Over at Teekay’s

On the side of a truck on the border between Croatia and Serbia (the former “Brotherhood and Unity” highway), in English:

Natural Mineral Water — Faithful to You and The Nature

My favorite newspaper reports on a customer survey by Microsoft on the usability of MS Office. (The article is vague about where, if at all, this survey may be available and since I’m on the road I don’t have the time to chase it up.) The survey, according to the report, found that nine out of the ten most requested features for Office already exist in the most popular application suite. While Word 1.0 had around 100 features, the current version has around 1,500. Little wonder that users can’t find what they’re looking for, and are overwhelmed by what they do find.

MS Word is the workhorse for word processing on both the Windows and the Mac platform, and I use it all the time, but it is simply not a good application for anything beyond a few pages (in my experience, around 20 with footnotes) or anything that includes tables. Thankfully there are alternatives; on the Mac, my word processor of choice is Mellel, which is terrific and outputs to RTF, but for anything longer I would always use LaTeX (using the iTeXMac front end). Beware, however, of one tiresome problem: neither have any easy way for collaborative writing/editing, not even in an author/reviewer setup. (Short of using some sort of versioning control or outputting to PDF which can then be marked up with the full version of Adobe Acrobat, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of this.)

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