext doesn't work in the Reviewing Pane, and since I rely so heavily on this feature for editorial comments, I've had to use comment balloons—which I dislike less intensely than I used to, but still don't love. (Useful tip, thanks to Jack Lyon of the Editorium: If you want to escape from a balloon when you're done revising its text, simply press the Esc key to return the cursor to the document window. That makes balloons almost pleasant to use.)
There are many other things that are more difficult to achieve in Word 2003 than they should be, largely because of some re-engineering of the interface and the plumbing, but on the whole, I can't see going back to Word X for my editing work. I'll still use Word X for writing so I don't have to load Windows each time I need Word, but on the whole, life with Word 2003 is much more pleasant than life with Word X. I've recommended Word 2003 as the best solution for anyone doing onscreen editing on the Mac, and I'll stick with that recommendation until I find time to play with Word 2007 and see whether it does the job better.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-18 01:59 pm (UTC)Macs for keyboard fascists
Date: 2009-10-18 06:47 pm (UTC)Mac users and Windows users tend not know an awful lot about each other's world, and as a result, cling to long-outdated stereotypes. I know more than most about both operating systems not because of any inherent virtue or moral superiority, but rather because I was required to use PCs for more than a decade at work, and Macs at home. I'm no longer fully bilingual, but I'm still functionally bilingual.
One of the pernicious myths about Macs is that you need to use a mouse. The most obvious way around the dreaded rodent is to open a Terminal window and launch Bash (how can you not love software with the name "Bourne-again shell", after the original Bourne shell software?) or your favorite Unix shell. I'm not that much of a keyboard fascist; I haven't used Unix since about 1989, and don't miss it at all, but it's about as easy and easily more powerful than DOS.
Windows beats the Mac OS when it comes to controlling everything from the keyboard, but it's not as wide a margin of victory as it used to be. The "Common User Access" architecture that IBM created for Windows was a great idea, and has only gotten better over time. The Mac doesn't (so far as I know) have anything like it. But you can use most of the graphical interface via the keyboard, either directly or with a little work. For example, you can switch among applications using Command+Tab identically to using Alt+Tab in Windows, and can switch among windows in any application simply by using Command+[`], like Control+F6 in MS Office or alt-W to open the Windows menu and select the window by name or number.
From the Finder, you can select any folder or file by starting to type it's name, then open it (Command+O), duplicate it (Command+D), and so on. You can Trash files (Command+Backspace) and unTrash them again (Command+Z), and on and on. And you can assign keyboard shortcuts to a fairly amazing range of things directly from within OS X, both for OS X itself and for any application in OS X, but you can also use keyboard utilities such as QuicKeys for more precise control.
In any Mac window, you can sort files by name, date, etc. using keyboard shortcuts, and can select multiple files by holding down the Shift key and scrolling. You can Command-click to select noncontiguous files too, though I'm not sure if you can do that from the keyboard. If Jim's reading this thread, he probably knows the shortcut. You'll still have to use the mouse for dragging things between folders, but I actually prefer that approach; I think visually when I'm moving files around, even though I could always do it without too much fuss in MS DOS.
I use the Mac at home because I know it inside out and it gives me an order of magnitude less hassle than my Windows virtual machine or the kids' PC. But really, we're about at the point in the operating system wars where you can pretty much accomplish anything you need to with either Windows or a Mac. I like the Mac way of working better, but can switch to PC without much disruption other than the need to rewire my fingers.