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WordPerfect Back From the Wilderness
Man With Broom writes "Just when you thought they were riding off into the sunset, they come back into town and start hanging around the mayor's oldest girl... WordPerfect 12 was described today on news.com, with Corel claiming compatibility for the small business user. But can they withstand the juggernaut? And what of OpenOffice?"
Well wordperfect used to lead, I guess while its not leading anymore they are still cranking out copies regardless. They do have a good plan for OEM on new computers though. Alot of compaqs and hps have wordperfect installed on them. $0.02
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
Word Perfect never left the confines of my heart. I love that software dearly. And what about OpenOffice? I say it's a perfectly good alternate right after Word Perfect and right before Clippy.
Yes it once was a fine product. About 6 patches into 5.1 version (1992) it got to be really mellow. Then they put out 6.0 and Novell came forth with 6.1 which does just fine in DOSemu. I still use it just that way. Print postscript to a file and use ps2pdf on it.
Now any current versions are another story. I never could stand any gui version of WordPerfect. That DOS version will stick with you though, and beats M$ product.
A while back, Novell used to own a significant share of both Corel and SCO. In 1996, Novell decided to sell off both of them. Article Here.
Corel has owned WordPerfect since 1996. That's 8 years, or about the average length of a US marriage.
WordPerfect was previously owned by the Wordperfect Corporation out of Utah, then Novell, then Corel. Corel has since been purchased outright.
I'm a Wordperfect loyalist from way back, just because I find it so much more intuitive than Office (at least, it is on Windows). For instance --- want to change the margins to a specific number? In WP, if you never used a word processor before, you may think to click "format / margins". On Word, where is it? "file / page setup"
Hm... yes law offices do use it. Mine did and I successfully pushed for a move to MS Office. Why? Because all our clients used Office. I'm no fan of Office but it made working much more transparent. Working with the dinosaur law offices who still used Wordperfect was painful in the extreme.
I used it all through college and never once used Word. Now that I graduated I never have to write any papers again, and don't have ANY word processor program installed.
The reason to use word perfect is simple: REVEAL CODES!
Otherwise, Wordpad has about all the functionality most people really need to write a stupid paper for a class.
Morphing Software
Word. WP 5.2 is the pinnacle of software. It starts you out, you start typing three seconds after opening the program, every option is accessible DIRECTLY, no fucking menu, and if you forget how to find it, you press F3 and type the function you want. So if you want to insert a graphic, and forgot how, F3, type G and it'll tell you.
I could get more done in an hour in WP 5.2 than in any other word processor I have ever used ever. 10 pages in an hour was my record for crankining out papers in WP...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
My mom also swears by WP. In fact lots of WP Zealots seem to like WP5.1 for DOS the best. So much so that wp11 has a wp5.1 emulation mode. (even if it is kind of a lame attempt)
Personally i feel WP is far superior to word, especially when you get the tabs and rules all messed up. reveal codes is an awesome tool to help clean all that up. I wont use a word processor that does not have reveal codes. (well I wont like it)
I just bought wp11, I guess they are trying to get on a 1 version per year mode...
Ahh, the command is actually "REVEAL CODES" as a poster below has said.
Oh, and ever since Corel took over it's been freakin bloatware just like their horendous Corel Draw which bogs on my AMD 3.0 Ghz with 1 Gig ram. Photoshop CS blows it away.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Well, word perfect (the whole WP Office Suite acutally) was once owned by Novell.
-CowboyNick
Most word processors offer substantially the same feature set. But there are at least three key areas where I think WordPerfect has an edge:
1) Draft Mode. This is the mode most people do their writing in, and I love WordPerfect's minimalism. Lots and lots of space for the text you're working on, and minimal clutter since they don't try to include access to every blasted feature in the ruler bar. OpenOffice's version of draft mode, such as it is, is called "Online Layout" and it's still cluttered looking and IMHO garbagey. MS Word's Draft Mode seems more cluttered than WordPerfect's., and suffers from too many autoedit things turned on, where the word processor incorrectly anticipates your needs.
2) Better writing environment. WordPerfect doesn't try to implement every last feature a business user could conceivably want. So the menus and so forth are far less cluttered, which makes the main features you need much easier to find. Add to this that MS Word's grammar checker is a piece of crap, while WordPerfect will actually make some interesting comments. I think if you're trying to write for a living, WordPerfect is a wonderful tool.
