This is a response to the first part of the word processor review recently featured on donationcoder.com. I have WordPerfect Office X3, OpenOffice.org 2.1, and MS Office 2003 all installed on my computer, and the article stirred up some of the opinions that have gradually come to settle in the depths of my mind. So here are my thoughts. Background I used to be the biggest WordPerfect fanatic out there. I started using it at version 6.0 (for Windows), and became addicted with version 6.1 (possibly the finest version ever put out, in my opinion; it was also the first and last version to be put out by Novell – under the “PerfectOffice” moniker – before they sold the business to Corel). Back then, I had the daily contrast of using MS Word 6.0 every day in high school to tell me: WordPerfect kicked the crap out of it. Long documents never lost their formatting, there were never any unexpected page overflows that kept switching all the time, graphics were easily positionable and formattable – basically WP provided desktop-publishing-strength page layout abilities which I used to create all manner of documents – whereas Word wasn’t able to position graphics reliably until around 2000 or so, and still can’t be relied on for anything resembling stable pagination. The placement of commands in WordPerfect also made an incredible amount more sense than in Word – you want to change line spacing, go to Format => Line Spacing (Format => Paragraph in Word); you want to change margins, go to Format => Margins (File => Page Setup in Word); you want to add page numbers, go to Format => Page Numbering, where you can also easily elect to make a custom numbering format or to start numbering at the second page, starting with the number 4, and counting up by 2 on each page thereafter (don’t even ask about doing these things in Word – it would take another entire article just to explain it). And if in WordPerfect you ever see unusual formatting like hanging indents or other inexplicable stuff anywhere in your document, have no fear, just click View => Reveal Codes and you can delete every single formatting mark within the document, one at a time, in a very precise manner. As the next editions of Word came out, they broke compatibility with previous versions without fixing any problems, and introduced incredibly annoying features such as auto-indentation and bulleting that never worked the way you wanted it and was impossible to get rid of (and of course let’s not forget about Clippy). If you ask me, all versions of Word up until 2000 were damn near unusable, and I pity the myriad cubical-dwellers who were forced to wrangle its squirming tentacles into doing what they wanted. Microsoft also “forgot” to add a WordPerfect 6 import filter (a format that has stayed essentially the same from 1994 to this day) until the 2003 (!) version of their office suite, and even to this day they just can’t be bothered to provide an export filter. WordPerfect, on the other hand, has always provided the most recent possible Word import and export filters. Despite Microsoft’s underhanded attempts at cutting WordPerfect out of the market, WordPerfect just kept chugging along, content to be superior and develop a loyal user base, with later versions still opening the most complexly layed-out projects I made back in 6.1 with aplomb. The end of the glory days I happily used WordPerfect for years, but then eventually I switched to MS Office 2000, and then for a time I adopted OpenOffice full-time. Why, you may ask, did I ever leave the warm haven that was WordPerfect? Well, since those 1990s glory days of obvious feature-for-feature triumph, a few things have happened: 1. Word became the de facto standard, largely due to bundling deals, and partially due to biased PC Magazine editors giving it Editors Choice year after year. WP lived on only in law and government offices, but by this point today it’s pretty much dead in those segments too. 2. In response to 1, Corel made WP look and behave more and more like Word, which ultimately diluted its ease of use and consistency. 3. The apps other than WordPerfect that are included in WordPerfect Office lost the features race with their MS equivalents a long time ago. PowerPoint may not be great shakes compared to Keynote, but it still manages to outmaneuver Presentations by a long shot. Quattro Pro is pretty comfortable and easy to use, but if you need advanced charting features, Excel is the way to go. And don’t even ask about Paradox. Let’s just say that using it gives you a real feel for the “good old days” of relational databases, a la Access 2.0… Or more accurately, a la Paradox for DOS turned into a Windows program. I guess these things don’t matter if you’re one of those home users that got WordPerfect Office preinstalled on your Dell or HP (a minor triumph for Corel), but for those business users to which PC Magazine preaches, it does. 4. Word actually has gotten a lot better (which admittedly doesn’t say a whole lot), while WordPerfect just hasn’t really, beyond a somewhat nicer-looking interface with optional Word-mimicking mode and better .doc file conversion. Don’t get me wrong, if you compare WordPerfect X3 and Word 2003, it’s a pretty even match. But with the 2007 version of Office, in my opinion, MS really has a powerful contender on their hands, while I get the feeling that WP’s codebase is just so ancient that Corel would have trouble revamping it even if they wanted to. And if you ask me, WordPerfect could use a revamp – as it stands, it has got a lot of quirks, non-standard interface elements, little inexplicable bugs and obscure ways of configuring things, all of which sadly enough bring back memories of the kinds of frustrations I had using Word 6.0. Still, at this point in time, I’m back to using WordPerfect because I still like using it better than Word (since I can accomplish things like page numbering far more easily than in Word). I’m also not using OpenOffice much, since its spell-checker isn’t as good, plus it’s exactly as difficult to use as Word (2003) and has as many problems with auto-formatting as Word ever did. But of course, the main reason I wanted WordPerfect on my computer in the first place is that I have such a large back catalog of WP-formatted files, which absolutely no other program, OpenOffice included, can open 100% reliably. The format dilemma I realize, though, that I am probably on