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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?"
I didn't know WordPerfect ever went anywhere. I know a lot of Windows users who swear by it. Apparently it has a better equation editor then MS Office.
once you go slack, you never go back
I always wondered why all those people want to have the latest versions of WordPerfect or Word. I mean, most of them don't even know how to use styles, page numbers, different fonts or other features anyways. In that way, nothing has changed in the past 15 years. WYSIWYG isn't anything either, since what I see as the average markup in a standard letter sent by Joe Average User is just as ugly on screen as it is on hardcopy.
This is a replacement signature.
I used to do Technical Support for WordPerfect way-back-when. It was always a better product than Word on its own. As someone else stated, people do swear by the product (law offices are a HUGE market for them, as is the US DoJ).
The price that Corel is offering it for does not suggest that they want it to be a significantly less expensive alternative to Office, and that's too bad. The only way they can reasonably expect to gain market share is by a combination of name and price.
That said, I'm not sure who they're marketing this too. The article doesn't suggest it's anything more useful than OpenOffice (improved compatibility with Microsoft Office? they've been touting that since WP8!), and OpenOffice still has a hard to beat price.
I can't imagine there's anything here to win back market share. Sorry Corel.
-m.
I remember WordPerfect fondly, ever since the first release, later down the road to Windows versions. Then sadly, work dictated that I must use Word, never cared for it very much it's improved greatly.
Now I've switched to OSX as my primary focus, and Novell/Corel have left us out to die (I'm sure many of you are happy about that). But I'd like some more established alternatives, it'd be great to see WordPerfect come back to the Mac.
OpenOffice is slated for a native version for OSX, but that's years down the road. The X11 version is pretty nice, I like it, but for my spoiled habits, it's not cutting it just yet. But I have high hopes for it none-the-less.
ThinkFree is interesting, but it's responsiveness is frustrating on older equipment.
Appleworks, nuff said...
We want more from Corel than just KPT and Painter. Office X 2004 looks nice, but the price and ethics aren't. Bring us WordPerfect.
I believe that the best way for Wordperfect to join the fray is to open source the bugger. Then lets see Microsoft run screaming when WP is running on every platform known to mankind, including Windows.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I can still remember WP for Linux. It wasn't too bad actually. It ran a little debian if you didn't have decent hardware, but for a while was the best choice for word processing. I never had it crash on me. At the time I had it working on FreeBSD with Linux emulation, and I'm pretty sure I installed it from the ports collection.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I think the only reason Novell bought WordPerfect was to get at GroupWise.
Once they had GroupWise, they sold off the rest of the s/w they got in the deal.
Then they intergrated GroupWise into the Novell Netware Directory Services.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
for one damn reason, Save a file as a Wordperfect 11 file, open it in wordperfect 8, and "Holy Crap", it works.. Formatted correctly, no nasty errors, it doesn't force you to upgrade all your computers office-wide to be compatible...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Since 5.1 days, WordPerfect was always my choice for writing documents. While MS-Word stayed inside my harddrive for rare occasions of opening incompatible documents that WP couldn't open, I used WP extensively. Since I began using Linux, however, things changed quite a bit. Though I used WP8 for Linux in the beginning, I later moved to OpenOffice, which possesses greater interoperability. Now my day to day tool for writing has been replaced completely with OpenOffice.
I was extremely disappointed when Corel stopped developing WP for Linux. I still wonder if Corel will ever release open source version of WP and regain some market share in wordprocessing. Even if they do, however, it is probably too late to regain their position in the business. MS locked in customers with their products and expanded their business. On the other hand, WordPerfect's proprietary format choked its own neck. sigh...
Basically my proof of this statement is "Because my dad (a lawyer) said so," so take this with a boulder-sized grain of salt if necessary. All of his legal forms for dealing with the district courts and the Fifth Circuit are in WP format, dating back to maybe 1996 (or whenever Corel made WP 6). They now are distributed in PDF, though.
Anyway, at least he swears by WP. He's in the other room, using it right now, in fact.
My experience was that reveal codes was essential because their cleanup of embedded codes was incompetent. Example: Select a word, bold the word, unbold the word, then look at the embedded codes. Too often I found that instead of removing the embedded codes, they embedded a second set that negated the first. Eventually the file might be filled with such garbage, with the result that later changes misbehaved. Using reveal codes was the only path I knew for cleaning up WP's screwups.
But in fairness, I was never committed to WP, and never wanted to be, so I only used it under duress. Gurus may have solutions to these problems (but I content that the problems should never have existed.)
The product name was supreme folly.
--- Bill
Shouldn't be too hard, WP 8 didn't involve any sort of a GUI, it was a DOS based program.
I used to install it for people in the 80's but hated it because I just didn't know how to use it. I could install it but couldn't use it.
Well, I finally learned how to use it and found it to be an extremely powerful and useful word processor and to this day I still miss some of the features it had. I found it extremely useful to be able to delete columns of text rather than only being able to delete horizontally in serial fashion. And the macro features were exceptionally nice too. Man, after a few months of intensive screwing around, I had gotten quite good with WP..