3) Reveal Codes. I've heard MS Word is trying to implement this feature, but WordPerfect's had it forever, and it's sensational. Have you ever used a WYSIWYG wordprocessor, and all of a sudden wondered why your text at a certain point has the formatting go to hell? And the only way to fix things is to delete a chunk of your text?
Well, with WordPerfect, you can see the hidden formatting codes embedded in your text. So it makes locating a problem code easy. In a long document, it makes tracing a piece of corruption a breeze, and it takes only seconds to remove the problem at its source. You find the hidden formatting code, delete it with a backspace, and your problem is solved. As far as I know, WordPerfect is the only word processor where you can be 100% sure that your document has absolutely no embedded crap.
Some final comments. I love WordPerfect but I'm no zealot. I'll happily ditch it in two seconds the moment an open source alternative addresses my above comments. I simply can't understand how people can create a word processor that doesn't have a sharp looking, minimal, ultra responsive draft mode. I like the draft mode in ABIword, but I've found that the program isn't as stable as I'd like it to be.
Unfortunately, WordPerfect has some stability issues as well. I've found that in my newest book, which contains 300 or so footnotes, WordPerfect seems to have a memory leak or something which causes a freeze for every ten or so endnotes I edit.
My guess is that in five years or less, open source word processors will have all the main features a serious writer could want. But for now, WordPerfect remains my word processor of choice.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
"OpenOffice is equally as good and costs nothing?" It is not free and it does not do as good a job. First, the time spent learning a new program is lost time. If I spent twenty hours learning open office, that is twenty hours lost and $7,000 less in the bank. Second, there are features in word perfect, some for lawyers, some for engineers, some for other professions that nobody has copied. For example, in my profession, the law, where there are thousand of members, only a handful of us actually go to court. When we do, we have to write a form of term paper we call a brief. Briefs have a very formal style which requires a very arcane table of contents. With WordPerfect I hit one button and it generates a table of contents and table of authorities which meet the nitpicking requirements of the anal rednecks before whom I practice. Word requires two hours of typing by a $25 per hour legal secretary; or four hours of my $350 an hour time. Assuming I had the time to download, install and troubleshoot an open source word processor, it still would not have my beloved "generate" button. WordPerfect does exactly what Word does only cheaper and better and takes less space on my harddrive. Why not pay for a superior product?
As someone that just walked my in-laws through the purchase of a "low-end" Dell, this is how it works. By default the machine comes with WordPerfect (not PerfectOffice). For $11 you could upgrade to MS Works (which is basically MS Word and some crap). The fact that the low-end machine starts at $499 and you get a $25 discount for spending over $500 means that the MS Word "upgrade" is essentially $14 cheaper than the WordPerfect default.
Not to mention the fact that, as you stated, many people opt for the inexpensive MS Office Small business edition.
Basically WordPerfect and PerfectOffice are included as a reminder to Microsoft that Dell is the one making the sale. Dell has no problems going along with Microsoft, but they don't want MS to forget that, when push comes to shove, Dell has other options.
...download from their site in zip format:
f ectOffice12_ScreenShots.ZIP
http://www.corel.com/futuretense_cs/ccurl/WordPer
I am NaN
As far as USING the product goes, WP is great. A lot of times I swear at Word for messing up my formatting, being difficult to get a layout 'just right', etc.
But as far as supporting the program technically, WP is a nightmare. They had a component called 'PrintPerfect', which would not only screw up printing for WP, but for anything else on that computer. It basically shortcircuitted the entire Windows print subsystem, trying to get it to use WP's print program. Also, there are tons of other technical issues- IMO the programmers didnt understand how to program for Windows, and rewrote a whole bunch of stuff which was already there in the WinAPIs.
Also, for some reason WP makes it VERY difficult to get service packs. On MSO, you can just use Office Update, or download the whole thing for yourself. Likewise, researching a WP problem is extremely difficult, whereas MSO problems can be searched for via technet.
Its a shame that WP had a good product, but shot themselves in the foot because of bad programming.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
No, but you used to be able to download the OS9 version off their web site for free after they discontinued support - maybe you still can.
The OS9 version runs in emulation in OSX. I use it to read old files.
WordPerfect is available for Linux. See the WP FAQ on LinuxMafia.com or other on-line sources.
