Mac Word 6.0

re: Mac Word 6.0

Ajay Juneja — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 06:00:00 GMT

Very helpful post!!!

a customer's perspective

Don — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 06:44:00 GMT

It's interesting to hear what a developer's recollection of Word 6.0 is. I experienced Word 6.0 as a customer (on a Mac, no less), and have a very different memory of it.

Of all the software I've owned, Word 6.0 is the only specific version of any software title that has really stuck in my memory. To this day, I still say "Word 6.0 had all the functionality I'll ever need in a word processor." I felt that way when Word 6.0 was new, and I still feel that way.

-Don

re: Mac Word 6.0

Christoffer Lernö — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 07:09:00 GMT

Thanks for that story, it was great!

another customer, another view

PAT — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 18:12:00 GMT

I remember all too well going from Word 5.1a to version 6, only to erase any trace of Word 6 not too long after and reverting to 5.1 (which kept running fine up until MacOS 9.22).

Word 6 is for many Mac heads with some experience one of the worst versions, if not the all-time worst version, of any major software product on the Mac.

For many, Word 5.1a remains unequalled to this day (despite the avalanche of featrures in Word X). In fact, if M$ would port the old 5.1a code to Cocoa, they would probably have a killer standalone word processsor that's sleek, agile, and so close to being full-featured that few users would ever notice the difference.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Lee Joramo — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:13:00 GMT

Thanks for this history.

I am a long time Word user, back to the MS Word 1.0 for DOS days. I continued to use Word for DOS up till about verison 5, when I switched to the Mac in the the early 1990's. To this day, I feel that MS Word 5.1 for Mac is the most wonderful and elegant word processor ever created. In fact, I continued to use it up to moving to Mac OS X Beta. I would still love to use a program like Word 5, if it was updated to Carbon or Cocoa. About the only feature that I ever wished for was for Word 5 to be fully AppleScriptable.

Microsoft has done an excellent job of Word (and the rest of Office) since Office 98. The programs ARE Mac like.

Alas, while I use Excel extensively, I find that I seldom do more than use Word as a document viewer. The reasons for this are two fold.

1) Word has become increasingly bloated with features that I don't need. know that this is not Microsoft's fault. What I consider feature bloat is mostly dictated by the demands of the market. I do know how to turn off the features that I don't need, and how to customize Word to meet my needs. But . . .

2) I find that I seldom need a word processor these days. Most of my writing is for the web or email for which I use BBedit or an email program. If I do need to create a formated document, I typically hand my text to a graphics designer who uses Quark or InDesign to build a finished document.

The one area where I do use Word is when collaborating on a document. Word's revision control tools rock.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Steve — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 22:53:00 GMT

It's interesting to hear someone from MBU say Word 6 was a crappy product. I brought a copy with my own cash to run on the first Mac I purchased. Largely because I used Word for Windows at work.

As you say it was pants. Subsequent versions came, but after v6 I didn't trust MS to do a decent job and risk further wasted cash. Now there is an interesting situation. Office X is good, but MS will only let you upgrade from the most recent versions. I heard the comments from MS that they were disappointed with Office X sales. I won't open the can of worms that is Office pricing, but I wonder how many people they have lost to earlier versions and in particular the dogs dinner that was v6. People like me.

Personally I would love to see MS loosen up their upgrade criteria and allow upgrades from earlier releases. It certainly ought to push up sales. If they did I would bring Word in line with all the great apps like Photoshop that I have upgraded down through the years.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Brendan White — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 00:07:00 GMT

Add my voice to the "it's great to hear the inside view" bit! And Rick, I'd love to hear about trying to understand the users better - us programmers are, generally speaking, notoriously useless at understanding normal people, who just don't care about how clever or interesting the code is - they just want it to work, and work the way they expect it to work.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Chris Hanson — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 00:24:00 GMT

I'm surprised it was that hard for Microsoft to discover what "Mac-like" meant. It goes to show just how insular Microsoft is.

When Mac users say they want software that's Mac-like, they typically mean they want software that uses the human interface controls provided by the Toolbox in the fashion specified in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.

