Hi Nick:
Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
In most cases, I don't think you are. There are a LOT of bugs in Word 2008.
1. Cannot set default position/location on-screen: will not open a document
fully to the menu bar (and same at bottom), unless I drag it there each time.
NOT SOLVED.
Bug. Wait for the service pack.
3. Will not hold all my toolbar and ³begin new group² separator settings, only
some of them.
SOLVED: Although extremely difficult to do, I was finally able to set my
toolbars they way I want. Microsoft shouldn¹t make this process so painful,
but Š
This "may" have been user error
2. When I turn ³Show all non-printing characters² off, they don¹t disappear.
Just check your settings in Word>Preferences>View, in the Non-printing
characters section. Show/Hide toggles the setting of "All".
If any of the other settings are ON, Show/Hide will not toggle them, they
will remain on.
So with Show/Hide ON, All should be the only one ticked, and with Show/Hide
OFF, none should be ticked.
The computer press can be a bit of a worry. Like anything else,
commercialisation and cost-cutting have taken their toll. These days, a
large proportion of the content you read about Microsoft products is
actually written by Microsoft's Marketing Department.
That's because the printed media are saving costs by having their magazines
printed in China. So their deadline occurs two or three months before
on-sale date, to give the ship time to get back to the USA with the copies.
This means that a large percentage of the printed publications do not test
the products AT ALL, and those that do give their reviewers THREE DAYS to
install, learn, test, and write a report on the software.
It's not going to be a very searching test
I was offered such a
contract once (because I used to be a journalist). When I discovered that I
would have three days to file if I wanted to get paid, I declined. I can't
afford to have my name on that kind of article
The online sources save costs by having very few journalists (some sites
have "none"). So they are easily sucked in by the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty
and Doubt) spread by Microsoft's competitors.
The Open-Source movement and the ABM (Anyone But Microsoft) camp are
particularly poisonous about the ISO Standard Office XML format currently
used by Microsoft.
That's because they hoped their competing standard would be adopted instead.
In turn, because their applications are not powerful enough to handle all
the things that can exist in an OXML file. Neither is Mac Word 2008, but
that point seems to have been lost in translation.
What they really do not seem to want us to inspect too closely is that their
competing ODF (Open Document Format) seems to have rather missed the point
of being in XML.
There are two "kinds" of Markup Language out there. The "SGML
Applications", of which OXML is one, and the "HTML-like" applications, of
which ODF is one. The difference is that in an SGML document, you can store
anything you like, provided you define how to handle it in the Document Type
Definition (DTD) and the Formatting Output Specification Instance (FOSI).
In ODF, you have a fixed syntax, like HTML, in which the legal objects are
pre-defined. ODF-based applications lack the ability to accept new objects.
You could theoretically extend ODF, but if you did, the ODF applications
couldn't handle the content.
Note to the purists amongst us: Neither of those statements above is 100
per cent accurate. If you insist on a complete and accurate description,
download all 6,000 pages of the OXML specification.
The DTD specifies what is legal in the document. The FOSI specifies how the
receiving application should handle each kind of content. In XML, the DTD
and the FOSI can be combined into an XSLT (XML Style Sheet and Transform).
The XSLT can, in turn, be "implied" (built-in to the application so you do
not need to store it in the document). In OXML it is implied, and you can
add your own XSLT to it, or replace it entirely.
One of the more amusing allegations that you will hear is that Microsoft XML
does not "comply" with the XML standard. Only someone who has completely
missed the point of XML could write such an allegation.
XML is a "Syntax", a "Language" if you like. There are two stages to
"compliance": "Well-formed", and "Valid".
Well-formed means that the syntax within the file conforms to XML coding
standards. It's like grammar and spelling in a piece of English text.
Microsoft XML has ALWAYS been "Well-formed". If it weren't, Word would
crash trying to open it (umm... Sometimes, Word 'does' crash trying to open
it, and you can guarantee that the code in that file is NOT well-formed at
the time!).
Valid means that the language within the file complies with the rules
defined in the Document Type Definition. Microsoft has occasionally been a
little careless in that area, but due to bugs, not malevolent intent.
However, in the same way as English Grammar and Spelling makes no comment
about what we may describe with the English language, the XML Standard makes
no comment about what a coder may describe in an XML document. You can put
anything you like in there, provided you observe the rules of the grammar,
and spell and punctuate it properly. And that is the whole POINT of having
XML in the first place. That's what the "X" in XML stands for:
"eXtensible".
Each new Microsoft XML application (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint...) adds a
few new widgets to the XSLT. Which becomes an extremely inconvenient truth
to those competitors attempting to handle the Microsoft file formats.
While they are very fond of issuing press-releases accusing Microsoft of
failing to follow the rules, they seem to go deathly quiet if you point out
that Apple's Pages seems to have no trouble with the format
Does this mean that Microsoft is purer than the driven snow? Of course not.
But it's no worse than its competitors, and better than many of them.
Software marketing is a contact sport: people get hurt. Some companies need
to understand that crying about it on the Internet, or running off to the
referee when you get hit, will not win the next match!
Do I like this state of affairs? Not much. I remember when the industry
was a kinder, gentler place. I also remember that a word-processor then
cost $15,000 per seat, couldn't handle a file larger than 50 pages, and
wouldn't line things up properly unless you used a font of exactly 10
points.
Hope this helps
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:
[email protected]