Dodgy advertising

It’s why I’ve never considered Word to be a serious program for use.

I’ve (unfortunately) had to spend many weeks using Word to write manuals, plus of course lots of other use over the years. Two observations:

1) It can be used properly, it can do all the reformatting correctly, but the user has to be very clued up on how to use it. It is a serious programme for use, but it’s bloody difficult to use properly.

2) Only a very small subset of its users (that I’ve come across) know how to use it properly. The people I cam across weren’t stupid. It’s just that it’s bloody difficult to use properly. So they hadn’t spent all the countless hours learning to use it properly.

It takes me back to the days when word processing and DTP were known to be different. Word was a WP, not a DTP. But proper DTP apps were expensive, so management made people use Word for tasks that were really DTP – instruction manuals, for example. An instruction manual is usually a complicated document, with cross-references, headers and footers, section breaks, tables, etc. Word can do it, but it’s difficult to do it properly.

And then there’s the nightmare of tracking changes…

It’s why I’ve never considered Word to be a serious program for use. If the printer margins don’t fit the declared document, it should highlight this on screen (like maybe a big red overlay?). It should not take it upon itself to helpfully rejig everything to fit the given margins.

It’s a Word Processor, not a DTP package. The whole point is to semantically lay the document out on the available paper size. If you want fixed formatting, you should be using DTP.

And yes, I’m aware that very few people seem to know this. That isn’t Word’s fault, however.

Going back to the original topic, if you’re used to using Windows XP, then most distributions of Linux (e.g. Mint springs to mind) will look and behave more like Windows than recent versions of Windows!

Ditto with LibreOffice compared to current MS Office (ribbon, errgh).

It’s a Word Processor, not a DTP package.

It’s a word processor with enough DTP-like facilities to give the impression it’s a somewhat limited DTP package, that then fails to be a DTP package at all. You can say a similar thing about LibreOffice, but at least it fails to be a DTP package somewhat more gracefully – indeed it actually works reasonably well as a somewhat limited DTP package.

Word is a wordprocessor with pretensions.

That isn’t Word’s fault, however.

The main problem with Word is the people pressing the buttons.¹
The second problem is that the people that gave it to the users should have realised that for 90% (or more) of the users they should have pointed them at WordPad (it’s quite a bit cheaper).

¹ I produced a document, in Word because it was expected, and used styles for the headers (big clues in the style names). A manager didn’t like the variants I’d done for the 3 styles (close association of header and body text rather than “floaty somewhere above”) and went through the complete 30 page document changing the styles to Effects.

I think the first question is to analyse what she actually does with the software.

Thanks Rick. She uses it for:

1. Email [Windows Live Mail]
2. Keeping tabs on her silversmithing projects [MS XLS]
3. Viewing and storing jpegs from her camera, or as email attachments,
4. Reading and writing Word docs [MS Word]
5. Occasionally browsing, timetables, prescriptions, … [Firefox]
6. Playing Patience

All in all, modest requirements that would be satisfied by ancient versions of Windows. She has Windows 7 at present. All that I read about Windows 10 pushing unwanted advertising onto the user, even into the Start menu, suggests that she would dislike it. She does not like to buy second-hand. So what are the options and where does one read about them; for there must be many millions out there in the same quandary? M**soft has had a long easy ride up till now, and evidently has little patience with the idea that their customers know best what they want. Apple + Wine is probably too expensive. I know nothing of Chromebooks, which appear to be cheap, but my past experiences with Android were not happy.

Apart from the fact it’s free, LibreOffice is imho actually better than MS Office -

I agree. I have it on Raspbian (RPi4). But when she was employed she had to use MS Office for compatibility – or so she still believes, whatever I say to the contrary. So the problem has two aspects: finding an affordable system that is adequate to her needs, and persuading her to go for it.

The whole point is to semantically lay the document out on the available paper size.

No.
That ceased to be the case the moment it offered you page sizes and the ability to define margins from the edges of the page.

It should not offer such things if it feels that it is acceptable to ignore them, without prompting, as it feels like it.

It’s a Word Processor, not a DTP package.

The distinction I make here is “does it work with frames?”. If it offers you a “page”, and maybe a choice of multiple columns, and the ability to paste in pictures with similar alignment to the text (left, centre, right, span) then it is a word processor. If, on the other hand, you can put content (text, images) into frames at arbitrary positions, including frames within frames, and specify frame linkage for how text is to flow, then it’s a desktop publisher.

And in no case should it affect the document upon something as simple as changing the printer without prompting the user. Can you name me another word processor that does something like that by default?

To add – Word’s behaviour also implies that a page that looks correct on one person’s machine may look horrible on another. Maybe this explains the trend of using huge margins in letters? It’s not because huge margins are good, it’s just a way to avoid Word autobreaking the document!

Start with a Linux “Live” build – you should be able to put an image on a USB stick and set the PC/Laptop to boot from the USB drive. It doesn’t have to be installed on the laptop and you can have as many different flavours of Linux as you have USB sticks.
Debian is probably going to be near enough the same as your Raspbian for you to be familiar with for “support” and there’s also the fact it should run on the elderly laptop, whereas I believe Ubuntu said sod that old tat with respect to 32-bit PC’s.
That said, with it being W7 then if it was bought with that pre-installed then it’s probably a 64bit capable beastie.

Zero cost testing, then you can buy a suitable bit of hardware later. You might actually find that extra memory from a reliable supplier like Crucial could speed the Linux test to well beyond her expectations and you might not need new hardware.

But when she was employed she had to use MS Office for compatibility – or so she still believes, whatever I say to the contrary.

Well, as we know MS Office isn’t totally compatible with MS Office from version to version and I believe that at one point you stood more chance of MS Office compatibility when you used LibreOffice than when you used a different version of MS Office

The main problem with Word is the people pressing the buttons.

The company I work for made a business out of of providing a “Word-like text editor” which can be configured in such a flexible way so that the user has no chance of pressing the wrong buttons. If the admin says so. The admin himself of course can do everything. If the super-admin allows it :-)

with it being W7 then if it was bought with that pre-installed then it’s probably a 64bit capable beastie.

It is.

Start with a Linux “Live” build – you should be able to put an image on a USB stick and set the PC/Laptop to boot from the USB drive. It doesn’t have to be installed on the laptop and you can have as many different flavours of Linux as you have USB sticks.

Brilliant advice. Many thanks.

I used Universal-USB-Installer.exe and an iso image of PCLinuxOS to put PCLinuxOS on a 32GByte pendrive. Then I used Toshiba’s HWSetup to give USB higher priority than the hard-drive for booting. But that did not work. However, switching on and keeping F12 pressed down did. PCLinux ran fine. BUT, it did not write back my changes of configuration to the Pendrive, so that after I switched off I was back to a raw system. I am not sure how to make changes of state in the Linux system to be written back to the pendrive when I close it down. I don’t want Linux using the hard disk at all; so that when I remove the pendrive my wife’s laptop will be in exactly the state she left it in, apart from a flag in the BIOS. But I do want the pendrive to reflect the changes when Linux is used. Does anybody have any suggestions?

I have not been following this thread but Googling “pendrive Linux with persistence” will give you some ideas about saving configuration changes with a Linux usb drive. This site has ready-made flavours of usb Linux to try: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/