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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?"
They wanna know where they can buy those funky plastic sheets you put over the keyboard to remind you what Ctrl_Shift_Alt_F5 means in WordPerfect.
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
How can recognize a drowning WP user?
He's yelling F3! F3!
New Commodore 64 comes out, with 4.8 Ghz proccesser.
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Is it me or do some of these applications seem like cheap, drunk floozies being passed around for different people to dance with at a party?
How many different owners did Painter go through? And Wordperfect? And Poser? And Bryce?
Someone needs to marry these apps and make them settle down.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
You'd of thought they would have perfected it by now.
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
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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.
Wordperfect $35
Extra modules $15
No #@$%#$*& paperclip.... Priceless
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From the news.com article:
...
"We're not in the double digits yet for upselling people to the full suite, but we are making progress," he said.
I think they've got some work to do
Oh no... it's the future.
It doesn't seem like there is a huge market available for Windows options.. Even if they come up with some great leap in technology, how long will it take MS to "embrace and extend" it?
They need to go somewhere MS really doesn't want to.. like Linux. Make a cross-platform suite that works in Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Force MS to legitimize Linux on the desktop, or give the market to you.
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.
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.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
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'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"
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?
Much will be said about the continued use of WordPerfect in law offices where it has been a traditional choice. We still use WP 5.1 for DOS to create our bills but this is dictated by our ancient accounting system which will be gone by year-end. (Thank $DEITY)
However, any law firm sysadmin worth his salt recognized long ago that the current legal document creation paradigm involves cooperative collaboration with clients absolutely none of whom will be using any version of WordPerfect. In addition, the pool of new legal secretaries will all be coming with Word as their background. The look of shock on our new recruit's faces after they've gone through the WP billing section of their training is a sad sight but one that reflects the reality that, for even Wordperfect's most loyal users, the time has come to use what the market requires. Legal documents are no longer created in isolation.
OpenOffice is nice to dream about but the forces that dicate a move to Word for a firm of any size are what is currently keeping OO out.
The most successful law firms in the future will be able to define a new, non-document-based legal information exchange paradigm. We need to get past the days of everything being done in the word processor.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
There is a cost to switching from wp to openoffice. We've (the company I work for) been a wp user since the early 80's. We have in excess of a million word perfect documents many of which we would need continued access into the forseeable future. We simply can't leave them behind in order to switch ship. While there are ways to do that conversion the cost in mantime alone is fairly prohibitive.
We've been following open office fairly closely and they've come a long way in terms of their wp connector. It's not quite there yet but it's close.
Once we consider it to be a usable state for us then we can look at using OO on a go forward basis for new systems.
It's my understanding that the sun version of wp will do conversions but as wp has been a good product for us there's no incentive for us to try to skimp a few dollars based on the price difference between wp and OO. For us the major incentive with OO will be we can consider switching from windows to linux.
Reveal codes
MS Word is better than it used to be, but I'll tell you, when it's doing something wonky, I really miss being able to reveal the formatting codes so I could see why the entire previous paragraph was stuck as heading 3.
Formatting is really just markup (like HTML) - why can't Word show us where it starts and ends when we want to see what's wrong?
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?
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.
Since that post probably took 5 minutes to write, it has a value of $29.17. It was very generous to donate it to this discussion. Thanks.
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.
TeX is awesome for laying out mathematical formulas (especially when compared to Word's bletcherous equation editor), and is quite nice for most common tasks. I couldn't agree with you more that managing a 100 page document can get crazy in Word, and is easy in LaTeX. But there's a catch.
For setting up tables, TeX sucks rocks. You have LaTeX tabular, which is only good for really simple things. You have halign, which is quite nice, but not quite powerful enough. You have longtable. But none of them are anywhere as flexible as Word's table tool. Recently, I was converting a paper from Word into TeX. For several tables, to express them adequately in TeX, I had to manually lay out all the hboxes and vboxes. Not fun. In fact, I was annoyed enough that I started writing my own macros for setting up tables. Then I realized that the TeX macro syntax is a hell-spawned evil twin of assembly crossed with Intercal, besides the fact that it's not actually documented.
Anyway, as sleek as TeX looks, be aware that under the surface it's a very hairy twenty-year-old piece of software.