Take a look at the Dell home systems. They've been including it for quite awhile. I bet there are more WordPerfect users than you realize. Wordperfect is a great word processor. If they wouldn't have stumbled during the Win 3.0/3.1 days then the could still own the market. AMI Pro was really the best word processor during those days until ... hmmm... who bought it..Lotus???... IBM owns it now and it is called WordPro.. I Still think that Open office has everything that anyone needs...
Zoid.com
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Like the other guy said, you are wrong. Show paragraph marks and stuff does NOT count as reveal codes.
Reveal codes is like looking at the HTML source of the document.
Only, <font> tags, etc, are single characters that you couldn't type in yourself by typing < f o n t >, but you can copy/paste/delete and cursor around between tags.
Morphing Software
Actually, no. Folks in universities and *nix shops use LaTeX. Industry Windows shops tended to use WordPerfect, up until version 8, if they wanted to do equations (the pre-MathType equation editor in WP was very, very good, and as someone else has already pointed out, rather LaTeX like). Beginning with 9, WP has sunk into decrepitude, thanks to being bought out by a second-rate graphics outfit.
For those of you that don't know, the reveal codes feature was like viewing raw html. You could take away bold by dragging away the bold symbol, etc.
It rocked with page viewing (print preview in word syntax). Because you couild edit the code to make the format look right while you were viewing it at 100%.
My old elementary school used wordperfect and I have been hooked ever since. I started off with 5.1 and worked my way up with it. Unfortunatly I found that after Version 9.0 it became very unstable. I tried 10 and it would crash at random some times on windows XP. I recently just purchased version 11 hoping it will not crash anymore and I also thought it would be the last word perfect released. Guess I was wrong. Im glad they are still releasing as they make one of the best word processors on the market and not to mention the fact that many doctors and lawyers swear by it. Now if only my university would allow me to submit wpp documents instead of word documents!
There are still a few places to pick it up: try Cal State or Radix's FTP site.
Once you've updated it properly, it runs fine in classic mode, and is pretty zippy. I have to use it periodically because the university I work at monomaniacally standardized on wintel (despite having healthy fine arts, media, and comp sci depts., duh) and many use WP, so us mac users constantly receive official missives attached as a .wpd file. Fortunately, the old mac application opens even new files without choking.
Damn those pesky terrorists
You need a Gateway Anykey Keyboard, it has Diagonal Arrow Keys!
Word Perfect has been very popular in the legal field for quite some time. Mostly because you can still read documents from years ago with no problem.
If you're using styles correctly, you'll never need anything resembling "reveal codes" to fix your formatting problems. If you use the manual formatting functions, you're asking for trouble.
Well, first of all, people don't always use styles correctly, or use manual formatting, or both. To make matters worse, different versions of MS-Word, especially between Mac's and PC's, can fubar a document beyond belief.
Since I tend to get such documents, I sometimes salvage them by loading them into WordPerfect, and then use reveal codes to straighten things out. Believe me, in some cases this approach is the best.
Somewhere around here I've got an approximately 20 to 25 year old issue of Popular Electronics or Radio-Electronics with an article on how to hack an interface into one to use it as a computer printer, the computer in question being something along the lines of a Sinclair or a TI-99.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Umm, comparing Corel Draw to Photoshop is like comparing MS Word to Frontpage, you can do the same things in them, but their focus is completely different. Corel Draw is vector graphics program, similar to Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop is a bitmap graphics package. Corel's equivalent is Photo-Paint. The small graphics design company I work for OVERWHELMINGLY prefers Corel Draw to Adobe Illustrator. Too bad Adobe dominates the market. In many ways, Draw is a better program, more in line with standards and doesn't try to draw things for you like Illustrator sometimes will.
--Stupid Sig Here--
Reveal Codes, is only a useful feature if the product does not behave as expected. Reveal codes helped people force the program to do what it wanted to do, because occasionally the program didn't *do* what it wanted them to do. And in the real world, this problem has largely gone away. With a WYSIWYG display you simply do not have the issues that you had when you had to guess how your document would print.
But you still have issues with *why the fuck* Word is making the page/line/paragraph look like it does. It does me absolutely no good to see a borked format if I can't figure out why it is borked. Behaving as expected != correctly displaying WYSIWYG. Reveal Codes was an absolute god-send, and a feature I still miss from good old WP5.1. (As an example, inserting/editting text just after some formatted text, say a subscript, is a pain in the ass.)
And that describes Words dominance. It was, and arguably is, the most powerful word processor, with fully custimizable UI depending on the needs, skill, and tasks of the user. This generated, possibly, the longest most sustained growth in productivity in human history.
