Microsoft Word vs WordPerfect

18 Jan 2017

[rey]

Years ago, I used WordPerfect for all my academic papers. I felt the program was more friendly toward that type of writing, easier to cite, create footnotes, end notes, bibliographies, etc. As Microsoft Word no longer comes as part of the operating system package, I have been considering my options.

My question is two-fold; is WordPerfect still a good product? Is it superior to Microsoft Word? What do professional writers prefer and why? (Yeah, that's three. I guess I'm a heavy tipper.)

Thanks.

[MayflowerMadam]

Better in WordPerfect:

Bullets
Numbering
Headers & Footers
Reveal Codes
Leading and kerning
In Word, the font often changes if deleting something at the end of a sentence. (WTF?) Doesn’t in WP.
Mail merge in Word is DREADFUL compared to WP.
ALL Justification (not FULL justification) in WP for DOS. (Not sure about WP Windows; it lost some functionality when it went to Windows.)
In WP you can block a section and save it as a new document; in Word you must open a new blank doc and paste in the section.

If there are two or more lines, single spaced, in WP you can change the justification of one line. In Word, ALL the lines change, even if you select just one.

WP tables was (is) could be used as a quite powerful spreadsheet with calculations, etc. (True in DOS; not sure about Windows.)

When I started word processing in the ‘70s, I was in love with it, and produced publications for a large organization. As time passed and things “improved”, the passion diminished because every improvement was detrimental to speed and efficiency. And when Gates hit us with Word bundled with computers, I was over it!

[pilipo]

I have been using WordPerfect since the late 1980s and refuse to ever give it up. It is preferable in every way to MS Word and a lot cheaper too. It also does good conversions to and from MS Word format, so you can share and edit documents with the rest of the world that uses Word.

Ditto. I especially like the reveal codes option.

[goldbux]

I recall the 1105 having a lot of useless but pretty front-panel lights. Four 8-bit words stitched into a 32-bit "accumulator"; four sets of accumulators; something like that. Each 32-bit display had two lights for each bit; one for on, one for off. Didn't trust the tiny light bulbs to display correctly since they also had a high burnout rate.

We also had an IBM 1620 with maybe 4K of magnetic core memory. Each single core had two wires running through it. Had to pulse both wires to trigger a change state in the core from zero to one & back.

The 6600 at LMSC (formerly LMSD – Let's Move Some Desks) had a big kachunka 80-column chain-&-gear-driven line printer. The printing batch job – before [genius!] Ralph Gorin at SAIL wrote a spooler (simultaneous peripheral online output layer) – ran all night, printing out Top Secret data.

The management spooks insisted that a heavy opaque shroud be thrown over the printer to prevent any non-cleared personnel from peeking at the sensitive info. Took ten months to acquire that level of security clearance, so the clearance-pending grunts they hired to work the AM shift regularly spent the morning digging compacted paper shreds out of the heavy printer gears. Your tax $ at work.

[goldbux]

You might enjoy strolling through the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Some of it’s a dumping ground for beloved but hopelessly antique machine artifacts. There’s a rogues gallery of portraits along a long wall. On my first visit, I was amused to recognize almost every one as a former Professor, employer, or colleague.

[Rockingham]

Too often, large companies seem to take a "test to destruction" approach to their business models by over-charging and otherwise abusing and neglecting their customers. In recent years, many businesses have pared costs by cutting service standards and avoiding new hiring and wage increases to keep good employees.

As hiring and competition pick up under Trump, these businesses will soon find themselves scrambling to keep their best employees, many of whom are poised to leave due to a long-simmering sense of alienation from their employers. Customers will also defect due to poor service experiences and better deals from the competition. I suspect that we will see a wave of business press stories about some large companies that find themselves in trouble for those reasons.

[Hodapp]

My wife and I have had six books published (Wiley and two smaller presses), and the publishers uniformly want Word documents. My wife learned on WP, adored it, and wrote several unpublished novels using it. But when she’d submit the files electronically, agents and publishers wanted Word versions.

We both fortunately have old versions from 2008, and nobody we’ve encountered demanded anything more updated. Thankfully, .docx files are uniform. Editors make use of the Comment feature a lot, which is a big reason they insist on Word. It’s how they mark manuscripts up for changes during author review.

So, love it or hate it, Word owns the world if you are submitting for publication (unless you are just going to self-publish with Lulu or CreateSpace, in which case, you have more leeway).

