Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: What's so bad about Word?

Author:Paul Howson
Posted:6/23/1999; 5:14:25 PM
Topic:Hidden failure of Win2k
Msg #:7760 (In response to 7759)
Prev/Next:7759 / 7761

I'm speaking here about Word 5.1 on the Mac which I still use. None of the newer versions have appealed.

Word's outlining is cleverly integrated with the paragraph style mechanism. Reserved styles (heading 1, heading 2, etc) define a paragraph's hierarchy in the outline view. But this also allows for FORMATTING to be associated (automatically) with different levels in an outline. This greatly enhances its usefulness as a writing tool when you have long documents or documents with numerous levels of structure. You can reflect that structure by use of type size, spacing around paragraphs or text colour.

You can also selectively show and hide outline levels down to a particular level (e.g. "show me just the chapter headings", "show me down to the subsection level only", etc). Another strong benefit when authoring and editing long documents with complex structure.

Frontier's outliner doesn't have any mechanism for associating meaning with different levels of an outline (as described above).

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