Word 6 looked and felt like a Windows product that happened to run on the Mac. That's the single biggest reason all the users I knew who used it hated it, and why all the users I knew who used Word 5 refused to upgrade. It was also something that demonstrated to me as a Mac developer what I shouldn't do to my users.

I occasionally have potential clients who want me to implement non-standard interfaces without a good reason. Word 6 is one of the chief examples I bring up when explaining how that doesn't work in the Mac market.

What went wrong with Mac Word 6.0

Apple Matters — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 06:48:00 GMT

Rick Schaut of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit explains what went wrong with version 6 of Word for Mac:In order to understand why Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product, we need to understand both the historical background that led to...

re: Mac Word 6.0

Sandy McMurray — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 04:07:00 GMT

Rick,

Thanks for the background. I haven't done any programming since learning BASIC years ago, but I appreciate the story, and the problem-solving challenges you faced.

The number one complaint I have about Word.X is that it uses its own spell-checker rather than the OS X system spell-checker used by Mail.app, TextEdit, etc. (If I've already created a custom dictionary by making additions in the e-mail; why should I have to do it again for the word processor?)

Likewise, I'd like to see the system Address Book data linked to Word.X for mail merge. Is this going to change in the next version?

re: Mac Word 6.0

Todd Albertson — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 07:23:00 GMT

I think Jeff Raikes was promoted from Word business unit manager to VP & GM for SMSD (sales marketing and service division). I was working for MS at the time and if memory serves me, our group re-org'd and my boss began working for him after we left Word.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Rick Schaut — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 07:55:00 GMT

Wow, you've all left me with a lot to catch up on. To all of you who have expressed gratitude, you're welcome.

Todd, I think you're correct, but that was so long ago. And I was such a green little pup, that anything that happened three management levels above me was just off my radar screen.

Sandy, to be perfectly honest, it would be a serious amount of work to try to use the system spelling checker in Word. One reason is that Word's spell checking is tied in with grammar checking. However, there might be a way that we can grab the list of custom words from the system dictionaries. I'll pass the idea on to our proofing tools people.

Chris, I'm having difficulty grasping how one might infer from a single instance of mixed-up priorities in one product group 12 years ago that all of Microsoft is "insular" in the present tense. And "insular" strikes me as being too strong a word. It's not that we didn't even bother to try to listen. It was more a case of not hearing very well. Also, Apple's HIG really had little do with what "Mac-like" meant for a majority of our users. Show me, for example, where Apple's HIG have any bearing on how Mac Word 5.x did styles.

Brendan, I'll get to it. It took me a few days to write the Word 6.0 post. I only get to do this in my spare time, and we're currently in ship mode with Office 2004. But you are oh so right. It's geeky cool to solve the really hard technical problems, but the users really don't care.

Steve and Lee, I don't set the prices. I just write the code. Sorry. But, thanks for the compliment, Lee.

Pat, whew. Retool Mac Word 5.x for Mac OS X. That sounds so simple when you say it, but it really ends up being a serious amount of work when you start looking at the details.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Chas Redmond — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:29:00 GMT

That was a tremendous recounting. I've been a user of Word since the 1.0 days. I upgraded to 6.0 but never really used it and I had an upgraded Quadra 650 with the PPC card and extra memory. However, when Office 98 came out I upgraded and thought the entire suite was quite something. It was better to me than Word 5 because I did use the other programs and OLE was a dream. I was amazed that you guys could get Visual Basic and the other MS stuff ported to the Mac architecture. I upgraded to Office X when it came out becaue by then I had upgraded my systems and had OS X running. I'm a real fan of Office X - and despite the contrary comments of some about it's non-use of OS X native components, I still feel Office X "feels" very Mac like. I'm one of those Mac original 128-and-up users who feels that Microsoft gets under-rated a lot because an awful lot of what is done, especially since the MacBU, is done with a very perceptive Mac-like approach. It shows and I'm appreciative and will continue to support the MacBU products. Thanks for taking the time to give us an explanation of why Word 6 was so bad - it really was and a lot of us were wondering how it happened that way given the previous great products.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Steve Stone — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:43:00 GMT

Rick wrote, " Retool Mac Word 5.x for Mac OS X. That sounds so simple when you say it, but it really ends up being a serious amount of work when you start looking at the details."

