Re: Need advice on MS Word (if anyone can stand it)

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

A couple observations on MS Word problems:
I am now the company expert on Word, haveing been forced to use it to produce
manuals. Never cracked a book -- the Murphy's law is that if you play with
hardware long enough you will break it, and if you play with software long
enough you will master it. I doubt that any of us "experts" in XyW would have
gotten anywhere by limiting ourselves to the manuals.

You _can_ do some limited file management within Word. Some hints:
1. If you keep files in different subdirectories, open a file to work on and
then do File-Save As-Cancel. This logs you on to that file's subdirectory
instead of the maddening "My Documents", which has always struck me as
somewhat kindergartenish.
2. From the Open menu, you can highlight a file and press Delete. You can
rename a file by pressing F2 or by clicking carefully on its name.

And no, you can't modify file names or delete files when they're open.

This is not to say that I still don't hate Word. But it's the right (or
necessary) tool for some of the things I do. If I could get TrueType and
really good graphics import, and some sophisticated table handling into
Xy4DOS,... Well, we know that won't happen.

We had some file management stuff in the Xy4DOS menus; I can't remember if we
shipped them that way. They were so buggy (after 2 or 3 of us tried to fix
them) that I yanked them out of my personal copy. The command line works fine,
and my modification in the enhancements I posted adds wildcards.

Re SW and VB menus: I wonder if the menu system can be modified or added to
with XPL code. For those of us who like to mess around with the menus and
dialogs, it would be sad if we couldn't. Also, will XPL have hooks into the
existing menus/dialogs so we can use them in stand-alone XPL programs? And
what about U2 files to modify the command structure?

For reasons outside this discussion, Kenny may not feel inclined to grace
these questions with answers; I hope he will do so for the sake of the rest of
the group.

Tim Baehr