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It's still sold (and apparently actively developed) but I can honestly say I don't know a single person who uses it:
http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4720105&cid=catalog20038&segid=6400043

It still exists, & is still maintained.. http://apps.corel.com/lp/wpo/

There are a number of drawing tools which offer the snap to geometric shape after drawing as an option:

  - Corel's Grafigo (v1 can still be freely downloaded from www.archive.org --- http://www.corel.com/6763/downloads/grafigo/CorelGrafigo.exe )
  - FutureWave SmartSketch / Macromedia Flash --- SmartSketch is even configurable in how loose / tight the recognition is
  - SketchRight (this one seems to've vanished, but was quite good for architectural use)

William

That Corel hand coded Wordperfect in assembly? I ask you, where are they now?

Errr... you do know that Corel didn't create WordPerfect -- it bought it -- right? And, BTW... that Corel is still around?

Wordperfect was originally written for a DataGeneral minicomputer back in 1979. It was hugely popular on minicomputers and Unix long before there was an Amiga. It was popular in the legal profession even back then.

For many years WordPerfect 5.1 was the most portable word processing document in the world.

Wordperfect fell from popularity many believe mainly because Microsoft engineered Windows beginning with W95 to prevent it from functioning correctly, particularly with printing. Novell sued in 2004, and seven years later the case is still winding through the courts. It's suspected that Novell's new owner Attachmate will accept a quiet settlement and let the WordPerfect lawsuit die. Attachmate is a privately held corporation and no information about the composition of their ownership is available.

Though Novell/Attachmate still own the lawsuit, Novell sold the product on to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect is still available in WordPerfect Office X5 from Corel, who bought the app in 1996. Microsoft invested in Corel in October of 2000. The last native Linux version, 8.1 released in 2004, didn't sell well as Linux adoption at that time was still very low. The last Linux version, 9.0, was released in 2000. Relying on Wine, performance was unsat. Some diehards still use the application. Novell also retained rights and merged the product into their own productivity suite, GroupWise, which is widely regarded as best avoided.

Way back when WordPerfect was good for its day. Since 1995 it's been an application that is uniformly rejected by its main host OS. To this day printing in WordPerfect in Windows is unreliable and quirky. Despite this, it's no longer a cross-platform application. Current versions run only on Windows now. Some think that Microsoft's investment of $135M in 2000 in a nearly-bankrupt Corel in October of 2000 might have influenced this decision somewhat. At that time Corel's founder Michael Cowpland was accused of insider trading and theft in August of 2000, an issue that was later disproved and settled when his trades were proved to be extremely ill-advised. A suspicious person might even think the accusation were an application of extreme leverage, given a decade of hindsight.

Michael Cowpland deserves his own post - an alumni of precursors to Bell Labs, Nortel Networks and others he cofounded Mitel Networks, founded Corel (which originally stood for COwpland REsearch Labs) and bought control of ZIM Labs. He did a lot of cool stuff.

I don't know what this has to do with the fine article though. WordPerfect was always a commercial application and is still. Source code has never been available, or it would have been fixed long ago.

WordPerfect X5 is actually an awesome product. I was testing it at work recently and really surprised by how great it is. Pity that they price it similarly to Microsoft Office.

Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.

Now I remember, Corel bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around.

Microsoft really had nothing to do with Wordperfect's death. They were far and away the number one DOS word processor and felt they could ignore that newfangled Windows thing that came along. By the time they realized that Windows wasn't a passing fad, it was too late. And it didn't help that their intial Windows versions were crap.

Novell bought Wordperfect for $800 Million and just a couple of years later sold it to Corel for $200 Million. Then a few years later Corel (the entire company) was sold for $200 million.

Here, let me Google that for you:

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1208530087126?trkid=NASEMGglOP#tabview=tab2

Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.

Now I remember, Corel bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around.

It's not called Google Market (was it called that before?). Anyway, it's Android Market now. Even if it were Google Market, I think that would be OK, as long as they understood that they weren't getting rights to the word "Market".

That's why there can be both MS Office and Corel Office.

Regarding "Oil Company": right. Oil Company is the analogue of App Store. A company; what kind of company? Oil company. A store; what kind of store? An app store, not a stationery store or a candle store.