True enough, but if MS were to do such a thing it would result in a serious amount of cash flow for MS.

Some of it from me.

Keyboard commands

Korn — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 17:14:00 GMT

Even in Word X, the keyboard commands for moving the cursor still do not follow Mac standards. For example, the Mac keyboard command to move the cursor to the beginning of a line is Command-left arrow. To move the cursor to the end, it's Command-right arrow. Moving between words is Option-left/right arrow.

But these commands don't work correctly in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Betalogue

TrackBack — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 22:23:00 GMT

Betalogue

re: Mac Word 6.0

Bill Timberman — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 23:10:00 GMT

Thanks for the insight into real-world development issues. I've been a Mac user since 1984, and bought every version of Word for the Mac from the beginning through version 5, and loved them all (except for 3.0, which was initially a buggy mess. Fortunately, it was very quickly fixed.)

I used version 6 briefly, couldn't believe what had happened to one of the best pieces of Mac sofware ever written by anybody, and stopped buying MS products for the Mac altogether until I saw Office 98 in action. I eventually wound up buying Office 2001, and Office v.X, and have been very happy with both.

My point is that bad stuff *does* drive customers away, but good stuff will bring them back eventually. MS takes a lot of risks, so I reckon it's inevitable that they lose a big one now and then. What put the company where it is today, though, is the energy to re-think and try again, the MacBU being a case in point. To say I'm as happy with Word v.X as I was with 5.1a would be an understatement. It's amazingly good, a real Swiss army knife of a program. It must be very gratifying to have been part of the team that delivered it.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Derek K. Miller — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 02:51:00 GMT

Ever since Word became the worldwide de facto standard for word processors in the 1990s, everybody has tried to do everything with it, including memos, letters, manuals, books, layout, collaboration, outlining, even e-mail.

And that's the problem with what Word has become, for both Windows and Mac. It tries to be everything to everybody. It has to. Sure, others (and even Microsoft) have tried simplified or more specialized word processors, whether with MS Works, AppleWorks, Nisus Writer, Mariner Write, or any number of other long-gone alternatives. But people buy (or pirate) Word, because that's what everyone else uses.

I'm an editor and technical writer, and I use Word's updateable fields, bookmarks, tables, auto-generation of tables of contents, styles, spell checking, track changes (grudgingly, but it does work), and even HTML import all the time. I never use the grammar checker, Word Art, outliner, indexer, hyperlinks, HTML export (ugh), VBA, or the Office Assistant. I turn off nearly every automatic feature there is, from conversion of hyphens to appropriate dashes, to AutoCorrect and AutoFormat. But I let Word automatically make curly quotes.

There are some bugs and design problems that have long annoyed me, but which have not changed since version 6.0 or before because other features have taken precedence. Different people -- and even different editors and technical writers -- would have a different matrix of features they use or don't use, and bugs or design issues they'd highlight. I'd gladly give up translucent charts in Excel if I could save files with more than 31 characters in their names in Word. Others would not.

Word 5.1a with the addition of inline spell checking (the squiggly red underlines) would cover almost everything I really _need_ to do. Yet I could never expect anyone to produce a program like that, because too many other people need different things. Word 6 was one of the earliest, and the most drastic, results of trying to keep up with the endless demands of feature creep.

Word v. X is a nice program. It does lots of stuff. But for all its improvements over version 6, it lacks much of the elegance of Word 5. And you know what? Mac OS X, for all its lovely lickability and stability, lacks some of the elegance (oh-so-especially in the Finder) of Mac System 7. Maybe those sorts of tradeoffs aren't necessary in theory, but they seem to be the pragmatic reality for Microsoft and Apple.

Oh, and if anyone wants to see what happens when someone plays an April Fool's joke that Microsoft _is_ porting Word 5 to Mac OS X, check out: <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-674.html#lnk3>. (The beginning of the same issue touted "VisiCalc for Mac OS X" as one of its sponsors.) The Word joke started a big discussion: <http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1892>.

