Post by David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

5h

If I remember correctly, 95 had grammar checking as you write (but the grammar checker was, and remains, terrible). I can't remember new features after that which were particularly useful.

2000 introduced the ability to click anywhere and fill in whitespace, which made people use styles less and generally made output worse.

EDIT: I had a look at Wikipedia's list of new features in Office 2000 and, of those, the only thing that looks like I'd care about it is the new vector and raster graphics program. Which seems to no longer be part of Office.

Edited 4h ago

1 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original

4h

@david_chisnall @thomasfuchs The amount of new [useful] features in MS Word over time, graphed against the memory size/system demand of the program, would be illuminating. I can't think easily of anything new in word processing that has excited me since we moved from markup based systems like Wordstar to WYSIWYG editors like Word.

Edited 4h ago

1 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original

4h

@bencourtice @thomasfuchs

Spell checking as you type was definitely limited by CPU and RAM. I think Word 2 kept the dictionary on disk and read individual parts on demand.

The main RAM thing was being able to include images. I remember doing a school report with two scanned photos in ClarisWorks (for Windows) 1 on a 386 with 5 MiB of RAM, and I had to write the text first and then do the layout because it started swapping with both images in the page and would freeze a bit.

There were other things in ClarisWorks 1 that I still miss. A text box in their drawing program had full access to all of the word processor's functionality. A table in either the drawing program or word processor was a spreadsheet, so you could do things like having a total at the bottom row of a table without having to do the calculation externally.

0 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original