The Emperor's new clothes aka Office 98
Having read all the reports about Office 98 and its new Mac like interface, I reluctantly shelled out the £189 or $300 US (I run a quick print business and all my customers are Office users)  First the good news - yes, it installed quickly and without too much difficulty.  Right! I thought, lets give PowerPoint a go (I should say that the main reason for upgrading from Office 4.2.1. was that one of my customers gives us PowerPoint presentations to run out on our colour lasers and despite downloading all Microsoft's so called translators from their web site I still couldn't read his files. MS Office had assured me they weren't PowerPoint files. It didn't say sorry I can't read this version of PowerPoint' but 'this is "NOT" a PowerPoint file.  Yes it is! you ignorant pile of .......

Yes it did (s-l-o-w-l-y)  open his files and I set to work editing them. What an unpleasant experience.  On my 7600/132 there is a noticable delay of 2 -3 seconds before anything happens whenever you select an object. And forget drag and dropping objects smoothly around the screen, everything is jerky and imprecise and moves in great clumsy piles so that trying to align text within a box; something I'm accustomed to doing almost without thinking becomes a major struggle.

And my WSYWIG fonts (MenuFonts) don't display in either their typeface or their generic family grouping.

.......and the screen colour prints out wrong.

.......and it crashed my Mac with the first Error 10 code in weeks within ten minutes.

.......and all those little things that we take for granted like the magnifying glass tool to zoom in and the spacebar/pointer key combination to get the grabber hand either don't work or simply aren't there.

All this after only half an hour with the wretched package. It's a real time warping experience.

This supposedly state of the art software is Garbage!

Why people put up with it, I will never know.

Thank God for Macs.....

P.S. I'm really looking forward to playing with MS WORD (not!!)

John Fleet