It says something -- about Word, about word processors in general, and about the rise of the Internet -- that I do most of my writing in BBEdit or Microsoft's own Entourage e-mail client today, however.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Michael Giagnocavo — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 15:28:00 GMT

As a Windows-only person, it's interesting to see a strange UI going towards the Mac. Companies going towards PCs mess up their UIs too. Look at the QuickTime (yuck) player for Windows. Even current versions feel strange on Windows -- as if they couldn't figure out how to write a normal Windows app (the menus). Also notice how Adobe and Apple use drop-down menus in their options/preferences dialogs instead of tabbed displays.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Mark Gisleson — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 15:51:00 GMT

For anyone who has trouble remembering what the initial "beta" of Word 6.0 was like, a local reporter chronicled my experiences here:

http://mfinley.com/articles/cardiac.htm

To the best of my knowledge, Microsoft used extensive input from me to solve many of the problems they had with this program, which I still consider to be the worst word processing program in the history of ever.

I was the lucky guy who discovered that the type-ahead buffer maxed out somewhere around 45 words per minute (didn't catch many MS programmers with that one, but it was quite noticeable to those of us who typed for a living). When I talked to the reporter, I didn't exaggerate in the slightest. After a couple of weeks on Word 6.0 I had an involuntary twitch in my left eye and ended up being hospitalized with cardiac arrythmia.

Saying Word 6 was bad software is like calling George Bush a bad president. In both cases, "bad" doesn't begin to tell the story.

If Microsoft really wanted to serve the public, they could still cash in big time with a release of "Classic Word 5.1.a" for Win and OS X. It's still the best word processing software of all time, and jettisoning it for all the subsequent incarnations of Word was a near-criminal act of monopolistic aggression (i.e., forced upgrades).

BTW, one of my friends was a cameraman for many of those focus groups. I never quite understood why interviewing purchasing managers was instructive to designing word processing software. You would have done much better to have talked to frontline secretaries, or maybe even a resume writer like me. I've got 50,000 Word documents on file going back to 1990, and I can say with tremendous authority that Microsoft has failed to support previous Word iterations on a regular basis. I have given up using Adobe fonts or elaborate formatting simply because I have no assurance the next upgrade of Word will support them.

Word for OS X is OK, but it's not Word 5.

Word 6

Michael Tsai's Weblog — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 22:06:00 GMT

Rick Schaut: In order to understand why Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product, we need to understand both the historical background that led to some key decisions, and we need to understand some of the technical problems that resulted from those decisions. Schaut was there. I’m not sure what to make of his comments that Microsoft had to do focus groups to determine why people thought Word 6 wasn’t Mac-like, and that the answer was that it wasn’t Word 5. First, it should at least have been obvious that Word 6 didn’t look right. Second, in its day,...

re: Mac Word 6.0

DorkStar — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 21:31:00 GMT

Interesting stuff. The one thing that still, to this day, is making Word un-Mac to me is the fact that there is no keyboard shortcut for Save As… I just don't get it!

D

re: Mac Word 6.0

Andrew — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 18:47:00 GMT

I remember Word 6 rather well, though I actually liked the program. Of course, my reasons weren't normal as I was a "switcher", having just switched from a 386 PC running Windows 3.1 (and Word 2.0) to a Macintosh PowerBook 145b with 8MB of ram.

I never had Word 5, and Word 6 behaved exactly like Word 2 for Windows, a program I was very familiar with, while adding useful features and improving the arcane steps required for customization. I still consider Word 6 as the first modern word processor as its multiple undo (first seen in Nisus) and autocorrect features are completely ingrained in the way I work.

I went back to Windows in 1998, and just recently switched back to Macintosh and have Office v.X. v.X is nice and Word X is a delight (my complaints are all with Entourage's inability to import from the Windows version of Outlook).

As for Mac-like, it is a look and feel, that is more important to some people than others. I like the simple appearance of old Mac programs and updated versions like AppleWorks. Word X has that look and feel despite its complexity, and so I would consider it a very Mac-like program as well. Not sure I'll bother with Office 2004, but if it imports directly from Outlook 2004, I just might, as I still have stuff in my old PC that hasn't made it to my Mac.

re: Mac Word 6.0: v.X problems

Leslie Smith — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 09:43:00 GMT

I have Office:mac v.X and I have NEVER been able to make the *&^^%y thing work. I tried the updates - they don't work. They won't do the update - they fail to update. I think I am doing it in the right order.

