WordPerfect, for a Better Word

While scanning through PC Magazine’s article on Firefox 12 (color me loyal blue) in high-speed overview mode, I noticed a link to their WordPerfect Office X6 Review & Rating. Well, of course I clicked it:

The number of people who use WordPerfect Office is an almost unnoticeably tiny fraction of the millions using Microsoft Office, but they tend to be intensely loyal.

I am one of those. I’ve used WordPerfect since those long-gone days when it commanded a two-thirds share of the word processor market. I still use WordPerfect, primarily WordPerfect 6 (both the DOS and Windows versions).

And why not? Why would I downgrade from WordPerfect to merely Word.

Please.

As PCMag observes:

…writers and editors who have used WordPerfect since the last millennium because, in many ways, it’s the best available instrument for writing and formatting text. Nothing matches its ability to put together multi-chapter documents from separately-editable files, and no other word-processor comes close to matching its ability to remove or redact confidential data.

See what I mean?!

I thought so.

Then there’s this, which I have yet to experience since I don’t have WordPerfect X6:

The new version adds a unique electronic-publishing module, with an optional wizard-style interface, for creating documents for the Kindle and other reader apps.

I’ve been wanting to get into epublishing, so this “unique electronic-publishing module” makes X6 sound very enticing.

And then there’s the matter of codes. Wow!

The major attraction of the suite is WordPerfect, the only modern word-processing app that makes gives me almost total control over the way my documents look. Microsoft Word, in contrast, sometimes seems to have a mind of its own—formatting documents in ways I never intended, or unpredictably retaining or discarding formatting in text imported from a Web browser. But WordPerfect almost always does exactly what I want. And it’s the only modern app that still formats and organizes documents by inserting normally-invisible “codes” in the text, so when you want to troubleshoot the formatting of your document, you can open a “Reveal Codes” pane at the foot of the editing window, find the code that’s causing the problem and either remove it or double-click it to change its settings.

I’m still amazed that Word hasn’t mimicked this feature. Maybe it’s because they want to continue being the four-letter word of word processing. Don’t get me wrong; I’m happy that they don’t. 😆

In an Office-centric world, it’s unlikely that WordPerfect will attract many new users…

I know. And more’s the pity. Oh well.

Now I must upgrade to Firefox 12… 😉

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