Bruce Toback writes:

> Office 98 (for the Mac) allows disabling the agent very easily, so I
>  guess Microsoft got the message.
>
>  <rant>
>  Actually, I mind the agent a lot less than I mind the "helpful" automated
>  correction features. Trying to type a sentence with an uncapitalized word
>  at the beginning is absolutely impossible, and I often need to do that
>  when writing documentation. Also, woe to you if your TLA is in
>  Microsoft's list of misspellings for common English words: you'll never
>  be able to type it unless you disable autocorrection. (Adding it to the
>  spelling dictionary, which seems like the obvious thing to do, doesn't
>  work.) And good luck figuring out how to disable autocorrection, because
>  it's not called that in the UI even though it's called that in the
>  marketing literature and packaging. And just try typing a plain document
>  with Roman numerals in front of the paragraph headings. No, Microsoft, I
>  do *not* want to create an outline!
...
Much good text snipped.
...
>  </rant>

That's fairly funny, Bruce -- and all true. When I first noticed what
Microsoft was trying to do to me (and I couldn't figure out how in the heck to
turn "help" off in five minutes), I simply abandoned the products that were
doing this "helping". I got these Office/Word products as a (I presume)
Microsoft-dictated undeleteable option when I purchased the PCs and have
ignored them ever since.

A really well designed word processor is going to let me do everything I need
to do, with a minimum of keystrokes or mouse clicks, as intuitively as
possible, and yet do nothing for me that I didn't explicitly ask.

Microsoft, regardless of all of the "research" that they're putting into such
products, is going the wrong way. They're wasting my time -- and their and my
money.

Wirt Atmar