To Apple's way of thinking, no oil company could call themselves a company after the first black-turtlenecked one did. It would be:

Standard Oil Company
American Oil Corp.
Anglo-Iranian Oil Group
Arabian Oil Herd
Venezuelan Oil Posse

Or maybe:
American Greasy Stuff Company
Anglo-Iranian Black Slippery Goo Company
Arabian Ebony-Colored Fuel Company
Venezuelan ? Company

Whenever people refer to it as WP7, I momentarily get excited and wonder if Word Perfect has finally returned.

WordPerfect still exists. The most recent version was released in 2010, although it is only available as part of the WordPerfect Office Suite. But I am with you on this, I always think of WordPerfect first when I see WP7.

Wordperfect Lives.

Sadly, only available for Windows.

To give a real world example: see WordPerfect.

Example of what? WordPerfect is still around...
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1207676528492#tabview=tab0

Kind of like using a fork to eat tomato soup, isn't it? I mean, you can do it but you'll really annoy yourself. Vector-graphics programs have so many advantages over raster-graphics programs for drawing it's almost ridiculous.

In the commercial space, there's Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. In the free space, there's Inkscape — a software package I like a lot.

This should give some insight into the problems with Linux and how it could be addressed: for all it's strengths, it's not something people want. They want Windows, despite it's weaknesses. Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.

The problem with Linux's market share is that few PCs sold in stores come with Linux installed. And not many people have heard of Linux. Sure geeks and hackers on Slashdot have but they are not the typical computer user. Also most people do not necessarily want Window but think they need it. Talking with others about computers I've heard a lot of complaints about their PCs, and almost every tyme the problem is Windows. When I ask them if they thought of trying Linux or a Mac I'm asked if they can run MS Office, they say they have to have Office. When asked why they can not give an example of what only Office can do except Office macros, while Open Office can use Excel macros macros for Word have to be rewritten. There is also WordPerfect Office, Lotus SmartSuite, and other office suites.

Simply many people have the perception they need Windows because they need MS Office.

Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.

Fact is is no one knows what Linux's market share is. Estimates are Linux has a market share in the single digits on desktops with Linux, and Apache, having large shares of servers. Even with internal servers though it's hard to know how many MS Windows servers there are because IT departments of businesses and other users of servers switch from Windows and IIS to Linux and Apache without telling others. There have been articles linked to on Slashdot about how the London and New York Stock Exchanges have moved from MS Windows and .net to Linux and other open source platforms. The London Stock Exchange not only switched to Linux but actually bought the company that developed the trading system the exchange will use.

Falcon

The real question though is, if it makes sense to switch why doesn't everyone do it?

You have to know an alternative exists before you can use it, that is unless someone else sets it up for you.

As you've pointed out, people wont switch unnecessarily.*

No I said people shouldn't switch unnecessarily, not that they don't. Some will upgrade if not switch even though they don't need to. A lot of software companies depend on that, software upgrades.

If open office is a perfect substitute for office, and if its switching costs are equivalent or lower than those of switching from office 2003 to office 2007 (a logical inference of your earlier points) why have we not seen a massive migration away from the expensive commercial product?

Besides the reason above there's FUD. Even of those who have heard of Open Office, I'd bet most think it can't do all they need or want to do. A big complaint I've heard is that the person wants compatibility and Open Office isn't compatible. Personally I have not found that to be true. I had one problem opening a Word 2007, .xdoc, document and someone else suggested I install the newest version. After I did the doc opened fine. However I have not opened complex spread sheets or documents using a lot of macros.

Also it's not all about ease of use or compatibility either. If that was it then people would be using WordPerfect Office or Lotus SmartSuite. Simply MS used anti-competitive business tactics.

Falcon

You know, I have always wondered why WordPerfect is still Windows only. Despite the recent increase in market share and popularity of OSX and even desktop Linux Distros like Suse and Ubuntu. A linux netbook with a "light" WordPerfect would be imensely usefull to quite a number of students.

Maybe, you should pick a version and try sharing documents with a few different office users to see how well it works for you over 6 months or so. I predict when your done you might have your answer.

