MS WORD 2000 - upgrade or replace ?

In desperation to eliminate a persistent bug with MS WORD 2000, I am considering replacing it.

So I am wondering if WORD XP is worth the $80? Is there much difference between the two? While at it, should I go for the office suite at $120?

Or, what about the FREE "OpenOffice "?

Or, even Sun's "StarOffice" (also $80)?

Any other options that I am not aware of?

Any disadvantages to the latter 3 options, like not being compatible with other software? Of the latter 3, do any have import/export with WORD and if so which is better?

 

You may want to give a look at 602 it is free. There is also a plus version but you have to pay for that.

 

To be honest there is VERY little difference between Word 2000 and 2002. I would suggest uninstalling it completely, then reinstall it and go into office update and update it to SP3.

 

Thanks Paul for the tip on not much difference between 2000 and 2002, that's kind of what I thought.

As to your suggestion to uninstall, reinstall, and do the SP3 thing -- been there, done that, and done a whole lot of other things, all to no avail. Now, altho migrating to 2002 might fix the problem, at this point I am a little disgusted with M$ and the impossibility of fixing this one little aggravating problem (sometimes I wonder if this kind of "bug" is time-programmed in, to force customers to migrate to new upgrade$ (notice the dollar sign there...)).

As a result, I am now trying out OpenOffice Write to replace M$ WORD and so far I am very favorably impressed, maybe even amazed -- it looks to be so much more advanced than WORD it makes me wonder why in the world anyone would pay money to use the inferior WORD product, and why the heck didn't I know about this a long time ago? "The word" doesn't seem to be "getting out ", so I guess that I will mention it here and maybe hopefully help someone else out. Also heard that there is another similar free word processor, "Abi-something" I think, that is about as good as OO Write but is not part of a suite like Open Office is, and consequently I don't think I am going to try that one...

Makes me wonder if I should be looking at replacing more M$ components with NON-M$ components, all the way to LINUX and stop contributing to Big Bill's wealth so he can give it away to those offshore backoffice countries that take our jobs while he is ripping us off and invading our privacy....... /rant

 

Hi keywester,
What's the Word problem, not that I'm an advanced Word user but someone else may no of your problem and/or a fix?

Yes from what I've seen, Open Office looks quite good, even my limited use of it when it was v1.0 and only about 50Mb says it's not quite as good as Office XP, (to be expected I guess) but one can't argue about the price.

 

Hey Paul,

The WORD "problem" has been thoroughly fleshed out (actually, "beat to death ") in a whole 'nother thread -- tried everything from deep regcleans to uninstall, erase, defrag, reinstall, reupgrade to (office) SP3 and nothing has resolved the problem, and at this point, I am simply putting it behind me as unresolvable (like I inferred previously, probably a time-activated "bug "), and am now moving on to something better -- but thanks for the inferred offer of helping out on it.

If I can find the thread, I will post back a link to it, but right now I am busy getting back to working without the phantom WORD bug$ (there were actually several that surfaced simultaneously).

 

Post back FYI update: since I was unable to find a suitable substitute for WORD 2000, and also stumbled across a copy of WORD XP/2002 at a bargain price at a Marketpro show, I ended up just upgrading 2000 to 2002, and after two weeks of working with the new version (which exceeds the average time frame to encounter the old bug), I have not had the old bug resurface, so I am concluding that the upgrade eradicted the problem.

Makes me wonder if I was right about the programmed-in time-activated bug...

Anyway, an FYI editorial comment - I concur with the opinions I have seen that there is not much reason to upgrade from 2000 to 2002, for WORD anyway, wait for the new 2003 release...

Another FYI, I had been using WORD as the editor for OUTLOOK, but then after upgrading WORD to 2002, OUTLOOK (2000) could no longer use WORD...

 

Hey, I still use Office 97 Pro on my XP system. Works just fine for me. But I did have to get a .dll file to get the spell checker to work with Outlook Express.

I wouldn't upgrade anything at the moment. Mickeysoft's longhorn is going to make everything obsolete.

 

I have 1 problem with ms word 2000 and thats pictures dont always appear???? but it was free so....

and as for paying $80 **** that.

get it on copy lol


Mike

 

"I wouldn't upgrade anything at the moment. Mickeysoft's longhorn is going to make everything obsolete "

Don't expect "Longhorn" before well into 2005 though!

 

Posting back. I have to update this post to correct the oversight about the new version of WORD. I was recently in a bookstore and perused a book on WORD 2002 and took a quick look at the "new features" section to be sure I wasn't missing something. And I was, as there are several new features in the upgrade that I was not aware of. The most significant of which was that word 2002 now has speech recognition capabilities built in.

Now, I tried out speech recognition capabilities a few years ago (IBMs ViaVoice) and I was not at all impressed with it then, as the dictation component was so inaccurate that it ended up taking longer to correct the mistakes than to just type it to begin with, plus the conversion to text was slooowwww... And frankly the speech recognition with WORD 2002 only works slightly better, but the slight improvement makes it possibly usable for speech to text if you are a slow typist, particularly with the correction features (or maybe if you are trying to stave off carpal tunnel syndrome).

The one thing that does work very well about it is the voice commands feature, as selecting the drop down menus and the sub selections does save quite a bit of effort with a pointer device and allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard, so it might actually be faster than using a mouse.

And I guess that I should add that after two weeks of not encountering the old problem, that the old bug with word 2000 (that originally resulted in the upgrade to 2002) has resurfaced with a vengeance in the new version, so FYI the upgrade did not fix that problem as I had previously speculated.