1 May 2003

Lies, Damn Lies, and Software Upgrades

For several months now I have been trying out various pieces of software in an effort to find a writing and working environment that suited me best.

I tried it all: Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite, Corel WordPerfect Suite, Star Office, and later Open Office too. In the end I settled for a mixed bag of software.

For my E-Mail and personal information handling I settled on Outlook 2000 from Microsoft. As an E-Mail handler it's one of the better programs, and the personal information handling features are more than adequate for a guy like me, who really just needs the thing to store contacts, my schedule, and my to do list. The program supports multiple E-Mail accounts and will let you set up a rule system to handle what happens to individual messages as they are received. My only problem with the program is that half the time the rules you set up for your mail system just don't seem to work. More on that later.

To manage TKs Keep I selected Front Page 2000, also by Microsoft. I've always liked Front Page for its simplicity. You don't need to know a whole hell of a lot about web pages and web sites in order to be able to create a pretty good one. And, if your ISP supports HTML publishing, Front Page will upload your site to your ISP for you, saving you the hassle of fiddling around with FTP programs, which can be quite a pain in the ass sometimes. The really cool thing about Front Page though, is that when you publish your site you have the option of only uploading those files that have had changes made to them. This way, you don't have to manually keep track of what changes you made to what file, and then manually upload only those files. The program does all the grunt work for you.

As a writing environment I settled on Corel WordPerfect 8. I've not had the opportunity to try the latest version of WordPerfect, but I'm not terribly inclined to go out and get it. WordPerfect 8 does what I want it to do and does it very well. The formatting controls are easily accessible and quite intuitive, and, when I see something going not quite the way I want it to in a document, I have the option of calling up a window which displays all the formatting commands and editing the commands directly. This is something that I have never found in any version of Microsoft Word or Lotus WordPro, or any other word processor for that matter, and it's a big part of what made me decide to rely on WordPerfect.

For a spreadsheet I settled on Microsoft Excel 2000, as much out of sheer habit as anything else. But the truth of the matter is that Excel really is the best spreadsheet out there to my way of thinking. There are things that you can do in Excel which you can't do in any other program, and it has a very intuitive look and feel to it. Best part is, when I'm working with multiple copies of the same kind of sheet I can create a template and make copies of the template any time I want to create a new sheet. The only other spreadsheet that offers this feature is Open Office Calc, but in the end Excel is just a better product.

That pretty much takes care of a lot of the things I do on a daily basis. I don't do a lot of database work anymore, but what programs I use when I do would probably best be suited for another discussion.

Note that all of the Microsoft products I use are from the Office 2000 suite of programs. Up until a couple of weeks ago those are the most recent versions that I have had access to. Then I acquired Office XP and decided to give it a go.

Installation was a snap, a fire and forget operation. I started the installer, fed it my serial number, and told it that I wanted to upgrade the version of Office that was already there. Then I walked away and read a book for a while. When I came back the process was done, and I didn't have to restart the computer. Wunderbar.

Okay, then, time to play.

First on the list, Outlook 2002. Definitely an improved version over Outlook 2000. They didn't change a lot, but what they did change was pretty substantial. For one thing, the message handling rules actually seemed to work.

When I receive E-Mail it all goes into a common inbox. Once it's in that inbox, then Outlook takes a look at the messages and applies the rules that I have set up to decide which messages go where. I have two separate E-Mail accounts through my ISP. One is for general use and the other is for my web site, The Keep. When messages come in Outlook takes a look at them and performs the following tests. If the messages come from a certain group of people who I have listed in my Address Book, then the messages are sent to the inbox I have set up for my general use E-Mail account. If the messages contain the words "TKs Keep Updates" or "TKs Musings" in the subject line, then they are sent to the inbox for TKs Keep. And, given that I don't give out the TKs Keep address to anyone really, any messages that come through that account are automatically sent to the TKs Keep inbox.

This has the advantage of keeping all of the spam I receive in a single place. When I do my E-Mail checks I take care of the items in my personal inbox and in the inbox for the Keep first, and then go through the stuff that didn't get filtered. Anything that I don't recognize or didn't ask for gets turfed, plain and simple.

The first thing that I noticed after I installed Outlook 2002 is that the rules I had set up were actually working. My mail was all being sorted the way that I wanted it to be sorted. Most of the time. Every now and again a piece of Spam mail would make it past the filters and get someplace it shouldn't have been, but that was okay. To my way of thinking it was still better than things not working at all.