I wish they would port it to Linux. I quit using WP in the early 90's but I would use it again if they could bring back the version 7 or version 8 program to run on Linux..
It's so interesting. I now work in the same complex that the original WordPerfect corporation build back in it's glory days. The place is huge! It's hard to believe that all these buildings were full of people coding WordPerfect 6 for Windows 3.1.
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
And that's still out there too.
The one thing that is silly is that we have this notion that we all have to be on the same word processor, when, we really don't.
This is my sig.
Which raises the question: If they saw fit to make dedicated keys for relatively obscure operations like "Print Screen" and "Scroll Lock", why didn't they think to assign one for "Help"?
Mac user's use Microsoft Office.
One of the main reasons often given by technical people who switch to Macs (such as scientists) is that it is a Unix that can run Office.
They did not come out with a windows version fast enough and the market left them behind.
Contrary to many of the comments made here, which shows misunderstandings of the word processing and os markets back in the good old days of floppies and text displays...
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.
The reasons that WP were dominant were two-fold. First they had the largest library of printer drivers. You could print on practically any type of printer technology.
Secondly, they could be trusted in how the text would break and that line-numbers could be trusted no matter what device you printed to. This was a vital feature that insured that the largest group of paper generators at the time (lawyers) set the marketplace, and set the market. WordPerfect could not be touched... They were as dominant then as Microsoft is now. But they failed to change when it needed to be changed.
The first feature became moot, as the Operating System provided an imaging model (GDI) and a device driver model to output that model. Wordperfect in their dominance, having them create a driver for your device was critical to your devices success. Windows freed the Printer Manufacturers from the "tyranny" of the of the word-perfect monopoly. Thier products would work as expected with ALL programs that were designed for windows, rather than making drivers for ALL programs, they could focus on a single driver.
Technology would obsolesce almost all character printers for ones based on a bitmapped display (Laser and Inkjet).
True WYSIWYG display of the page, and that the display imaging model and the printing imaging model were the same, then the display could be trusted. And all the problems that required reveal codes went away.
Creating documents that looked like they printed. Were huge driving factors to the rapid adoption by lawyers, and by a huge new group of people that actually wanted to create documents, but couldn't before, office workers.
Word Perfect missed the boat. They were the presumptive champions but they just could not get to market, and by then Microsoft won.
As to the UI... There were several types of users and writers out there. The most computer savvy of them all, were the ones that had been using word processors for years. The *HUGE* market to come, well nearly everybody, didn't know how to futz with computers.
I can make Word a blank piece of paper. With no menus, just me and the page, and I can invite, or disinvite any piece of underlying technology that gets in my way.
I as a company can assume that the type of person who could do this, would be the type of person that would figure out HOW to do it.
The Unwashed masses needed as much help as possible. And it worked, millions, billions(?) of users started making documents they had always wanted to make, even without a bunch of specialized knowledge.
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.
Word Perfect was just too late to the new way of doing things... And the name and history was not enough to comeback against word.
The truth is for the business world that pays their labor, even with a value proposition of *free* for openoffice, there are going to be too many issues and problems added by not being word, that OO is still not ready for primetime. If it happens (It may never happen), it will just take over the market almost imm
Reveal codes are only useful for people who don't know how to use Word.
Going back 5 major versions (and probably farther), Word has had support for styles. Styles allow you to take a block of text and apply either a character style (for a group of characters within a paragraph) or a paragraph style (for an entire block of characters terminated with a paragraph character). This is a very, very powerful feature.
The problem is that nobody knows how to use it, and they use the auto-formatting features. You can spot these people a mile away--they bitch about grammar check, numbering errors, re-typing large blocks of text, etc.
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.
On the other hand, I personally eschew both WP and MS Word for Adobe FrameMaker. Now there's a true power user's word processor! :)
Nathan
I understand WP zealots. Besides my own very positive experience with WP, I am addicted TeX user now. The addiction is not that I don't won't learn MS Word - as a matter of fact I know MS Word very well. Too well to criticisize where it's weak, and well enough to to try to fix its weaknesses by stealing usage concepts from Tex world.
For example, I edit fonts of individual words or paragraphs as an exception. Ususally I edit fonts in styles. The problem is that MS Word is badly designed to use styles.
Well, MS Word is badly designed for any intellectual usage. If you create a document, type 50 pages, then redefine most of styles, then type 50 more pages - soo you'll hate MS Word and Microsoft. the document will grow huge (10 MB even without bitmap pictures), MS Word will exit with fatal errors, and there are chances that your document can be corrupted any moment.
Such problem can never appear with TeX. First, the format is open and transparent - it's easy to fix problems in any text editor. Second, there is a processor that can give you enough diagnostic/debugging info. Third, you can use wysiwyg modes/editors and see/edit the code in paralel in two windows/panes, like in WP. But the main advantage is that you define your styles separately from the document and thus you separate different aspects.
Of course using a full power of TeX is not for novices. But with editors like TeXmacs, TeX can be used by novices - it's not more difficut than WP in reveal-code-mode.
Less is more !