Ryan’s Journey

This post was inspired when I realized I had the full version of Microsoft Works Suite on my laptop. No I just didn’t find it or whatever you want to say, I just overlooked it, and installed MS Office 2003. My question is why is it still around?

Back when I was solely a mac user (1991-1997/8), the Microsoft Works Suite was the only word processing program offered by Microsoft that worked on a Macintosh, I believe. I forget when exactly Word was made for Macintosh computers, but I believe it was in 1997 or so. My first PC laptop in 1998 had both Microsoft Works Suite and Microsoft Office 98. But dropped Works a little after.

Nowadays, people and manuals sometimes say “open up word, and do x”, instead of saying open up your word processor. I know that there is a number of word processors other than Word and Works. Hell, Microsoft Windows even comes with two free. Yeah Notepad and Wordpad aren’t that fancy, but they still work, and are still considered word processors. But this isn’t what I am trying to get at in this post. What my question is, is why Works is still being actively updated?

I think Microsoft should just stop making the Suite all together. I just tried to make a database using the built in database application in the Suite. Let me just say that it felt like using Excel with it being a tad more user friendly, and calling it a database. Sorry I don’t think so, I could not even make multiple tables! If you have made a database, unless it is really basic you need multiple tables to do almost anything with it. The filter was somewhat nice since it had a number of drop downs on it, but no built in functions, and the advanced mode looked like poorly written SQL. A few years ago Microsoft finally stopped putting out updates for Windows 98, shouldn’t they do the same for Works Suite?…Unless of course there is some significant amount of people that I am not thinking about.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, office, word, works suite

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