Even worse is Microsoft Works. Horribly incompatible with just about everything, and changes its own internal formats every few versions, with no backward compatibility.

Click to expand...

When I was in middle and high school and was the school's in-house computer guy (for both faculty and students), I had a lot of people come to me and ask me why Word 2000 (what they had on the computers at school) wouldn't read what they did at home. Almost all of them were using Works. There were some pretty nasty looking TXT files created just so they could work on their stuff--albeit with all sorts of goofball characters in the middle of the documents.

I advised all of them to either type it in or at least save it in WordPad. That cleared up the problems.

Works was surprisingly easy to use--I have 2.0 for Windows--but it sure was a pain compatibility-wise.