AWGS limits/problems

[joko@well.sf.ca.us (Joe Kohn)]

A member of my user group asked for some advice on a good word processor,
and I told him to get AppleWorks. Either he's head-strong or mis-understood
me, and he got AppleWorksGS. So, here's the problem...He called me the other
day saying he had a 54 page word processing document, with headers and
footers, and it was about 96K in length. When he tried to open up the
document, he said weird things happened. After trying to make sense of what
he meant by weird, he sent me the disk, and I have to concur that weird is
the best word to describe what the program is doing. BTW, we both have 4
megs.

For starters, nothing works. Scroll up a little, and crash. The cursor even
managed to get changed to a strange black blocky cursor, just like with Easy
Access installed, but I don;t have Easy Access installed.

Does AWGS have an upper limit as to the size of files it can work with? Does
it get flakier the bigger the document is. Will Claris trade him AW Classic
if he calls them, and says he wants to "downgrade" to AW 3.0? If the guy is
a professional writer, can he get his money back from Claris because he
bought what was supposed to be a tool for his trade, and he got a program
that doesn't work as advertised?

It was weird. When I loaded the file into UtilityWorks, and saved it as
straight ASCII, it was only 37 pages (down from 54) and was only about 65K.
Does that sound right, or did AWGS somehow corrupt the file with extraneous
garbage? Also, here's a clinker. I loaded the TXT file into AW 3.0 and saved
as an AW file, then loaded that back into AWGS, and it was also only 37
pages. Never having used headers/footers before, do they add 50% to the size
of the file.

To make a long story short, I recovered all his data, but what a pain!?!

One more AWGS weirdness for you...when I loaded the original file into AWGS
and tried to save it back out to disk, AWGS gave the error message that
there wasn't enough space on the disk to save it to, even though there was
700K free.

One last question...is this the weirdest AWGS story, or are there many other
nightmares?

Apple and their Claris subsidiary ought to be ashamed of themselves for
refusing to fix that program that many spent $200 or more for. I'll
certainly remember that the next time I go shopping for a new computer <g>.

I feel bad for this guy. He's a real novice and thought he was getting a
good program, and naturally, when he called me all he could say was "what am
I doing wrong". (Aside from buying the wrong program, probably nothing)

Joe