He was referring to the rings around my eyes, stooped gait, and a palsied tremor in my hands.

"I'm breaking in a new word processor," I said. Al understood. Al understands a lot.

Adaptation takes its toll. I'm about a month deep in using Microsoft Word 97. Compared to previous word processor switches, this one hasn't been too bad. I've lost some weight, and I can't sleep, and my teeth itch. But nothing bad.

Now, I type for a living, so word processors are important for me. For you it might be a database or spreadsheet program. Whichever it is, you know that transitioning is tough. Always hitting keys you think will do one thing, but instead do something quite different.

The last two years I have gotten comfortable using Lotus WordPro 97. At first I wasn't nuts about it. But as the heir apparent to a program I adored, Ami Pro, I had to try it.

Lotus software always gets high marks for team features, but in word processing their strength is image fluidity. You could drop anything just about anywhere in Ami Pro or WordPro, size it, shape it -- it's really a desktop publisher doubling as a word processor. I eventually came to a fine appreciation for the richness of Lotus WordPro.

Microsoft Word outsells WordPro by about 15 to 1, is seen by most folks as the best Windows word processor for business. Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word -- think about it. I found Word more flexible and less boxy than WordPerfect, which Word displaced to become number one, but less fluid than WordPro.

But the first few days were a killer. I had a dickens of a time doing something that should be very simple -- changing paragraph styles. To modify a style in WordPro, you hit the right mouse key. Up pops a panel that changes the way all paragraphs labeled "Bullet" appear. It takes a few keyclicks to make the change apply to all "Bullet" paragraphs, but it worked.

Word is clumsier. First, the mouse-key only allows you to change the style of the paragraph your cursor is on. To change the entire "Bullet" style, you must go through several dialogue boxes several times. Some changes require seven or eight clicks.

Even then, the program has a capricious way of undoing changes. My first day I changed every paragraph in a book manuscript from 12 point Times, double-spaced, to 11 point Courier single-spaced. A few minutes later, the document snapped back to Times -- and in boldface! My entire 300-page document, bold. It made my writing seem, I don't know, more assertive.

I will say that I have not been able to duplicate this feat. Perhaps it was because the document began life as a WordPro document. Which brings up file conversions. Lotus, being the underdog, has no choice but to offer to-and-from Word conversions. But Microsoft won't provide utilities allowing Word users to import and export from Lotus (owned by IBM) WordPro.

Another oddity: If you finish a paragraph marked "Bullet" and hit ENTER, the next paragraph by no means is another "Bullet." Or, it will be labeled "Bullet," but the one thing you want in a paragraph labeled "Bullet" (a bullet) will disappear in both the new and the old paragraph! I'm doing this now as I type this article. I have no explanation for it. And I hate it.

The thing that pushed me over the edge though, was the lack of a document-flipping command. WordPro offers a keyboard shortcut (CTRL-TAB) that lets you cycle through opened documents. I use this a lot. CTRL-TAB in Word adds a thin-space to your cursor point. In 20 years of computing, I have not yet needed a thinspace. All Word allows is ALT-W, showing you a list of open files. Possibly I can create a macro, but macro languages, when they are learned at all, are learned in the second year of use. I want something now.

These misgivings aside, I don't hate Microsoft Word 97. The things it does it does quite well, and learning was less painful than program shifts of the past. Going from DOS XyWrite III+ to WordPerfect for Windows in 1989 -- that was life-threatening.

Word is great at file and string searches, and it remembers how you like to look at directories -- whether you prefer alphabetic or chronological order. And for you bibliographiles out there, it givess great footnote.

I'm going to keep both WordPro and Word, and use each according to the project. Some clients insist that I use Word. But my heart is still with WordPro. Indeed, a suggestion I made to Lotus last year is now an unofficial add-on. They even named it the FinkBar in my honor.

I ask you: would Microsoft do that?

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.