Dan Gookin's Naked Office
Chapter One
Life beyond the Basic Word
The biggest slice of the Microsoft Office Pie goes to Word, the word processor program
pretty much all of mankind uses to compose their thoughts, jot down lists, create new
ideas, or write that Great [insert country here] Novel. I've been using Word for over
23 years now, and there's one thing I've noticed: The program is horribly misnamed.
The original version should have been called Microsoft Letter, because that's what the
program originally did best: put letters together. (Microsoft Letter would have been
based upon an old DOS program called Microsoft Alphabet, which was purchased from
an old PL1 programmer who wrote Quick-Cuneiform.) Then, with minor improvements,
they could have introduced Microsoft Word, Microsoft Sentence, Microsoft
Paragraph, and finally Microsoft Document-not to mention the companion program
from Symantec, the Norton Microsoft Document Recovery Kit. Ah, but I digress ...
Pretty much anyone can use a computer and figure out how to use Word. The program
has been so successful that it's essentially unchanged from its Word 97 version. The ... read full excerpt from Dan Gookin's Naked Office ebook