Um, I think maybe, just maybe, you are overstating the global/cultural benefit of one bloated piece of software.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
...was due to the fact that it was programmed in Assembly language. I'm not sure if the Windows versions were or not but that is why the DOS version was so honkin' fast.
Hmmm, geh...
To respond to your well-written and accurate comment:
1) The ONLY thing that ANY printer company needed to do to get a WordPerfect printer driver, is send WP a printer on 'permanant loan' for us to write the driver for, then to subsequently troubleshoot those drivers on that printer. If any manufacturer wanted us to pull support for that printer, all they had to do is request their printer back - which N-E-V-E-R happened. For that reason, WP had a HUGE printer lab that I spent hundreds of hours in.
2) WordPerfect wasn't that late to the word processing market for Windows... When Win 3.1 came out, WP 5.1 for DOS was the reigning word processor. WordPerfect, in order to get into the market sooner, released WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows -- a horribly buggy version of WP.
The reason it was so bad was they stripped the user interface from the DOS version and put a Windows interface on it. At WordPerfect, we called this the WISIWYWA - What You See Is What You Want (As opposed to ....What You Get) This was primarily due to WP5.1 Win still using the DOS print drivers. The Bug Fix for WP 5.1 Win was WordPerfect 5.2 -- still using the DOS print drivers.
A more accurate claim would be that WordPerfect was slow to market with a STABLE version of WPWin. WPWin 6.0 was a complete re-write of the code base to work within the 16bit Windows OS, of course by that time they were late to market.
3) One reason why WP was slow to market with WPWin 6.0 was a bitter debate taking place between the top brass at WP. Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastian (The Pres/VP) wanted to support Windows, whereas Pete Peterson wanted to support OS/2... heh heh. Anyone remember OS/2?
Alas, WordPerfect was, in fact, Almost Perfect
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
HP been shipping WordPerfect instead of Office for almost a year now (I have the ad that says that Inlcudes WordPerfect 2003 Standerd on Every Model(. Also, I have one of those key things from WP 5.1, for both 98, and 101-key models :). Now if they would release a mac version, I could forever de-MS my Mac.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
Print Screen was pretty useful when you could only run one program at a time and needed to keep some information for later reference.
Scroll lock came in handy when you had to switch between reading a document, when you wanted arrow keys to scroll and editing it, when they should move the cursor. Try it without mouse sometime.
On the other hand, Help is only marginally useful if a program comes with a full printed manual and a luminated reference card. Do you really have space to spare on a 360K floppy to hold a copy of the book.
For the long-term Unix veteran, or the ones (like myself), who just think more like Unix, a word-processor is really nothing more than a fancy graphical font-end to a combination text editor and typesetter. Most people who think that way would like more access to the actual typesetter markup codes than Word gives you (these are the same folks who still write HTML in Notepad/vi/Emacs, or at least tweak it with those while mostly using a WYSIWYG HTML editor). Some people still write word-processing documents (complete with markup) in text editors and run them through troff/TeX for this very reason.
So you see, Reveal Codes makes things easier for newbies and power-users alike. Unlike Word, which, in typical Microsoft fashion, is only really fun for intermediate users, and a pain for both extremes.
Now, if only they would make a decent Linux version.
Shameless plug: A standalone WordPerfect filter component is available now for OpenOffice.org. Try this URL: http://libwpd.sf.net. WordPerfect export was pretty much always experimental in AbiWord/KOffice (libwpd doesn't even try). You're much better saving your document to rich text.
We had the same problem (compat with WP docs) and solved it very well with StarOffice. Now we can use Linux as a very viable desktop, while still being able to access our old WP material.
You might be skeptical, but just try StarOffice: the way it handles WP documents is surprisingly good.
Sigged!
please tell me where the Word reveal codes command is
Tools -> options -> "view" tab -> reveal codes
That's the global setting, if you just want to reveal a particular code (or only for part of a document), select and use shift+F9
http://www.mvps.org/word is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn to use Word more effectively.
I know this is unlikely to get me anything other than slated on slashdot, but if you take the time to learn to use it, Word is actually very powerful.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
The trial version of WP is a great way to get some very nice fonts. Install it, then copy out the fonts to a safe directory and uninstall.
Charlotte Sans is a spectacularly clear font good for 1280x1024 resolution and up. I think I snagged it from the trial WP a few years back