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I still use WordPerfect x14 for my personal stuff. Anything I do for others, especially if it is heavily formatted, has to be in Word, as WP’s save as DOCX does not always give expected results.

WordPerfect has MUCH better paragraph formatting, better kerning, and complete control down to the character level. Foreign and special characters are also easier to use. Better mail merge for envelopes. Much better for printing sheets of laser/inkjet labels. Cool way to set margins in raphic version.

Word is vastly superior on its embedded tables and spreadsheets. There is no area that Word is awful.

WordPerfect crashes more, especially in complex documents.

I don’t know if WordPerfect will ever be truly 64 bit.

The add-on products (mail, calendar) are awful. Quattro Pro is no Excel. Paradox is for those who like it, and it isn’t really being upgraded. The PDF generator usually works well enough, but no better than CutePDF, and without the features of my Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 (I will NOT go to subscription model).

To make it work like the old WordPerfect (DOS 5.1) you have to make some hard choices on keyboard mapping, and make sure you turn OFF select whole word on click. If I WANTED to select the whole word, I would have dragged the mouse or double clicked.

Reveal codes is 80% of what it was in the DOS era. Macros are easy but not as unlimited as in the DOS version (when you could actually hit the RETURN key to search for a return). These concessions had to be made to accomodate the Windows standard user interface.

It is still a better word processor for people like me, but it really can’t be your only one. Nota Bene is gone.

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!