The second thing I noticed is that Outlook will now give you access to your Hotmail or MSN Mail accounts without having to go to the Hotmail website. So I set things up so that I could access my Hotmail account while I was checking my other two accounts. It's really kind of cool, actually. I can now check all of my E-Mail accounts without ever having to fire up Internet Explorer.

Then I installed Norton Anti Virus 2003. Now the rules don't seem to be working at all, again. I've still got access to all of my accounts, but the filters aren't working. One of these days I'm going to try disabling the incoming E-Mail scan for viruses routine and see if that helps matters, but it's still disappointing. And a bit on the frustrating side, too. Ah, well, welcome to my world.

As for Front Page, the changes that were made are mostly cosmetic in nature. The program itself appears to be working the same way it always did, at least on the surface. But there are some differences that I have noticed.

The first thing that I noticed is that Front Page will now open the last web site you were working on when you start the program. For someone who only works with the one site, like me, this is a pretty convenient feature. Also, Front Page will now store the login information for your web site upload, so I don't have to enter my login ID and password every single time I update the web site. Best of all, it will even hold onto that information between sessions.

The only other changes that have been made appear to be in the way that things are done. At first I found some of these things mildly vexing, but after having some time to think about it I've come to the conclusion that most of these changes are probably for the best.

When I was using Front Page 2000 and I was creating a link to another page on my site, I used to enter the complete address to the site and then, in the same window, tell Front Page which frame I wanted that information to be displayed in. Easy as pie. Creating a link would take no more than a few seconds.

With Front Page 2003 when I tried to follow the same process I got links to pages that wouldn't display. When I took a look at the address that Front Page had programmed into the link it didn't take me long to figure out why. Microsoft had anticipated that guys like me would be operating that way, and had conspired to make our lives easier without telling us first. Now, instead of entering the entire address for the page you want to display, you select the page from a nearly standard open file dialog box and Front Page takes care of the rest. I will admit that the feature is a time saver, but it was still a little frustrating at first to do the same things I had always done and get links that would not work.

Another thing, I use frames at the Keep. The reasoning for this is simple, the use of frames allows me to display a great deal of information in a reasonably rational and logical manner.

Every time I set up a link to a page in Front Page 2000, there was a text box which would allow me to enter the label for the frame I wanted the information displayed in. With Front Page 2003 the process is slightly different. Now there is a button in the dialog box labeled Frames. When you press this button it asks you which frame you want the information displayed in and programs the link. Same thing when you're dealing with bookmarks.

A little vexing at first, but all in all a pretty intuitive process. Just takes some time to get used to it, is all.

As for Excel, well it's pretty much the same old Excel. I haven't seen a lot in the way of changes, although in all fairness I haven't spent a lot of time in Excel since I did the upgrade.

However, I did discover what seems to be an incompatibility between WordPerfect 8 and Office XP.

Back when I started writing Centurion Enterprises I was using Word 2000 as my word processor of choice. Word 2000 will let you save a file as a web page, which you can then open in Front Page and apply whatever formatting you want to apply.

Word 2002 will do the same thing, but when you try to open a web page created by Word 2002 in Front Page 2002 a message box will appear telling you that if you want to make changes to the page you're going to have to do it in Word.

Vexing.

All right, I thought, I'll get around that. I'll open the file in WordPerfect and save it as a web page from there. I know for a fact that Front Page will open and edit an HTML file created with WordPerfect. I do it every day. Simple solution.

Yeah, right.

As soon as I went to open the Word file in WordPerfect, WordPerfect stopped responding and I had to end the task. Tried it again. Same thing.

All right, then. Time to look at alternatives.

Open Office has built in support for Word files, and it will let me save files as web pages which I can then edit through Front Page. So I opened the file in Open Office, saved it as a web page, and opened it with Front Page.

Flawless.

But it still annoys me that I can't do that the way I'm accustomed to doing it.

One of these days I'll take a shot at trying to fix it. I'll uninstall and then reinstall WordPerfect Suite to see if that fixes the problem. And if it doesn't, well there are other things that I can do too.

Bottom line, mixed reviews. Given my experiences so far, about the only program in Office XP that's been responding the way I expect it too has been Front Page. Once you understand what it's doing, and adjust your own procedure to match, it's actually quite the good little program.

As for the rest, well only time will tell.

Maybe one of these days I'll have to sit down and write the ideal office suite.

And maybe pigs will fly too.

But, hey, you never know. In this world, anything is possible.