Microsoft macros: The VisualBasic editor, used for Word 97 and throughout Office 97, is shown at the top. Below is a macro to send an Access database form to MS Word for printing.

Shifting sands of Microsoft Word cause papers problems

Once upon a time, newsroom systems were closed systems, run by kind and wise wizards who toiled in obscurity, making everything run smoothly and providing a stable working environment for newsrooms everywhere.

Well, maybe not.

That fairy tale of the wonderful proprietary system has been replaced by the fairy tale of the open system. Like all fairy tales, good is always great and bad is really, really bad. Most of us, newspaper cynics that we are, learned long ago that life's not like that.

The move to open systems promised to free newspapers from the tyranny of closed systems developed by unresponsive suppliers, driving down the cost of purchase, training and maintenance.

Oops. Wait. That's another fairy tale.

What most of us really did was trade one system replete with its advantages and problems for other systems with their advantages and problems.

Those advantages and problems are here to stay, at least if a lap around the floor at any recent NEXPO is any guide. These open systems have made significant inroads, with products from Quark, Microsoft, IBM and others replacing the fare from the suppliers we love to hate.

And by far the most popular -- strike that, make it "most common" -- text editor is Word from Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash.

Once a pale stepsister to such word processors as WordPerfect and Wordstar, Microsoft Word now dominates the market. And suppliers and newsrooms leery of closed systems and still trying to hold down training costs have acknowledged Word's grip on the marketplace and embraced it as the text editor of choice. Companies such as Agile Enterprises, Advanced Technical Solutions, Advanced Publishing Technology, Harris, American Computer Innovators Inc. of Amherst, Mass., and others have turned to Word as the text editor.

The move has not been without problems.

A typical system today is often a client-server environment, with Word, Quark XPress (from Quark Inc. of Denver), a program for reading wires, a database, a web browser, an e-mail program and a collection of all the other geegaws that come with Windows or Mac OS thrown in for good measure.

"Contrast today with the days of proprietary systems," said Bruce Steere, manager of point solutions with Advanced Technical Solutions Inc. of Wilmington, Mass. "They were closed systems and when you needed something, you had to go back to the vendor. But, there was no reason to worry about viruses and people introducing software to your system."

Viruses and conflicting software are problems every open system manager has to deal with. The very openness that we all demanded leaves us vulnerable to problems that just didn't exist before.

The Daily Journal, of Vineland, N.J., has dealt with problems of open systems. Some of the problems were niggling little things, David Stump, managing editor for operations, said, and others were fairly serious.

The Daily Journal uses ACT from Burbank, Calif.-based Advanced Publishing Technology Inc. ACT relies on Word for text-entry and copy editing and Quark XPress for pagination.

Stump likes Word, but wishes there weren't quite so much there.

"It's a functional word processor," he said, "but has much more power than the average newsroom user needs. I've sometimes felt that we would be better off if we had a stripped down [word] processor."

The newsroom computers are reasonably powerful Windows 95 machines. And like many machines with Windows 95 and multiple software packages, strange problems crop up.

"We've had problems with the spell-checker in Word," Stump said. "It occasionally defaults to English -- U.K. English. And AutoCorrect will change all-cap datelines to caps and lowercase, even when autocorrect is turned off."

Stump also reports memory problems, with computers needing to be rebooted regularly, though he hopes they go away when he switches to Windows NT.

Memory management problems are a big deal at the Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star, according to John Meyer, managing editor. The Morning Star switched from an Atex J-11 system, from the predecessor of Atex Media Solutions Inc. of Bedford, Mass., to ATS a few years back, giving up its Atex terminals for PCs running first XyWrite (which is now sold by The Technology Group of Baltimore), and now Word.

"Word evidently has a memory leak when dealing with fonts," Meyer said. "Our design involves a lot of font scaling. That's something that the old Atex-style systems handled simply, and since ATS and XyWrite were based on it, it was simple there, too."

But things are never simple when dealing with Microsoft.

"When we started doing this in Word, we hit a big 'gotcha,'" Meyer said. "There's a bug in Word that takes memory away whenever a font is scaled. And that memory never comes back."

And as the memory -- and system resources -- get sucked up, things get a tad unstable. To keep computers from crashing, Meyer had memory meters installed on everybody's desktop so they could track problems and restart Word before a catastrophic crash.

"You can watch the memory go right down and then crash," he said. "We found that just displaying the font list could cause memory to go down."

