tends to be a memory hog, and the built-in macro features are inherently
insecure, providing an excellent breeding ground for viruses. Documents
generated by Word also have the bad habit of hiding extra information (such
as deleted text and personally identifiable details about the file author) in
their headers. And files created in Word usually aren't readable by other
word processing software, because Microsoft keeps Word's document format
proprietary.
close to matching the Word's menus and toolbars, but OpenOffice.org
Writer (hereafter known as OOo Writer) matches Word on the PC function
for function and even looks just like it. If you use Word on a Mac, you can
also use OOo Writer, but it looks like the PC version, which is somewhat of
a downer. But the OpenOffice.org volunteers have scheduled a native Mac
OS X version to come out real soon now. I used OOo Writer on the Mac in
its current form to write this book.
just for them. For everyone else, you can save RTF documents that others can
open and edit in any word processing program, or save PDF files that can be
opened by anyone using Adobe Reader or similar PDF viewer. These alterna-
tives also have their own native file formats, which are not as ubiquitous as
the Word doc format and therefore not as prone to carry viruses.
consider WordPerfect. Lawyers and legal assistants swear by WordPerfect for
legal contracts and briefs, possibly because it has been around long enough to
be entrenched in that professional industry. It was the first word processor
to offer automatic paragraph numbering and automatic footnote numbering
and placement on pages. WordPerfect used almost every possible combina-
tion of function keys with the
1986, and in 1989, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS became the word processing
market leader. Then Microsoft moved in for the kill.
with them (e.g.,
was also rendered obsolete by Windows' use of its own printer device drivers.