Monday 17 August 2015

Finally made my decision - and got a birthday present.

I wrote a post recently concerning my observations of differing word processing packages. I also had a birthday. At my advanced age I generally forget such thing as the numbers are growing ever higher. Someone once told me that the older one gets, the faster time progresses. It must be true because only a few weeks ago I was twenty five and now I'm older (or at least feel like it) than Methuselah.

    I thus decided to buy a word processing package because my old XP machine is on its last legs and apparently my (legal )copy of Word 2007 won't work on windows 10 - not that I can buy one yet because all the machines currently on sale are upgraded Win 8.1 machines and the OEM software allowing me to buy a native 10 machine isn't available and won't be for a few months. I can't bear upgrades because there's always rubbish left over from the old operating system and in machines which don't retail with any backup software it's too much of a risk.

    My first encounter with M/S word was version 2 about 1991. (The enormous cost of which was probably for the 1100 page instruction manual)

    I hated it. I hated what came after it as well. So I bought Word Perfect and indeed wrote four novels in WP5 & 5.1. Then Corel bought it and we all know what happened then.

    So, after trying all the free ones, some of which are very good, I finally downloaded and  bought TextMaker 2016 for windows. For £51 I also get a back up disc and free 20gig flash drive (which have still not yet arrived from Germany) and I love it. The interface is a little more primitive but nowhere near as messy as Word with all those stupid style boxes. Better still it comes with Export to EPub and PDF buttons. I'm not going to use them very often but at least they're handy.

    Depending upon where I look or ask MS Office 2016 is anywhere from £89 to £150 and Ill be hanged if I'll pay every year for Office 365.

    I sent a novel I'd created in Word and transferred to TextMaker to a friend the other day (the final test) and it opened without any formatting errors.

   So as far as I'm concerned it's money well spent.

    Now where's my backup CD and flashdrive? I could have walked to Germany and back by now.

9 comments:

  1. I can't pretend to understand a word of this Roger but I'm sure it will be of interest to someone so I will Goggle+ it and say no more. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. All it really means is: that if you're using MS Word 2003 or 2007 and you intend to buy a PC running windows 10 then they won't work and you'll have to buy the newer version.
    I'll bet Microsoft are giggling themselves sick.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, Happy Birthday, Roger.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't do birthdays because I'm old, really, really old - according to my daughter, who'd better watch her mouth if she wants to get to the grand old age of twenty one.

      Delete
  4. The exporting features would be very handy - i had to buy adobe pro 8 in order to do my PDFs straight from Word (I bought a used, old version - works for what i wanted, but ti was still 30$ extra I had to spend). I do;t suppose word 2010 works on the new windows?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Apparently it does, depending on where one looks. You must either download a few free patches, or not. As usual M/Soft is full of useless information. I'm not bothering with Win 10 until I can buy it as a standalone package, or buy a new machine which hasn't been upgraded from win 8.1 at the back of the computer shop; which apparently will be by the end of Oct. If you're willing to put up with the occasional glitch of an upgrade over a clean install, get it now as the new machines are going to be pricey.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sure looks like a good system.

    ReplyDelete
  7. It is, and I finally got my back-up cd and free flash drive to install the system onto and which allows me to run Textmaker on any PC without installation.

    ReplyDelete

Labels