algebraist's Journal: The jollies of Microsoft Word, at least on WinXP

On the whole, Microsoft WinXP seems to be an okay system, if you forgive its shortcuts mania, occasional loss of communication with a LAN, and intolerance for certain PC games. [Hint, 'though: Definitely invest in copies of Karp, et al's Windows XP Annoyances and Windows XP in a Nutshell put out by O'Reilly Press.]

But Microsoft Word for WinXP is something else.

I have a resume: Nothing fancy, just a one page thing. If I edit it in WinXP's Word it balloons in size to 632K. If I take the exactly identical .doc file, transfer it to my Win95 machine, add a space, delete the same space, and save it, it becomes 175K. I can open it just fine in WinXP Word, as long as I don't save it. Amazing.

Oh well, gives me a reason for keeping my Win95 system around, along with all the excellent software I've invested in and on it.

alternatives to word

[jasonrocks]

Have you thought about abiWord or something similar. You can save your documents in .rtf (rich text format) and access them from most modern word processors. (including MS Word)
AbiWord can do LOTS. It's free (GNU I think) It's cross-platform. The only thing that it's lacking in is scripting and forms (mass labeling, etc). These shortcomings aren't very much and some people may have improved on them. You can probably easily store a resume in well under 20k.
URL=http://www.abisource.com/ [abisource.com]

Re:alternatives to word

[algebraist]

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, if I had a choice, I wouldn't use MS Word at all. Technical recruiters act like they're software dumb and Word is the de facto standard for exchanging resumes. Recruiters don't even want to print them from a Web site in another format which renders them as well or better!

Switching to abiWord would depend upon its being 100% compatible with Word because of this. If the IT consulting and contracting biz were stronger, I could throw my weight around and use it, switching.