Hi Rafael:
"... I have a custom view set up in Entourage that threads by
Subject..."
That's an ordinary 'choice' feature on entourage, rather than
'custom', isn't it? I've used it.
View>Arrange by>Edit custom arrangements...
"Word crashes when the document gets too complex to read."
The doc that crashed was only a page of uncomplicated text.
And the object or coding structure beneath it? A Word document is a binary
structure of "objects", properties, and pointers. Internally, it's very
complex, even if the text it is displaying is simply "The cat sat on the
mat".
"Careful selection when editing prevents it."
I don't understand what you mean by 'selection' here.
Or here:
"Neat, precise 'selection' will improve your score a lot."
A Word document consists of a large collection of nested containers. Think
of Chinese Eggs: containers within containers within containers. The lowest
level of those containers contains a text string. Each sentence may be an
individual text string, or it may be several, depending upon whether any
formatting has been changed within the sentence.
The formatting is itself stored in containers. These containers look very
much like tables of "properties. For example, the font, its face, size,
colour, spacing, kerning. In a separate table are the paragraph properties
relating to the paragraph the string is in. Things like line spacing, space
before and after, justification etc.
Word connects the text string with its formatting properties using binary
"pointers". These are large binary numbers indicating the precise position
in the file of the formatting container, and the row in that table that
applies to the text.
The pointers are hidden from display. However, the non-printing characters
(particularly the paragraph marks) show you where they are. When copying
and pasting text, it is important to know whether or not you are including
the paragraph mark in your selection. If you choose not to do so, Word will
attempt to expand your selection to include the binary pointers that
indicate the formatting.
If you are in a hurry, and have a lot of formatting pointers close together,
and some are laid one on top of the other, Word sometimes gets confused.
When it does, it mangles the pointers. When that happens, the document
structure is corrupt, and Word begins to crash when handling that document.
The real issue here is not whether WE thing the document is "simple", but
whether WORD thinks it is after trying to decode it.
"I suggest turning your non-printing characters on while editing so
you can see what
you are doing."
With only an ordinary word text document? That seems extreme. I
don't understand why.
I suggest to you that it's "basic". If you are in the habit of editing with
the non-printing characters hidden, expect your documents to be unstable and
unreliable. Once a document becomes corrupt, it is very difficult to fix it
without losing information.
All I have is what's on SBC/Yahoo, my server. Do you have a special
spam filter program or something like that?
Yes. I do. The filters provided for no extra charge by companies such as
Google and Yahoo are configured to allow through spam generated by the
companies who pay for advertising with those providers. The spam filter I
use is produced by a company that makes its living solely from anti-spam and
anti-virus solutions and does not sell advertising. It's a server-based
system that rejects rubbish before I see it, so I do not have to waste time
or bandwidth downloading it.
Why don't you use just Entourage for both news and mail? Why switch
between one and the other?
I do use Entourage for both mail and news on the Mac. On the PC, I use
Outlook and Agent. I almost never handle news on the PC, because Entourage
offers greater convenience for the news work that I do.
Are FireFox or Mozilla or IE Mac superior to Safari, which is the
browser I've been using? I used to use ie5 on os 9.
Depends on which versions. IE has not risen above version 5 on the Mac and
is no longer being produced. IE 5 Mac was he best of breed when it was
launched, but that was a long time ago, and it is now well behind the game.
Safari is available in various flavours. I'm still back in OS 10.2.9, for
which the latest version of Safari is 1.3. It's small, fast and simplistic.
However, there are some severe bugs with its frames handling and it is no
longer developed.
On OS 10.4, you can go up to Safari 2, which is a superior browser. FireFox
is arguably a more powerful browser than Safari 2, but the advantage is
slight. FireFox is well ahead of Safari 1.3. FireFox and Mozilla are
essentially the same thing with a different look.
IE7 on the PC has raised the bar in browsing to new heights. Not everyone
likes it (ask me and the answer you will get depends a bit on the phase of
the moon...) However it is massive, very fast, very powerful and very
secure. On a powerful computer, IE7 is clearly ahead of all the rest.
We can expect many of the ideas from IE7 to make their way into Mac browsers
over the text few months. Some of those ideas (e.g. Tabbed browsing...)
made their way into IE7 from Safari
and some of those ideas (security
tools...) are not so important on the Mac.
I guess the answer also depends a lot on what YOU mean by "better". Many of
the things that the new browser do, I do not need, and some of them I do not
WANT.
The game being played here is "owning eyeballs". Each of the browser
heavy-hitters is trying to become "The Desktop" through which the user views
not just web pages but the entire world, everything on the computer.
IE7 is rapidly heading onto that direction on the PC. If you see IE 7
running in Windows Vista you will see that a lot of what happens on the
computer is being displayed by IE.
I think we can expect to see greater moves in that direction on the Mac in
the next version of OS X. I'm sure that FireFox and Mozilla are working
overtime to be there when OS 10.5 appears
BTW: Thanks for accurately providing the details of your software in your
questions: it makes answering them a lot easier
Cheers
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410