I think what I show is there is another way to cook, my way if you like. I want to be a chef, not just a cook.I only know MS Office but moving into Adobe. You however, are a master of the ingredients and have all the hallmarks to become a master chef! I will enjoy following up on the links and considering all possibilities.

It doesn’t really matter how we put our calculations together, so long as we talk about it and learn. There are so many choices and opportunities and I want to see the ideas come forth from other engineers. We should be inspiring each other all the time.

I am following up on OpenOffice and reviewing that; my australian counterparts swear by it and it shows promise. However, a company in Edmonton tried to use this as their platform but I understand it didn’t work in translation with other clients.

Thanks for posting and great comments.

Anthony

1. I studied math and science when computing power was moving off the mainframe to the desktop personal computer, and have seen many developments in the field. I remember pushing Visicalc to its limits on my Apple IIe in high school, and Cricket Graph and MS Office on my Mac SE through engineering school.

2. With many software publishers running out of features to pack into their bloated products with every version, some are attempting redesigns of the user interface. I recommend people do a fresh analysis of their computing needs whenever they upgrade software or refresh hardware/OS, since they will be going through a learning exercise and likely file format change.

For example, it may be better to switch to OpenOffice (or just add it to Office 2003 and migrate at your own pace) than to switch to Office 2007. Or to consider a Mac, rather than replacing a WIndows XP machine with Vista or Windows 7. Or to replace Windows on an older machine with Linux. And, studying the impact of the change may find ways of not having to change procedures at all, maybe by adding a little memory or an external hard drive. A fresh examination with someone who knows several options is worthwhile, especially in light of the cost and external dependencies of software nowadays.

3. Cutting and pasting Excel calculations into Word, largely for the superior page formatting of Word (title, header/footer, page numbering) takes more care and discipline than I have. I recommend having another look at staying within Excel for this, and structuring the pages carefully to improve the output results, eg:
• raw input data
• formulas and constants used at each stage
• transformed data at each stage
• final results

4. OpenOffice has many components that assist an engineer with complex project work, such as an integrated equation editor, powerful and well-integrated write/calc/database modules, and native PDF output.

http://why.openoffice.org/
http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html

5. Mac Users should have a good look at Numbers, part of the iWork suite. Its page-layout capability, graphics and chart handling, and user interface may be perfect for many engineering calculations. Numbers reminds many engineers of Wingz, which engineers mourned when Informix discontinued it. Apple’s Claris division bought the source code and some of its features popped up in Numbers 10 years later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informix_WingZ
http://www.macworld.com/article/138426/2009/01/numbers09.html
http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/

6. One final note about Open Office. It is cross-platform, meaning you can take the file home from Windows at work, edit it at home on the Mac or Linux, and take it back to work the next day with no translation problems. And, the file format is a well-documented standard so you are not locked into upgrading from Microsoft’s Word 2003 to 2007 to 2010 etc. Open Office is the only suite I have on my Linix or Windows machines, and sits beside iWork on my Macs, and often acts as the can opener capable of opening almost any file and obsolete format I encounter.

Good luck all.

If we had the Word 95 as a basic platform, we could focus and improve the drawing capabilities, add squared paper features, equations tools, easier design of headers and footers, improved links with Excel and better graphic-handling capabilities

I remember bck in the late 90′s we had a product called Frontpage from Microsoft and it was a desktop publisher package. Absolutely brilliant and simple it was. It got crucified in the html wars becoming Publisher. It became huge, expensive and way too stupid for practical use. They sure obliterated that idea which had potential.

If Microsoft cannot see the real opportunity to build user loyalty then that is OK because I am not sure I want to see what Word 201x will bring! I have survived 4 upgrades and enough is enough. I am figuring a way to achieve the same results with Adobe products and I know they will take great interests. Adobe are interested in user-loyalty and will virtually give a product like this for free. The beauty is everyone can use MAC or PC or their own computer and achieve the same results. Got great plans!

I spend more than 80% of my time, preparing either calculations, reports, spreadsheets or databases and you will be doing that too, before you know it. I take great pride knowing I can use the tools proficiently to express and do my job better.

While there are no shortcuts to learning, I can give you some great tips that will give a head start. I have made every mistake you can possibly make.

I am passionate about what I do as an engineer, training the team, because the impact on their career is so profound.

While I like your idea of doing a WordEng I doubt Microsoft would ever go for it. They are too much into the money and having these new versions of windows and office come out so everybody can go get the “newest and greatest” version when in the end it turns out all to be rumor and be totally crap.

The situation reminds me of an old movie clip I saw in a college psychology class. There was shoemaker who came up with the greatest shoe in the world, and it would last much longer than normal. While it was a great idea, his bosses hated the idea because it would mean no business. If the shoe is perfect, there would be no need for people to buy newer versions.

The mindset of the world needs to change so that we focus on efficiency and improving what exists as opposed to worrying about who can have the most money in the world.