And simply displaying a font list was something that was done regularly, especially with type arriving by way of disk and e-mail, type that had to be formatted for the appropriate section. Meyer said they could avoid opening the font list by manually entering the font name instead of choosing it from a list, something that might annoy a copy editor with tight deadlines, multiple zones and pagination.

Meyer said he also could avoid the font problem by using WordBasic macros to grab files and format them. But that opens two other cans of worms.

WordBasic macros are one of the most common ways of spreading viruses these days. (Remember Melissa? The Melissa virus hit in March, infecting about 100,000 machines, according to the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University, and forcing companies -- including Microsoft -- to shut down e-mail services.) About the only sure way to keep from being hit by a macro virus is to disable macros, but that is just not feasible on some systems.

Steve Auerweck, systems editor at The Sun in Baltimore, is in the midst of installing a new editorial and pagination system from Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla. It, too, depends on Word for the text editor. It also depends heavily on macros.

"Harris is still very macro-driven," Auerweck said. "There are some things that are still very kludgy, and I don't think we've seen the full implications of that problem in the long term."

Weird Word
Another can of worms is reminiscent of the problems faced by those that Quark XPress users ran into when upgrading from version 3.12 to 4.0. Just as XPress XTensions often break when the program is upgraded, Word macros can run into problems. Versions of Word up to the version in Office 95 used the powerful WordBasic macro language for automating tasks. The versions of Word released with Office 97, however, used Visual Basic for Applications for that function. And though the help files said Word would convert those existing macros, the Microsoft Office web site states: "You may need to modify parts of them manually to retain the macros' original functionality."

Steve Nilan, a partner in the Sacramento-based supplier consulting firm Nilan-Sanders and a longtime System Integrators executive, said that viruses aren't the worst part of depending on Word.

"Viruses are a minor threat compared to incompatibility," Nilan said.

Word itself is not some monolithic structure. There are versions in use ranging back to the old DOS days, 16-bit versions for Windows prior to Windows 95, 32-bit versions for Windows NT and Win95 and Win98 as well as versions for Apple's Macintosh. And the file formats for these are not always compatible. To further complicate matters, early versions of one generation of Word may produce files in a slightly different format than later versions or versions which have had software patches applied.

These file incompatibilities can wreak havoc on those sending and those receiving files.

"This is a problem for free-lancers," Nilan said. "But it's a bigger problem for advertising. You have to take the attitude that 'what they send me I have to take.'"

Microsoft Office, of which Word is a part, contains file converters that allow newer versions to open files from earlier versions, as well as save in formats readable in earlier versions. Unfortunately, many of those converters are not loaded during a typical Office installation.

Office is often called "bloatware" in the computer press because of the amount of disk space and random access memory the programs consume. Running Office 97, for example, from a network server still requires at least 24-megabytes of files on the local computer. Loading the program at each workstation can consume 121-megabytes without breaking a sweat. Loading the entire Office suite, along with those pesky conversion files, can eat up 191-megabytes on a hard drive. And given the quirks of Microsoft's licensing policies and the problems of running Office from a server, many companies just bite the bullet and load the whole package locally.

"We never had good success with installing a copy on the server and letting others use it," said David Kraai, president of Advanced Publishing Technology. "We have always had to install it locally."

Depending on off-the-shelf software and integrators can pose other problems. In Baltimore, Auerweck had planned to install Word 97 on the computers running the Harris software. That didn't work out, he said, when the Harris conversion from a 16-bit application to 32-bit ran behind schedule.

"We had intended to come up with Word 97," Auerweck said. "But the general port of their system from 16-bit has been much rockier than they anticipated. So we're up about halfway on the reporters on Word 6, which has been off the market about four years," leaving him open to problems with file incompatibilities as well as macro problems when it finally comes time to upgrade.

David Benson, systems editor at New Jersey's Press of Atlantic City, is even further back, running Word 2.0c on Windows 95-based PCs.

"PCs are such misery," Benson said. "There are so many things that are intertwined. Win95, Netscape 4, Word. ..." His voice trails off with a sigh. "At least it's better, though. With Win3.1, we rebooted the machine every 30 minutes. Now, we style everything in Word and reboot a machine about twice a day."

Wilmington's Meyer is far more current, running Word 97 with Service Release 1. But even that is not up to date. There was a Service Release 2, which caused as many problems as it solved, SR-2a which came out about a week later, and other versions of SR-1 and SR-2a, depending on what other Microsoft applications you may have. In addition to the switch from WordBasic to Visual Basic for Applications, Word 97 improved support for HTML. The much-newer Word 2000 adds XML support.