Our sysadmin has really been trying to use it on her own machine on and off for a few years. She has to exchange docs with lots of different people running lots of different versions of office (mostly vendors). Without fail, there is always some bug that forces her to use ms office. Recently she was trying to open a 20 page word document in OO, and it took something like 10 minutes to open. Turned out to be a known bug in OO. My boss is also trying to use it, but he leaves it open for days on end, and it misbehaves by locking up his X session to the point where the machine has to have X killed from a remote machine. Then there are the dozens and dozens of compatibility problems which aren't deal breakers but do cause problems. In the end it keeps turning out to be cheaper/easier just to pay the devil and use Office instead of dealing with all the OO problems.

Your experiences may be different, but I suspect that something like http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1151523326841#tabview=tab4 may still be a better bet than OO if you really must use something other than office. It has compatibility issues too, but last time I tried it was a much better solution than OO.

It's just markup - not much different to what you do with a slashdot post :)

Yeah, well I suck at making those too.

Wordperfect is vastly superior for that point since it shows codes - if MS Word also did that it would have saved me and many others a vast amount of time (paticularly finding where MS word thinks an image belongs and puttin it where I think it belongs).

Everyone complains about this, but I find it perfectly predictable where Word puts images when you insert them. Maybe it depends on which word processor you got "used" to before switching to Word? (In my case, ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.) In any case, that doesn't matter for this particular subject, since placing images won't (normally) be done by the author.

Of course Wordperfect is not around any more for a variety of other reasons.

Wrong: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1207676528492#tabview=tab0

You can buy it right now if you want; they even have a download link. Unless by "around" you mean "fewer people buy it", in which case you're correct.

The biggest reason to use MS Word is macros but that locks you to a single version unless you do a lot of tweaking and swapping around of libraries.

No, the biggest reason is its excellent Outlining mode, which no other word processor has even attempted to compete with.

You "miss" it? What's stopping you from buying and using it right now?

http://store.corel.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10302&mpe_id=14404&jspStoreDir=Corel&intv_id=40553&partNumber=OL_WPOX4&evtype=CpgnClick&langId=-1&catalogId=10103&ddkey=ClickInfo

There, you can even download it if you don't want to wait for shipping.

I can just use the GIMP to do my photo touch ups and other editing.

I tried GIMP years ago when I had Windows but found it seriously lacking. So I tried out Paint Shop Pro. Now that I have a Mac I'll try CinePaint, aka FilmGIMP. Because colour bit depth is important to me I consider it better than GIMP. Whereas GIMP only has 8 bit colour depths CinePaint has 16. Which brings up something I don't like about the GIMP developers. A programmer submitted code to the project that had 16 bit colour depth, several years ago, but they refused to use it. So he, or she I don't know who is was, forked GIMP. Many years later GIMP still only has 8 bit colour depths while movie studios work with CinePaint.

I used Photoshop a few years ago, and the interface was sleeker than the GIMP

Have you tried GIMPshop? It's interface was designed to be more like Photoshop.

Falcon

WordPerfect X4 sells for $299. Office 2007 Standard (with more elements to the suite than WP) sells for $399. I wouldn't call that extortionate.

Boycottnovell is where I keep up-to-date with Microsoft's latest anti-free, anti-open source, anti-human actions.

Don't let the name of the site fool you, they do keep a close eye on Microsoft and Novell's pact and current actions, but it's so much more than that. I'm discovering BoycottNovell.com to have fresher and better Linux news and Microsoft watching news than almost any other news site on the web, with Groklaw being one exception.

I'm counting down the day until Novell's site turns into a 100% pro-Microsoft masturbatory piece devoid of any Linux mention, just as Corel.com became after Microsoft's money went into the Corel hiney. What happened to all of the Corel software ports to Linux? Go to Corel's site now and it's one big Microsoft Windows e-penis cum fest. Where's all the Linux ports? Ha, ha! Yet again you bend over for Microsoft and you get nothing but an eggy rectum full of Ballmer and Gates smiling and steaming orc sperm. The Orc sperm will take awhile to settle deep in Novell's e-anus, but when it sets, expect the Linux offerings to dry up like an old lady's forgotten and unloved cunt.

That Microsoft is allowed to still maintain anti-open source feelings in the face of overthrowing Corel Linux with money and returning to Corel Linux as it was rebranded as XandrOS and enter into a patent agreement, sign patent agreements with other companies involved with Linux, lie about interoperability and offer nothing than a few bent pubic hairs from Satan's ballsack by the name of Moonlight ("Ever dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight? I ask that of all my friends" - The Joker, Batman The Movie), tells me lady justice in America isn't just blind, she's also a rich, money grubbing whore who wouldn't know justice if all the jailed non-violent pot smokers (who are subjected to sodomy and forced oral sex by diseased gangland pensies), surrounded her and blew smoke in her face. Just as with the O.J. Simpson trial, the "glove never fits" because it's stuffed with money for lady justice.

