How Do I Love Thee?

A Paean to My Favorite Word Processing Application- Part 1

By Bayle Emlein

Sounds weird? A love poem to software? No weirder than the antics of the aficianados of the iDevices. And a whole lot more rational. Let me count the ways: Reveal Codes, Make It Fit; Typesetting; Block Protect, familiar interface resulting in about 0 (as in flat, Zero) learning curve; OK, maybe 2%. And that’s just the word processing application in the suite. There’s the spreadsheet (Quatro Pro, think Excel), Presentations (guess what offering from the 500 pound gorilla it matches), Lightening (to capture images, ideas, content), and WinZip (updated version of the venerable compression and decompression utility, purchased by Corel in 2006).

The Corel flagship product is their graphics suite. For some reason, several years ago, Corel, Inc. purchased the WordPerfect Office Suite despite their focus as a graphic company. Amazingly, it worked and they have managed to keep improving the office suite while keeping the Corel Draw Graphics Suite at the forefront of that market. This document was begun in WordPerfect 9. It was completed in X6. I have indulged in several upgrades in between, just not on this machine, which is a P4 running XP Pro SP3 with a 2.91 Ghz AMD Althlon 64 GB dual core processor 5600

Reason #1: The first thing I found to love was installation: Click download, go put the laundry in the dryer, enter the serial number and keep on keeping on, seamlessly. Version 9 documents open without a problem. Version 9 will open X6 documents without any complaint or interrogation regarding whether I really want to do this. No emulators to install. Version X6 is compatible with all the versions of Microsoft Word and OpenOffice/LibreOffice that I’ve tried. I would have tried WordStar, but my 5.25" drive isn’t running. Looking at the SaveAs options, there don’t seem to be many word processing formats that WordPerfect is uncomfortable with.

Reason #2: No learning curve. Though there are more options and much more functionality (details to follow) than there were when I met WordPerfect, version 4.2 for DOS. Despite two (2, count them) changes of ownership, nothing I learned in the 1990 paper manual was wasted effort. (This is in contrast to Certain Other Applications, who rearrange the furniture and rename functions faster than the Fed can change interest rates. I’ve notice that I’m much less proficient in successive versions of Word, since I have to tease out the correct name and hunt down the new location of each operation I want. Processes that I don’t use very often have just dropped off the play list as I focus on hunting down the feature I need right now, or 10 minutes ago.) No Hide-N-Seek with WordPerfect. The folks in Ottawa can tell the difference between a communication tool that should be invisible behind the message being conveyed and a first-person shooter.

Reasons 3 through 10 are still to come!