The WordPerfect Insurgency

Any proposition that Randy Barnett, Glenn Reynolds, Res Ipsa Loquitur and I all agree on must be true. As the Knoxville Blogfather says, “I'll give up WordPerfect when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.”

Counselor Barnett expatiates on the evils of that other word processing program:

Word reformats paragraphs and everything else as it wishes and it is sometimes next to impossible to trick it into keeping it to the format you prefer. I assume that someone somewhere knows how to make all this work, but I have been word processing since I paid $4500 for an NBI standalone word processor in 1981, and word processing programs are simply not supposed to be that hard to figure out and control.

In contrast, WordPerfect is an amazingly elegant and transparent way to write.

That it is, particularly because it’s possible to look at the formatting codes and change them as easily as one rewrites texts. The latest version of Word, for the first time ever, lets you view the codes but makes it no simpler than before to alter them (that is, not simple at all, unless you think exactly like Bill Gates).

Mr. Barnett does concede that Word is superior at tracking changes, a useful feature when several writers work on the same document. I rarely use it and recall that it used to be a WordPerfect weakness, but it seems to work just fine in WordPerfect 12. In fact, it tops Word by allowing selective incorporation of a reviewer’s suggestions. In Word, they are part of the document and can only be undone by deleting them and typing the original words back in.

Being owned by a Canadian company, WordPerfect has, I suppose, no chance of overtaking a Microsoft product, no matter how great it qualitative superiority. Besides, every secretary administrative assistant in the universe has been trained on Word, and trying to switch them over would cause a huge temporary drop in paperwork throughput, perhaps leading to – hmm, maybe that’s another reason to raise high the WordPerfect banner.

Comments

[rita]

Like Counselor Barnett, I've used word processing software since the mid-80's. "Reveal Codes" has always been one of WordPerfect's best features. Word is ok for simple letter writing and such, but WordPerfect can't be beat for legal documents. Unlike Word, it lets you set up your own formatting and then leaves it alone.

Thanks for the link!