Well, Word is not and has never pretended to be a desktop publishing
application (Publisher fills that slot in the Microsoft Office lineup, to
the extent that anything does). It is a word processing program, pure and
simple. Although it has many features that make it superior to some DTP apps
for specific jobs (such as long documents with footnotes/endnotes, TOCs,
indexes, etc.), its graphics handling and page layout capabilities will
never rival PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, QuarkXpress, Adobe InDesign, etc.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site:
http://word.mvps.org
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"John" wrote in message
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Thanks for the great reply Suzanne. You certainly know your stuff.
As much as I like Word I still don't think it's a match for the old
Ventura
Publisher program I used to use about 12 years ago (particularly where
more
complicated documents are concerned). It's both a shame and surprising
that
Word hasn't caught up with these old desktop publishing programs yet. I
still
find the Word interface unnecessarily cluttered and it can sometimes be
very
difficult to place items exactly on the page where you want them to be,
since
Word always seems to assume it knows best.
I'm still not convinced by the ribbon interface either. It may be great
for
users who don't want to learn the program properly but I find it quite
slow
when you want to take control and define elements yourself rather than
just
using all the pre-defined stuff.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.