I am pretty &**^%'d off with the whole Word for Mac X stuff. It runs for a few seconds then crashes.

I think the aim has been to make MacOSX users defect to XP.

--Leslie Smith

re: Mac Word 6.0

drunkenbatman — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 06:11:00 GMT

Cool post. I've had my problems with some versions of Office in the past, including the current- but I know you guys have one hella hard job in front of you and are often pulled in several directions, and beat up on from several directions. Keep it up, and <a href="http://www.latext.com/pm/betalogue?id=P931">ignore the asshats</a>.

re: Mac Office 2004 demo is now online

Dan Crevier's Blog — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 22:37:00 GMT

Some cool Microsoft blogs

TomorrowYesterday - A Dennis T Cheung Blog — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 03:17:00 GMT

Dan Crevier Rick Schaut...

re: Mac Word 6.0

Daniel Woods — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 07:01:00 GMT

The first WP I used extensively was WordPerfect5.1 for DOS, I used to type my documents with a split Window so I could observe my Formatting Codes and ensure my Documents were well structured.
When I got my own computer and had to purchase my own software, headed straight to WordPerfect7... IMO the best WordProcessor for Win32. I continued using WP7 and WP8 for all my documents, until I attended a Course which required Documents to be submitted electronically in the Word6.0 Format. I was forced to print a Proof of the finished product in WordPerfect, export from WordPerfect to Plain Text, and then MarkUp the document on the schools Win3.1 Machines running Word6.0
Nowadays, after Upgrading to a Mac, short documents are written in Plain Text, or RTF using TextEdit. Occasionally, If I have a Large Document which requires a Consistant Structure, I'll use DocBook. I publish documents using PDF.
I would love to see a "Document Processor" which concentrates on Document Structure, rather than Appearance.

office v.X repeating history?

Dave — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 12:38:00 GMT

As long as we're at it, let's talk about v.X.

Excel seems to have dropped most of its key commands, and they are not customizable.

Word is quite sluggish on average machines, though the current crop of dual G4s and G5s seem to work well with it.

There are a number of key missing "features" which I personally can live without, but I think we're all concerned about what will happen when Office 2004 comes out - will it support the document security "features" of Office for Windows?

Rick, if you're reading this, ... how about Access? I don't know anyone who actually LIKES it, but I know lots of people who NEED it.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Marc Bizer — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 22:36:00 GMT

One of the big problems with Word 6 was that it was basically IDENTICAL to Word for Windows 2, UI and all. It's a bit disingenous to imply that no one could agree about what made Word 6 "un-Mac like." What made it un-Mac like was the fact that it had an identical UI to the Windows app that had inspired it. To be specific, reviews of Word 6 pointed out, for example, that dialog boxes had "OK" and "Cancel" exactly reversed compared to the way they were in virtually every other Mac application -- because that was the convention under Windows. And I distinctly remember someone from MacBU pointing out that for Word98, someone had to go through 700 dialog boxes and change the button order back to what it had been.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Andrew — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 14:58:00 GMT

Is Office 2004 still Carbon, or will it be Cocoa? Going to Cocoa is really the only way I can justify another $150 (Student and Teacher) for the new version.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Rick Schaut — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 15:20:00 GMT

Andrew, read my "Carbon vs. Cocoa" post.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Nicholas Riley — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 20:10:00 GMT

Thanks for the post! I also use the example of style definition to explain why Word 6 on the Mac sucked so much, and am really glad to know that it's similarly appreciated inside Microsoft. The whole menu-coming-out-of-a-button thing... yuck, and to think Apple made it a standard control in OS X (see the font panel).

I don't know if you ever tried to use Word 6 on a PowerPC Mac with 8 MB RAM - I had to do this for a summer, on a Power Mac 7200 with System 7.5.3, and it was sheer pain; I ended up bringing in my PowerBook 540, which while a lot slower in the processor department had 12 MB RAM, and that made all the difference.

