Anne Troy wrote:
Francis: If Word is useless, why do 90% of word processor users use it?
(Food for thought.)

Because (a) FrameMaker is too expensive and (b) Word comes as standard
on most business PCs!

I'm a technical writer and following my company's recent takeover, have
been obliged to start using Word again after 4 trouble-free years of
using FrameMaker.

I didn't mean to offend anyone, but I'm just fed up of Word's total
unpredictability - i.e. the way that something that worked yesterday,
doesn't work today - and the inordinate number of bugs it contains
(I've given up on multi-level numbered lists, just to take one
example). I work with long, complex documents and Word just isn't up to
the task of producing them. I waste *days at a time* trying to get it
to do what I want.

I've also made the mistake of writing Visual Basic macros for automatic
conversion of one format to another. You wouldn't believe the number of
workarounds I've had to write in order to get it to do approximately
what I want, because of the minefield of bugs (which Microsoft,
needless to say, calls "features")!

Sorry to be negative but I am just extremely frustrated.

Try this:
http://www.officearticles.com/word/p...oft_word.ht m
************
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

Thanks - problem is I want to *retain* the paragraph and character
formatting of the source document, but not the page layouts. The stupid
thing is that in *one* document I have, the page layouts get copied
over, and in another document, they don't! That's what I mean about
Word's infuriating unpredictability.

Anyway, thanks for the response!

Francis