Obviously we use what we are most familiar with, unless outside pressures force us to change. Those of us who converted the zillions of keystroke formatting commands used in WordPerfect prior to ver 5.1 with its toolbar, would never consider changing to another program, while those of us who began computing later on are perfectly happy with Word in one of its various iterations.

I happily used some of the better Commodore word processing programs until I got seriously into college late in life, and the Commodore was just too slow. I used Works for a while, but needed more power for longer papers. We had WordPerfect at school and I knew I didn't want to beat my head against the desk trying to discover a simple format or embedding command, so I began using Word. By this time I had seen how much easier Macs made life, but hadn't the bucks to go that route, and bought a very early version of Windows from a blow-out store.

Once I started using Word I discovered that there were other interesting and powerful programs out there that could work just as hard as Word, but would still involve a long learning curve again. The big problem with Word on a Wintel machines is its cost, and the amount of both disk space and memory it consumes. Additionally I understand that it is slow and poky on Macs. If I were to start over now I would seriously consider Star Office, which was available as a free download from the Sun web site. This program has Word, Excel, and Powerpoint work-alikes, and will open files created in most versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Additionally it is available for free download (or was) for several different platforms, including UNIX/LINUX, and offers a desktop similar to Windows in both UNIX/LINUX and Windows.

Dave