Another obvious way in which Word 6 was a step backwards were the keyboard equivalents. I loved the way Word 5's keyboard usage was so standard: command-shift-X for text formatting; command-option-X for commands, and the most common commands got command-X shortcuts (I still remember command-D for "Character" and command-M for "Paragraph"). Perhaps because Windows was missing the Mac's option modifier, the Word 6 keyboard layout was a mess in comparison.

re: Mac Word 6.0

David Phillip Oster — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 20:48:00 GMT

What about Visual Studio C++ for Macintosh? Right around the time that Word 6 for Mac was released, Microsoft also released a version of their C++ development environment that contained a library that would implement the Windows API but run on a Mac. The library was huge and caused any program using it to look like a Windows program on a Mac, to feel un-Mac-like, and to run slow. Was this technology using in Word 6? It sure felt like it.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Rick Schaut — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 22:24:00 GMT

David, yes, Word 6.0 used WLM, though the size relative to Word wasn't all that large. Nor, for that matter, could one reasonably say that WLM was the primary reason Word 6.0 was slow. Also, using WLM didn't mean you couldn't make a program far more Mac-like, but you had to do far more work than simply retargetting the compiler to use the PPC version of VC.

Where's Rick?

Buggin' My Life Away — Sat, 01 May 2004 18:14:00 GMT

re: Mac Word 6.0

darukaru — Sat, 15 May 2004 03:47:00 GMT

An excellent story. Thanks.

re: Mac Word 6.0

sabry — Tue, 18 May 2004 08:22:00 GMT

re: Mac Word 6.0

leighton — Wed, 19 May 2004 09:28:00 GMT

As someone who has used Word since version 1.0 it's been most interesting to read some of the thinking behind Word 5->6->98 migration.

Word 6 was as bad as Word 5 was good. When it came out I was a student at Princeton doing computer support and the number of calls for help started quadrupling... one night after 20 or 30 Word 6 based calls. I and the other techs went out and deleted Word 6 from over 200 public computers and replaced it with an old copy of Word 5 and the extension to open word 6 documents. Our call rate for word went back down to 1 or 2 a day . For years they kept Word 5 running.. improving it through 3rd party apps like Smart Scroll that gave it live scrolling and open dialog box enhancers that allowed for advanced file searches. To this day there are many people happily using Word 5 to produce major papers and manuscripts. (Now most of the public computer rooms are gone but those that have macs have Office X installed)

Now as a CS professor I use Word 6 to demonstrate bad HI. I never fail to get laughs when showing it with it's full compliment of toolbars out.

The turnaround between Word 6 and Office 98/Explorer 5 was amazing. It was as if a lobotomization had been reversed and MS suddenly "got it", Both were excellent products and both were HI-wise (but not performance wise) better than their Windows counterparts. As far as being good computer citizens the best thing MS did during this transition was standardize the word and excel document formats and make them platform agnostic.

We received Office 2004 last week and I was happy that Word had been polished (less flakey crashes and problems with fonts), but was otherwise unimpressed with the upgrade. I would have liked to have seen conceptual leaps that both simplify the program and make it more powerful (obviously easier said than done, but one can hope...). I was disappointed that long-standing issues (font families not being grouped for example or over eager auto-text) were not addressed and that obvious innovations (an "instant search" box) were not added, still improvements in other part of the suite show that the Mac BU still can produce great software. I hope to someday see something other than Office and Virtual PC come out of the BU. The thing about Mac users is that we buy lots of software. We're good consumers.

re: Mac Word 6.0

George Fowler — Fri, 21 May 2004 17:31:00 GMT

Terrific blog, I discovered it via the link the the open file resolution entry, which was very informative. I understand there is no route back to 5.1a, which I still use under Classic. (The only feature I miss is zoom.) Word 5 is getting worse now in Classic, and its days are numbered. So I have high hopes for Word 2004. One irritation to someone like me, who uses 5.1a unless he needs a feature available only in higher versions of Word (like robust tables, wider range of graphic insert formats, etc.): the Save down to 5.1a seems to have been removed and only .rtf is available as a "Save down" format. This has some issues if you want to open a doc in 5.1a, as I often do. For example, docs with superscript footnote reference numbers often lose their superscripting, and there is no way to get it back globally via Find/Replace (or I guess it is called Change in 5.1a). But if you do a Save down from 2001 or X, they are preserved.

