Due to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays falling on the regular meeting dates each year, the Orangevale-Folsom chapter holds a single meeting on the first Thursday of December. Over the years, it's become tradition to pass the hat and share in a pizza dinner during this holiday meeting and one of the larger turnouts of the year showed up to partake.
What with the food and the renewing of friendships, the meeting is less structured and more free flowing that usual. We did have a lively question and answer period that ended abruptly when the pizza arrived.
The featured presentation for the evening continued our look at basic productivity software. One of our members, Darlene Mahl, has worked with word processors for many years and she agreed to demonstrate for us some of the more advanced formatting features in MS Word while attempting to contrast similar features in WordPerfect.
Darlene put together a very impressive PowerPoint presentation and passed out copies so the members could follow along during the presentation. She began by explaining that her presentation would only have brief comparisons of the two word processors because she only had version 8 or WordPerfect available to her. Her first comparison, though, concerned the use of keystrokes. WordPerfect makes extensive use of keyboard shortcuts while Word is very mouse and menu driven. Word does have many keyboard shortcuts available and Darlene showed how to find and print a copy of them. Several versions back, WordPerfect finally dropped their proprietary keystrokes which were carried over from DOS into the initial Windows versions, so now they have adopted those standard in Windows for most tasks. A noticeable difference between the two programs is that Word's keystrokes change depending the context and view while WordPerfect's are standard throughout.
No comparison of the two programs would be complete without contrasting the detailed Reveal Codes feature present in WordPerfect that is so sadly implemented in Word. WordPerfect's enables the user to see and edit all the embedded codes directly. Word's are pretty much limited to paragraph markings, tab characters, and spaces.
In Word, she showed how to display and use the tool bar and how to add and delete feature icons to customize its appearance to the individual user's preferences. She showed how to use the paragraph formatting windows to set indent and line spacing as well as line and page breaks. She also demonstrated the use of the markers on the ruler to change the settings for the margins, column widths, and indents.
Before the presentation was concluded, Darlene answered lots of questions and several very informative "how-to" discussions were started which carried over into the lobby after the meeting was over. All agreed this was an excellent review for us and Darlene has agreed to post her presentation on the chapter's web site for all to see and use. This presentation is the fourth in a series of presentations on MS Office components, three on MS Word and one on MS Excel. Our thanks to Penne McKee, Dennis Richardson, and Darlene Mahl for their explorations of Word and to Roy Korb for showing us the power of Excel. We'll be looking forward to similar presentations next year.
The Orangevale/Folsom Chapter meets from at 7pm on the fourth Thursday of each month at the Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church at 11427 Fair Oaks Blvd., in Fair Oaks. All meetings are open to the public.
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Mike Evans
