Word ’97

I just realized that the program I am using to type this blog is WORD ’97. That means I have been using this particular program for nearly eighteen years. I imagine that Microsoft spent a few years developing it so I guess my program is of legal age. 

 

Word 97 seems to meet all of my needs and to tell the truth, I don’t know what a lot of the buttons at the top of the page do. I had heard once that even the people who developed the program don’t know everything it is capable of because the program design was segmented. I’m sure that after 20 years there is someone at Microsoft that is pretty good with this program. I’ve kept this version mainly because I am cheap and see no reason to buy an updated version with all of the new bells and whistles that I won’t use anyways.

 

Louise had to buy the new WORD for her laptop because it came without a CD drive. I am still having trouble with the whole idea, why buy WORD when I could have set her up with Open Office for free. She didn’t feel that it would meet her needs I guess, and since she actually understands much more of the buttons, she just may be right. The new WORD seems to be the same as the one from 1997, well, at least it seems that way when I use it. I’m sure it has special little buttons that will connect you directly with your twitter account and possibly seventeen thousands new fonts.

I would be happy if I could still use the typewriter, but I never really mastered it. Oh, I knew where all of the keys were and how to feed and advance the paper into the machine. I could switch from black ink to red if I ever needed to (I didn’t). Selecting a font was dead easy, you didn’t. Sure there were a few keys on the keyboard and switch like things inside the typewriter that didn’t seem to have any use whatsoever, but I managed to ignore them pretty easily. The biggest problem I had was how hard to hit the keys to produce a nice, even letter and to manage to do it for every letter that I typed.

 

I am glad that we have to think very little and that we really don’t have to master any kind of skill to be able to type and produce a blog on a daily basis. I live in a wonderful time, made for the mediocre.

I would switch to Microsoft Word 2013 if I thought that it would make any kind of difference in the way I write. I’m thinking that perhaps I should ease into the newer Word programs with Word 2000 or 2003, that way the changes (if indeed there are any) would be pretty easy to absorb. I use windows Vista on this machine and so far, Microsoft is still servicing it, unlike Windows XP which it dumped like last Tuesdays fish. When I have to upgrade, I guess I will go whole hog and get Word 2017 or 2023.

 

There are a lot of other word processing programs out there, some are better than the others of course. When I first started this blog, I was going to write it on a program called “Writer”, but it is just easier using Word. I liked Writer because it was so basic, just a green font on a black background with real time word count. I suppose that is important to some writers. Me, I just try to fill a page at a time and not bore myself too much. 

I might go back to Writer, but then again, maybe I won’t.