In the "United States of Advertising" (Bill Hicks), Microsoft's egg sucking Ballmer runs free and we all suffer for it one way or another, with Bill Gates waiting in the wings to splash himself like an enema into American politics, so like the many curious remote exploits (backdoors) in WindowsXP, their biggest backdoor is yet to come. No project is safe so long as Microsoft is around, they will always find a way to inject their devil sperm into it, while their paid off cronies pump up anti-Google hype for the unwashed mashes to digest, while they are guilty of many of the same things, such as censorship in China, but the typical person, like the DOJ, always gives Microsoft a free ride.

Microsoft in 2008 is still ever the monopoly it was when it was convicted, if not much more so, especially with its filthy cock twisting and turning in the vulva of Linux and open source, the mysterious patent list looming.

When are the people of America and the rest of the world going to get together and hold Microsoft accountable for its crimes against humanity? DO NOT SETTLE for small checks in settlements, do not allow them to continue to get away with their vicious predatory behavior. Corporations should not be above the law, but people are scattered and apathetic and allow corporations like Microsoft to continue to fuck them and rape their country of tax dollars for their proprietary mafia software and services. It is clear the majority of people will bend over and take anything, like with the Sony Rootkit audio-CD event, where yet again a corporation gets away with anything they want, with a slap on the wrist.

Microsoft is not above the law, each individual is capable of bringing change that resonates across the globe, but the big media beamed into your house has convinced you otherwise. You have the power in you to change the world, do not think otherwise. Look inside you

You can also get Paint Shop Photo X2 from the Corel website http://www.corel.com/ for like $55 with this coupon UG40OFFSEP

Actually, the beta version of WordPerfect does support ODF. You can sign up for the beta test here.

Still called paintshop pro. Got bought by corel. http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1184951547051

For whatever you want to fault it, doesn't OOXML have at least a couple of rough non-MS implementations (Novell, Corel, Thinkfree)?

Adobe's site and Corel's site are even more obviously shopped. Corel even managed to use the same initials as PlayStation Portable ;-)

I think that the problem with Open Office is that Microsoft Office has no real competition, hence it can afford to ignore everybody else.

This is something I hear a lot. Why does "Microsoft Office has no real competition" have anything to do with "the problem with Open Office". You identified some actual problems with Open Office: "[lack of] dictionaries, grammar tools, paper formatting and tool integration to support every country in every region of the world," which, I might point out, that some of the non-OO alternatives solve handily.

Some people will say "but what about Open Office", but the problem is that while it may be free, there is no incentive for anybody to develop program other than for the simple joy of it.

The problem is that the commercial alternatives to Microsoft Office have all but died out (Word Perfect , etc..)

This is clearly wrong. Word Perfect, after many years of neglect and changing hands several times has retained Word Perfect diehards (like Lawyers) and gained market share through OEM bundling. You can buy Corel WordPerfect Office X3 now for $280 or a $150 upgrade. It's not important to all OpenOffice users, but based on my experience with the OEM version of WP which came with my laptop, WordPerfect is faster and more compatible than OO. I see that the business edition has many more essential Office features (like an Outlook replacement).

Unfortunately the only company that is any position to do this is Apple...

Ummm... IWork (Pages, Keynote and Numbers)?

There is of course Star Office, but that is just a commercial version of Open Office.

I don't understand why this doesn't count. It even includes a high quality licensed spell check engine.

Send my love to WordPerfect 14, wherever she is!

Ottawa.

Corel owns it. http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Produ ct/1152105038419

It's still used in a few fields where Word hasn't completely taken hold. I used to work at a hospital, and our Medical Coders preferred it to Word. I hear that the legal profession also is still mostly WordPerfect users.