re: Mac Word 6.0

saber — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 10:04:00 GMT

word 6

re: Mac Word 6.0

rj — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 14:40:00 GMT

Just read this thru a link from Wired. Very interesting article (I even enjoyed the 'technical' part about swapping functions in and out of memory)! FYI, I recently helped an independent writer/publisher upgrade his machine from a 12-year-old Centris to a DP G4 running Panther. He went ahead and purchased the latest version of Word and payed someone to come in a train him (I don't do word processors). He called me shortly after that and asked if it was possible for him to trash that new version of Word and put his old 5.1 copy on the new machine! He knew how it worked and could get it to do what he wanted without fighting it which he felt he was doing with Word X. Maybe a Word-Lite with a simpler interface and not so many options would be more appealing for people like that?

Performance

Larry Kollar — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 17:14:00 GMT

Like rj, I found your article through a Wired link. I'm another long-time Mac person, started with Word 1.05 on a 512K Fat Mac, yadda yadda.

Anyway, can you comment on the performance issues in 6.0 that were fixed in 6.0.1? I remember a *huge* number of primal screams coming from the Mac newsgroups in those days over how slow 6.0 was. We wound up with a copy at work; I gave it a try and found it unusable on the 68030 IIci boxes that were typical for the time. The PPC version was even worse -- I remember one net'er saying he had VirtualPC and the Windows version actually ran faster under VPC than the native version!

When Mac users began defecting to Word Perfect in droves, Microsoft rushed out 6.0.1 to cure the worst problems. It was still slow, but usable. Microsoft was so eager to get that patch out, that a polite emailed bug report got me a free copy. (And I still have that stack of floppies somewhere. :-) As a technical writer, Word 6.0.1 -- or maybe Word 7/95 on PCs -- was the last version of Word that I've found usable for serious documentation.

But, if you have the time and opportunity, I'd like to hear what caused the horrid performance and what had to be done in the 6.0.1 version to fix it?

re: Performance

Ian — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:02:00 GMT

I was probably 8 years old when my family upgraded to version 6, and I remember it vividly. I'm not sure how much RAM we had, but I remember constantly sitting in front of our Mac with a stopwatch in disbelief (yes, I actually did this). We paid for the upgrade to 6.0.1, and I feel strongly that this was my life's first experience with extortion. Microsoft lost my loyalty with that upgrade.

Word 6 brought virus infections

Paul — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 16:30:00 GMT

One more strike against Word 6 from Word 5.1: with it came the Word macro virus invasion. Within a month of us installing Word 6, we were infected company-wide with macro viruses.

Word 5.1 & upgrading

Russell — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 19:11:00 GMT

To this day my father uses Word 5.1a (on MacOS 9.2). Every release of a new version of Word would be met with a brief period of wondering "should I upgrade?", which soon passed given the prospect of losing the formatting (or even something as small as the Print Setup settings) on hundreds, and then later thousands of files.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Johannes Rexx — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 19:56:00 GMT

Yes indeed, Word 5.1a represents a time when Microsoft was a much better company than it is today. Word 5.1a still runs fine today on my DP 2Ghz G5 under Classic mode.

MS wrote great code back then. And it was not the corporate nuicance it is today.

- Johannes Rexx

re: Mac Word 6.0

grad student — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 23:33:00 GMT

I used MS Word 5.1 throughout high school and college. When I finally saw the "new" Words running on computer lab machines, I thought it was a joke. Just feature piled on feature for no apparent reason except, of course, to be able to charge people more money for upgrades.

That A WORD PROCESSOR ran slowly on a spanking new machine while 5.1 cooked away on a 030 seemed to me to be the height of stupidity. Aren't programmers ashamed at stuff like that? What ever happened to the notion of elegance, and doing more with less?

Macros? The only way I discovered them was when a roommate's machine was infected with a macro virus.

