Alternative to Open Office...Kword

[tino]

A small review is on that site.

The download is available here

Not sure its going to take many users away from Open Office atm but its on the right track.

[burnin8r]

I think the writer is right on the mark when he says that while MSWord is the standard all others are compared to, its awful.

Compatibility with it is imperative tho, or else no one can read your resume without a hard copy !

I don t know that I will uninstall open office but competition is good for everyone.

[hydran]

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[MrbLOB9000]

Heh, Kword's been around longer than OpenOffice.org.

[Intuit]

MS Word is buggy, lardy, malware-friendly and incompatible on purpose. It's not even compatible with previous versions of itself. To me it's a cruel, expensive joke, not a professional tool.

Somebody tell this cat he shouldn't expect to be able to run MSO on a 486DX 133MHz 32MB machine ?  MSO is not backward compatible ??  Okeedoke....

[hydran]

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[Intuit]

First of all that's in a plug-in format not proprietary to or embedded in microsoft word (not .Doc in other words).  Chances are shared DLL resources that Word'97 used to write Rich Text Files were udpated with incompatible revisions when more recent programs or/and system updates were applied.   Since newer DLLs aren't overwritten by install programs you might not get Rich Text Format working properly even with a reinstall on that system.  You'll have to run it under VPC with a non-updated O/S.

It's totally unreasonable to expect a program to be forward-compatible.  Save in Word '97 Doc format and you shouldn't have any unmanageable problems.

[hydran]

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[Intuit]

It's not a native format Hydran.  It has to be converted.  External resources are responsible for handling that.  Run the program under VPC, non-updated O/S and it should work properly.

[ScutMonkey]

?
wtf are you talking about - surely you can expect THE SAME PROGRAM THAT SAVED THE FILE TO BE ABLE TO OPEN IT?
thats reasonable, I'd say!

You shouldn't be using a 10 year old product regardless.  This is consistent in both the linux and MS worlds.  Update, update, update.  

Now granted, this probably wouldn't happen in a linux program, but that's because the underlying architecture is different as Intuit has explained.  That's a design decision and a totally different debate.

[Reflex]

Actually, I have to say that Hydran's situation blows me away.  RTF is a common format and pretty much should work with anything.  I haven't a clue how it could have been broken like that..

[hydran]

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[Intuit]

I still have Word '97 and ran it.  RTF wasn't even a choice and all the other normal choices/formats are gone.  What's left are only the native formats... DOC, DOT & TXT.  

I also vaguely remember having problems out of Wordpad's non-native formats after an install many years back.

I had problems copying and pasting into Word Perfect 2000 after the Microsoft VerCLSID update.

I have various other word processing programs installed including Microsoft Works (crap) and Open Office.

Many programs rely on plugins and the resulting issues were far more palletable back in the 3.1 days when install programs would commonly overwrite newer files with older revisions.  Unfortunately problems sometimes manifest themselves in the reverse too, when older files are updated with newer ones especially when they have to be redesigned to differing standards as a result of exploits or functionality.  Doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to though.  Your problems with Word '97 were likely caused by a third-party install or O/S update.

The inter-dependencies aren't always clear (good example) but it's the nature of windows.  Without those inter-dependencies Windows or rather the programs that run on it would be twenty times slower (and notably larger) than they already are.