[editor-surveyor]

.
You could heat a small city with the exhaust draft from a univac.
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[daniel1212]

I’m doing LibreOffice on Linux (I think just a branch of OpenOffice). I write books and self publish, so it is quite a risk moving from Word. Libre is a little quirky, but so far so good though. The big question is whether the index will work and how to format the tabel of contents better with multiple tiers.

I have not done that latter but i used to OpenOffice (now Apache) for years for documents, and find it to be the best WYSIWYG (like Trump is) basic web page creator for our web site . Thank God.

I also use LibreOffice, but they made some "improvements" i do not like, removing visible borders for one.

[editor-surveyor]

.
IBM word processors were all over the country in ‘68 but they had no display screen of any kind. The printed page was all there was to look at, but a good typist could produce an editable form letter in no more time than it took to type it.

[editor-surveyor]

.
My Father-in-law has published several books and his publishers would only accept Apple, so he went to word perfect and exported to PDF which easily can be converted to Apple’s format.
.

[daniel1212]

Computers will make yer lives easier!

Or at least more productive. Yet i know of only one word processor (TextShield ) that enables AutoPaste, meaning pasting in a document everything you copy. A couple clipboard utilities can copy all, but i find this (no longer supported) replacement for MS word pad better for that task.

[daniel1212]

Now we know the cause of Climate Change.

[Stanwood_Dave]

“Back in 286/386 days.”

Yes sir, I remember the UPS guy delivering my first computer (386), and as he brought it into my office, I joked at him and said bring it back, It's already obsolete. (The 486's) were just being advertised. Yep two thousand dollars for that sucker. DOS 5 software and all.

Not wanting to throw gasoline into the fire, but am I the only moron that when interfacing with someone who uses word, I just save the document in a RTF. (Rich Text Format.) Works for me. Just saying.

I'm using my WordPerfect version7 from the early 90's{?,} if I recall. I'm now 2017, running windows 7, 64 bit, some minor problems (no address book) other wise good still to go. For what it's worth during a 10 year period of civil court arguments, my associate during this time used word, I got to use it also, not impressed.

[NYAmerican]

I agree, RTF works great for a universal Doc format. And PDF for non-editable Docs, what’s more universal than that?

[NYAmerican]

I’d love to visit the Museum one day. You should publish your memoirs, it sounds like you’ve experienced many things worth sharing.

[Abby4116]

I just saw this thread and will admit I did not read all of the replies, but I have always preferred Word Perfect to MS Word. And, yes, you can still buy Word Perfect and it has been upgraded for Windows 10.

Surprisingly, you can still install the old WP8 (about 1997) in Windows 10 and it works perfectly, unlike Office '97 which would not install from Vista on in Windows.

Reveal codes was the deal breaker for me when I used them side by side. Even in the new Word, I don't feel like "tricking" Word to format the way I want it to format.

[zeugma]

My favorite feature of WordPerfect was the “reveal codes” feature that allowed you to visibly see all the formatting information of a document. It was incredibly useful for cleaning up a document after a lot of edits had been made in it. I use LibreOffice these days, and wish it had that feature.

[goldbux]

I would first have to purchase the newest release of WordPerfect.

[zeugma]

Word still hasn’t gotten a multi-level list function that works! WP was great back in the day, but they lost the market. Superior products don’t guarantee a market success—especially when you don’t know the market.

People forget the history of what was actually going on when the 'word-processor' wars were going on. I distinctly recall the "competitive upgrades" offered by Microsoft to get organizations to switch from WordPerfect. They were practically giving it away, using the DOS/Windows cash cows to underwrite the losses. WordPerfect didn't have a chance as long as their main competitor didn't have to worry about actually making money on their software.

This was a tactic executed quite successfully by Microsoft on many fronts.

[CyberAnt]

I loved WordPerfect .. and it had a feature that WORD CANNOT DO.

In WordPerfect, you could type two words, and split one to the left margin and one to the right margin.

I have never figured out how to do this in WORD. I use WORD only because it is the most commonly used.

However, I will be needing a more flexible software soon.

I’m not against paying for software; I find that the ones you pay for are usually a much better product, and they also perform better. Plus, they usually keep you updated more regularly.

My example is anti-virus software. I know a lot of people who use a FREE type of that software, and then end up with all sorts of junk on their computers. I’d rather pay for my anti-virus .. which REALLY WORKS.