When Word finally disappeared from my machine -- somewhere along the line I must have had a hard drive failure or not enough time to transfer over all my files -- there was no question that I wouldn't go to the new "Office." I ran Nisus Writer on OS 8, and when I got OS X, switched over to Mellel. Both are great pieces of software.

re: Mac Word 6.0

Chef Rufus — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 15:58:00 GMT

Thanks for an enlightening post. I hung on to Mac Word 5.1a right up to the day we trashed our last Mac. I'm glad to see you mention the styles issue. This still sticks in my craw as the worst thing to ever happen to Word. The second worst seems to be a day-one design flaw in the Word code base: the way that bulleted and numbered lists are handled.

re: Mac Word 6.0

John Allen — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 23:12:00 GMT

To a comment further back about keyboard command for Save As, it is F12.

Comment above about current top flaws in Word are correct:
Number 1- defining styles
Number 2- bulleted and numbered lists, a real pain, trying to be too clever. Cannot figure out how to turn them off, or to get them to come up with tabs where I define them.

It beggars belief these can't be fixed now.

re: Mac Word 6.0

JD — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 01:25:00 GMT

Great post -- I found it while searching for Word X newsgroups. First off, I loved all the background, even the geeky stuff. And, as a longtime tech comm person, I've got to second all of Derek Miller's comments about feature use (except the VB, which I use a lot for cleaning up docs b4 porting to FrameMaker [no I'm NOT going to start that macintosh sob story] and robohelp. But I really appreaciate seeing your comments about the style formatting issues.

This is my biggest complaint about the advanced features of Word. Styles are critical to consistent document construction and Word has _never_ gotten the interface right in Windows or on the Mac. Absolutely critically important for anyone attempting to get close to a structured document in Word needs to have the option to show a formatting palette that _splits_ the paragraph style and the character style attributes into two, separate, visible pulldowns.

In order to get around the opacity of having the things show up in the same menu, I wind up having to add to my user's keystroke agony by adding a "char" or "par" attribute to the style name, just so they can see it in the window (without actually opening the full pulldown. It should not have to be this way. The style palette should separate the two into separate menus and there should be an option of turning on a "character highlight" across the entire doc so folks can check to see if their char styles are really where they want them. In these days of single-source docs, a Word doc may find itself being ported to/transformed/parsed into a wide variety of new renditions (an xml doc, an online help doc, bits in a database table, etc.) This kind of control would greatly aid in this process.

It would also be nice if the tabbing/primacy issues of the input areas in the Format.Style>New... dialog were fixed so that a verbal command (many of us power users also have rsi issues, and use that feature of X extensively...) of paste would actually land in the Name of style entry area rather than just causing a "blink" in the Style for Following Para pulldown

re: Mac Word 6.0 -> 6.01 performance

Andy Dent — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 12:09:00 GMT

As a cross-platform programmer for many years, the story I remember hearing is that Word 6.0 had to be compiled with the optimisation settings on the cross-compiler turned off, or way down, because high optimisation was too buggy. They were effectively using a beta version of the cross-compilation product.

(This kind of problem was not unique to Microsoft - C++ compilers for many years have typically suffered from this problem, and particularly Microsoft compilers, although much less frequently since Visual Studio v5).

By the time 6.01 was released, the compiler was up to scratch and full optimisation could be enabled.

The usability month

Bloggable — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:00:00 GMT

Wes Meltzer is pining for some reader responseanything to break up the onslaught of spam he receives. As fodder for some comments, this months Mac blogosphere scouring has turned up a lot of discussion about Microsoft Words downward spiral that started with version 6. Additional blogosphere topics include wishing for a modern Mac Portable, CUPS, the value of AppleCare, and three unusual iPod stories.

Surprising User Expectations

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One of the most enlightening experiences I've had in my 5+ years at Yahoo was sitting in on some usability tests. Being on the "watching" side of the one way glass is fun. But it can be particularly frustrating when the application or service users are attempting to use is your own. Back in 2000 or 2001, I watched a few such tests on specific areas of the Yahoo! Finance site, which I worked on at the time. I walked...

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