X-no-Archive:yes
I have been following this thread off and on.  The message from Bruce was,
as usual, very interesting and Wirt's answer just thickened the plot, so to
speak.  Being a long time user of Word, Word 6.0, Word 7.0 and Word 97, I
thought I would jump in at this time.  I do not disagree with anything
Bruce and Wirt have said, I just offer the following.

The simplest way to disable these spelling and grammar features is to click
on Tools, Option, Spelling & Grammar tab.  There, all will be revealed.
  The auto-correction and Autoformat features are disabled by clicking on
Tools, AutoCorrect. . . and there again, everything will be revealed.

I long ago replaced ClipIt with another actor but then I disabled even that
one several months ago.  I use Word in my e-mail client, because I figure
my English needs all the help it can get.

I find these features really disconcerting as when I write documentation,
they happily get in my way.  However, I now write the documentation in
FrontPage which has its own set of problems.  However, with FrontPage, our
documentation now goes out on 100% post-consumer recycled sub-atomic
particles.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP America, Inc.
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Wirt Atmar [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Monday, 19 October, 1998 2:16 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: Off topic: MS Office Assistant

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