For vector graphics, check out Adobe Illustrator's nearest competitor, CorelDraw. For bitmap image editing, check Corel PhotoPaint (part of the CorelDraw suite) or Corel's PaintShop Pro software. For desktop publishing, consider QuarkXpress or the open source app, Scribus. For making PDF files, look into Foxit PDF Creator or PDF Creator. I don't believe there are many low priced or open-source alternatives that are comparable to Front Page or DreamWeaver. However, take a look at Kompozer (an improved version of the open-source NVU). For what it's worth, that's my advice for low cost alternatives to the Adobe Creative Suite.

Every design program worth using should be able to output CYMK TIFFs. And every printing company worth dealing with should be able to use them as a source.

Personally, I use Corel's Graphic Suite. Corel DRAW has been an industry standard right along side Illustrator. Their PHOTO-PAINT is a pretty strong competitor to Photoshop.

The other programs included in the Suite I don't find much use. But getting a Photoshop and Illustrator -like programs for $400 is pretty good. Also check their upgrade eligibility, you may be entitled to the $180 version.

Every design program worth using should be able to output CYMK TIFFs. And every printing company worth dealing with should be able to use them as a source.

Personally, I use Corel's Graphic Suite. Corel DRAW has been an industry standard right along side Illustrator. Their PHOTO-PAINT is a pretty strong competitor to Photoshop.

The other programs included in the Suite I don't find much use. But getting a Photoshop and Illustrator -like programs for $400 is pretty good. Also check their upgrade eligibility, you may be entitled to the $180 version.

You can still purchase WordPerfect, http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Conte nt/1150905725000

Word is a pain at removing hidden codes while WordPerfect's Reveal Codes makes it extrememly easy to spot the problem and to delete it. I often cut and paste from Word into WordPerfect to get rid of Word's hidden codes. For instance, I was recently given an MS Word document with double pagination. My secretary spent several hours trying to get rid of it. I cut and pasted the document into WordPerfect and was done correcting the problem in a matter of minutes.

I don't hate MS because its MS. I hate MS because of what they have done to fine products that are not theirs.

first big example: MSFT & IBM. The pattern usually resolves to MSFT=wins big, Partner(s)=at best manages to survive but not really thrive from the partnership, or at worst they lose their butts.

nfortunately Word is the only guy left on the block

I say that governments and the people can demand the standards and APIs to be open, and then competition will naturally follow.

Outside Office 2007, who would ever implement this "standard"?

You can open .pdf files in Open Office?? Can they be edited?

If you call acquiring JASC then yes they have offered many new products. Paint Shop Pro is now a Corel product, and is a program I would LOVE to see ported to Linux. :)

What killed WordPerfect was that they could not open Word Documents

The rumours of WordPerfect's death have been greatly exaggerated. A new version was released only last year. I know a number of people who still use it in their day-to-day work. Most of them are novelists. One is a lawyer. It isn't dead, it has been relegated to niche markets.

My favourite office suite is still WordPerfect Office. At least for the typing, which is about all I do WordPerfect is still unmatched by the simple fact that it isn't unable to handle the pages' layout and that it has that wonderful reveal codes markup functionality. I can't count how many hours of formatting WordPerfect saves. My dad who is a jurist/law researcher uses WP for, among other things, the way it handles footnotes and references, and I'd happily use WP for all my typing needs, but I have been more or less forced to use MS Word for school stuff, and testing OOo on my Linux systems wasn't a nice experience at all.

And by the way, I think someone should put together a Free WordPerfect 5.1/6 clone for *nix. It'd be awesome to have a really good quality console word processing (*not* text editing) environment on my shell server. Or is there already such a project, or is there a console-WP that works on modern unixlike systems??

Hey Craig, how come I can't get Word Perfect for Linux anymore?

I could be wrong, but shouldn't you ask the good folks over at Corel about that?

Well, you could always use this age old, tried and tested patch: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Co rel3/Products/Display&pfid=1047024307359&pid=10470 25942227

Adobe Reader: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
Sun Microsystems Java: http://www.java.com/en/
Azureus: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes
Winamp: http://www.winamp.com/
AudioScrobbler: http://www.last.fm/
Mozilla Suite: http://www.mozilla.org/
Opera: http://www.opera.com/
GIMP: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
GAIM: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

I also suggest to get:
B's Recorder gold: http://www.bhacorp.com/products/gold8/index.html
Corel Painter IX: http://www.corel.com/
Powerquest.. sorry Norton Partition Magic: http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/s ystem_performance/pm80/index.html

I'd like to write a small descriptions for each software but I have busy now so this is just fast reply. :)

You probably know this...

