Re: DTP Shootout -Reply

[NANCY KAMINSKI <NKAMINS1 -at- FAIRVIEW -dot- ORG>]

>>> Christie Christopherson <chrisc -at- NED -dot- CACHE -dot- NET> 12/05/96
01:04am >>>
"WordPerfect is definitely still on the market and is my #1 choice for word
processing and DTP...."

I'm glad Christie has had such luck with WP. My office, on the other hand,
has had different results.

WP 6.0  is the word processor of choice at my hospital, and I have yet to
see any of the general users (computer programmers, business office,
etc.) produce a decent-looking document. For casual users, WP is almost
unusable. We have particular trouble with tables--getting them to sort and
so on.

Then a few people brought in their own copies of Word. When folks saw
how easy it was to use, illegal copies bagan spreading like wildfire. Many
people create docs in Word and save them as WordPerfect docs to
comply with the rule that all docs be in WP format.

The only point I want to make here is that Word seems to be more
accessible to the casual user. WP is very powerful, but it takes a long
time to get to the point where using it is easy (at least here).

We three tech writers use PageMaker for our docs (most of which are in
the 100 to 200 page category) and find it much easier to work with. I
personally would hate to have to use either Word or WP to create books
that include graphics. PageMaker fits out needs perfectly (and we haven't
had any catastrophes with files, either).

The hospital is moving away from the WP family into the Microsoft world,
based on the complaints of the users. We're still stuck with WP and Novell
Groupwise, however.

Just my .02 worth.

Nancy Kaminski
Fairview Hospital and Healthcare Services
Minneapolis