APT's Kraai said he tried to avoid the Word macro problem by writing code for the programming interface to Word that uses the C programming language.

"By using the C code, we can call system calls automatically," Kraai said. "We can sense if the document is a particular version, and it keeps us away from the problems with macros."

Kraai said the C Application Programming Interface (API) has been remarkably consistent in different versions of Word, easing the upgrade path when new versions are released.

Not so for Meyer. "Unless there is a compelling reason to upgrade, we've found that systemwide upgrades are more trouble than they're worth," he said.

He doesn't lay that on macros vs. APIs or any other particular thing, just the nature of the beast.

"We're much more dependent on the systems people than we used to be," Meyer said. "There were a lot of neat things in Atex and XyWrite that we gave up, things that were perfected 20 years ago. It's important to know that we lost a lot of capability that we took for granted."

Benson also is wary of upgrading just because there is something newer out there.

"Upgrades are frequently disasters," he said. "We used to be a very people-heavy industry -- typesetters, proofreaders or whatever. We're now technology heavy. And unlike people, technology changes."

The law of unintended consequences kicks in when you try to upgrade, Benson said. "The ad department may need to upgrade a program to keep up with a client. But by the time all the related things are changed, one $500 program can lead to $200,000 in upgrades."

They shoot reporters, don't they?
Another problem with the openness of these systems is the ability of unknowing, or merely curious, newsroom staffers to severely disrupt things. ATS co-founder Ray Toothaker commented three years ago that they had to jump through some hoops to protect the Word display fonts. Something as simple as having a reporter install an unrelated program that swapped out the standard display font for a modified font with the same name could throw line counts and screen displays off, he said. About the only way to prevent it was not allowing people to install software, an unlikely prospect given the number of programs floating around the Internet.

Joe Bingham, associate director of editorial systems for New York City-based Newsweek magazine, said that a number of his users do just that. So far, he said, it has not caused any problems with Word or the system that Nashua, N.H.-based Agile Enterprise installed at the magazine. Newsweek was one of the first installations of the Agile system, and is still using Office 4.3, with Word 6. Staff members needing later versions have them installed in different directories, which Bingham said has had no ill effects.

Auerweck's plan to prevent users from installing software was direct, if slightly tongue-in-cheek. "We'll just shoot them," he said.

Atlantic City's Benson hasn't had to shoot anybody, he said.

"People are responsible here," Benson said. "They are grownups. They also don't want to screw up their work machines."

Nilan said this was part of a long-running debate in the industry.

"How do you protect the newsroom from itself," he asked. "The answer is, you can't."

As Steere put it, "You can lock things down, but you may not want to do that. And anybody with half a brain can figure out how to undo that anyway."

The ability to turn to one supplier to solve problems was gone once newspapers headed down the path of open systems. And the relatively small size of the newspaper market has led the standard suppliers to be less responsive than many would like.

"Marrying all the off-the-shelf software, it's kind of touch and go," Stump said. "You pay a lot less money, but you get a lot less accountability."

"Microsoft told us our memory problem was with our fonts," Meyer said. "The only problem was, the fonts they told us to use wouldn't go through the RIP. It brings to mind Lily Tomlin's old line. 'We don't care. We don't have to.'"

But Meyer is not about to turn back the clock

"Like all Microsoft stuff, it's very powerful and has some great features. They don't have an army of developers for nothing," he said. "They've stolen every good idea anybody had, but that's old hat in the newspaper business. But we are now fully Windows, and that's opened up a lot for us."

"It used to be all a reporter needed was a typewriter and a pen and pencil," Benson said. "But now all this data can be and should be at everybody's fingertips. ... Now a reporter really does need a machine powerful enough to run a spreadsheet, a word processor and a database."

-- Steven E. Brier

Advanced Publishing Technology,
(818) 557-3035,
e-mail: aptsales@advpubtech.com;
Advanced Technical Solutions,
(978) 657-6500,
e-mail: info@atsusa.com;
Agile Enterprise,
(603) 880-6440,
e-mail: frizzo@agilent.com;
American Computer Innovators,
(413) 256-1147,
e-mail: sales@aci-openpages.com;
Atex Media Solutions,
(781) 275-2323,
e-mail: info@atex.com;
Harris Publishing Systems Corp.,
(407) 242-5330,
e-mail: hpscmktg@harris.com;
IBM,
(770) 835-9909,
e-mail: georges@us.ibm.com;
Microsoft Corp.,
(206) 882-8080;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888,
e-mail: quarktech@aol.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.