You can get Wordperfect here http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Co rel3/Products/Display&pid=1047025942277.

As far as I can tell they no longer make a linux version. I bought WP8/Linux and still have it.

I agree with GP, I do not know why people continue to *believe* that typing cryptic commands to the computer is easy, again it may be straight forward when YOU KNOW HOW but it is not easy to INFERE when you do not know the commands.

for one, what THE FUCK does eselect opengl set nvidia means? that does not makes any sense, again what does emerge nvidia-kernel means??

Give a doctor those instructions and they will just unplug the cord and go to read a book. You have to have a very narrow perspecitve to think like that. One of the main goals of software usuability is to allow people to INFERE by themselves how to use something with their prior knowledge.

People know how to search in google. And if they need to do something they will search in google.

I will take the time to give you a step by step example.
Lets imagine our hypothetical Jane average user who has returned from London and has her digital camera full with pictures, now she wants to make an album on her computer. She has two different choices:

google "photo album windows XP"
or
google "photo album linux".

In the first case, if she has Windows, the first 3 google search results are:
1. Microsoft Windows XP - Make a photo album on your computer
2. Picasa
3. Digital Photography - Reviews and free downloads at Download.com

The frist option is a page containing detailed step by step instructions on how to make a Windows Folder and use it as a photo album.
The second option is Picasa which will direct you to download and install the program by clicking "open" (after that, you know it is Next/Next/Next).
The third option will direct you to download.com, which provides a list of photo album applications like FlipAlbum (ha, my father bought that IIRC).

Now, with our Linux Jane, what do we have as the 3 first results:
JAlbum - free web photo album software and photo gallery software
Corel Corporation - Home of CorelDRAW, WordPerfect, Paint Shop Pro ...
Linux Online - Application: Web Photo Album

The first one is the closer to an answer, it takes you to Jalbum, unfortuantely you must register with some personal data (so much for the Open Source karma uh?) and you may need to download and install Java runtime.

If our Jane have not run yet, she will download the .bin, and then she may try to open it (supposing that she is using fedora core 4 with Gnome she may double click or right click and open, or just click open on the firefox download window) and then a big text full big X error window will appear saying: "Cannot open JAlbuminstall.bin".

Of course, she should know better as to change the rights to executable in the properties windows and then after that, open a terminal and run it... but that was just too much, so she went to the second option... ... Which takes her to Corel corporation, and after wandering around she finds Corel Photo Album, and after clicking on the "Try It" link she may create an account and download the program just to see that it is an EXE, whoops, not for Linux (she might even read the System Requirments before doing all that...).

So, she goes to the third option, it seems good:

Web Photo Album automatically generates photo albums on the fly from directories containing your favorite photos. Supports captions (including HTML tags), definable page sizes, forward and reverse preview, and index pages. All preview and inde

WordPerfect I would buy it the second it came in a Linux version (Like a bought so many of its DOS & MS Windows versions). I really miss it. OO.org is actually quite nice now, but not having "reveal codes" sucks, since I am control freak when it comes to large documents.
I even see a new version of WordPerfect Office called X3is out now:
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Co rel3/Products/Display&pfid=1047024307359

Well, back to work..

--
Regards
Peter H.S.

I used to post a lot to a community board over on Delphi Forums and the big thing then was signature art.

Hundreds of women with nothing better to do (and a few guys) would sit around chopping up copyrighted artwork (for the most part) and putting usernames on them.
Then came the effects, glitter, sparkling, gold, fades, weaving and glass ... you get the idea.

Most of these people did a google for "glass text" or something similar and came back with tutorials up the wazoo for using a $600 software package to create detritus to fill externally linkable webservers with.

Another way to learn the package is to search your favourite BitTorrent server for a "Photoshop ebook".

At the end of the day trial and error is the way that us geeks learn, but some people have to have their hands held firmly until they are sure they can't break something by clicking a widget they never tried before.

If you're just starting out and will never need the power of a $600 package you can always give PaintShop Pro a try, nearly all the features that amateurs will use in a $99 package.
If you think you will outgrow PSP, don't waste your time learning it, just go right along to Adobe PS. Retraining after using PSP is so much hassle that many people never bother going beyond its limits.