A bit of Word redemption

I did some checking in the Ol’ Google Machine and found several pieces of information that led me to believe that Word could do some desktop publishing. And I was right. Sort of. I was able to get images to float around the page like I wanted. And I was able to make text boxes and even quotations appear as I wanted. That being said perhaps I need to dig deeper into the belly of the beast. I’m still getting PagePlus because I really like the features it offers and the price is extremely reasonable. But maybe Word isn’t the kludged together long document app of years gone by. Perhaps Microsoft has made amends. At any rate it’s definitely something to look into. I don’t think it can completely fulfill my needs but it has come a long way.

I worked with PagePlus quite a bit yesterday and really do like the way it works. I think between it and Word I will be able to pull this project together with a minimum of hassle. It has been interesting though. Seems very little has changed in the desktop publishing world over the past few years. There are two or maybe three major applications people turn to, and they all cost an outrageous amount of money and are insanely complicated to use. Other software has made massive strides in trying to be user friendly, yet DTP software seems to thrive at being awkward to use. Once you dedicate yourself to the task it probably all makes sense but it all seems so needlessly complicated. I guess that is the price of total control over the layout. If you let a wizard do it you have to accept its values. If you build it yourself it looks exactly the way you want. I guess for all that outlay of cash you get ultimate power but you also pay to spend all that extra time hunched over the computer fiddling with every dial and nudging every pixel.