a sinking ship regarding the WordPerfect file format. The aforementioned review’s talk about “formats now being more important than word processors” got me thinking about how I was in effect locked into the WordPerfect format. I want to reach the Zen state of application independence described in the article – I want to be able to read and edit my documents in whatever word processor I want! So I’ve decided to convert all of my WordPerfect files and preserve them in a more widely readable format. And believe it or not, that format isn’t ODF – it’s MS Word 97-2003. Now before you go rush into the comments section to call me a sell-out, may I urge you to read a bit further. Let me just say that I am a practicalist. The MS Word 97-2003 format is the one format that pretty much all word-processing apps can reliably read and write to, and in many cases they can even be set up to save in this format by default. It’s a de facto standard. It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly been a rough road getting to the level of compatibility we’re at right now, but we’re there, and it’s supported – by every single (mainstream OS-targeted) word processing program in development today. When the day comes that I finally decide to move onto another word processor, be it OpenOffice, AbiWord, or Word 2007 (much as I hate to admit it, the UI junkie part of me is yearning to try it), I will never have to worry about compatibility… It will just be there. And that, to me, is more important than upholding a personal file-format ideology which, until ODF truly becomes fully supported everywhere, would just serve to make my life more complicated. So, just as I rip all my music to MP3 (despite the supposed advantages of AAC and WMA and the real advantages of OGG) because I want to avoid application/device lock-in, I’ll convert my documents to .doc format and avoid word-processor lock-in. So that’s that. Until at least next year, when ODF really gets integrated everywhere, consider DOC the new MP3. You heard it here first. Now there’s one more point I want to bring up before I finish. User interfaces still need help The user interfaces of office programs have really suffered because of the factors leading up to this point in time: They came from disparate roots whose Windows versions sprung up near simultaneously (WP, Ami Pro, Word, and StarOffice), and thereafter the one with the worst interface actually won out in the market. The result is that there is a lack of sensible interface conventions in office programs. What I mean by this is that to this day we do not have any kind of consensus on where the user should look for line formatting, for page formatting, for headers, for borders, etc. This problem is relatively severe when compared to the established conventions that have developed in OS/DE-level GUIs, where despite the many differences between MacOS, Windows, Gnome and KDE, there are enough shared interface conventions across all of them that most users who have experience with one environment will quickly be able to figure out how to perform similar actions on another environment. For instance, actions such as changing the wallpaper, the look and feel, the mouse settings or the resolution almost always involve a “Control Panel” of sorts. The users know to go there, since it’s logical – if it’s a setting, it’s in there. By contrast, where is the logic in setting margins by going into the File menu? Where is the logic in setting page numbers throughout the document by editing the header of a single page, and why must I create a custom page style simply to avoid putting a page number on the first page? There is absolutely no reason that I, who consider myself a fairly advanced computer user, should have to search through the online help just to figure out how to set page numbers. There is no reason page numbers should be non-trivial or take up more than five minutes of my time, period. And yet, in MS Office 2003 and OpenOffice 2.1, this is the case. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. This lack of sensible, standardized interface conventions is the result of MS winning the office wars. If WordPerfect had won, perhaps we would all be using the kind of intuitive interfaces found in WP6.1. Yet sadly, MS’s stranglehold on the market has negatively influenced other programs’ UIs to be less coherent and more idiosyncratic (because they have either created their own from-scratch UIs or embraced the chaos that is Office’s). And of course these competitors’ resultant poor UIs have only served to help Office reinforce its own entrenchment, and so the cycle has continued. But the fact that MS has released as huge of a change as Office 2007 is a momentous occasion which calls for much celebration, because (if you look at it from an angle other than “MS just wants to hijack ODF, oh I hate them so much”) it has the potential to reinvigorate the stagnant, status quo office software scene. The result could be that the WordPerfect and OpenOffice developers finally reconsider their strategy of imitating Microsoft, and start reorganizing and improving their interfaces so they actually make more sense and are easier to use! The potential is there for a new renaissance in the refinement of office software UI. KOffice already took the first brave steps, but now Microsoft has officially thrown down the gauntlet! Who will step up to the challenge? About the author:
Michael Klein is a 24-year-old student of computers, music, and life.
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“The bottleneck is Microsoft. FOSS software is happy to interoperate with any other software. Why won’t Microsoft? That is the $64,000 question in 2007.”
Understatement of the year.
Nice piece. Agree with cyclops too.
I would change the title to a “Personal Lament of the State of ‘Office’ Computing”
Like many people, it is a sorrowful look at what could have been with Wordperfect. I, too was a WP user (5.1 for Dos). It was such a powerful tool.
Unfortunately, we should all know by now it isn’t the quality of the product that leads to survival. This has been played out so many times (the early PC wars won by IBM) in the past. Microsoft’s main skill has been marketing, where they have PWNED (sorry!) everyone.
Unfortunately, this battle is not at the user level, but at the OEM level and at the big business level. Microsoft doesn’t sell software (primarily) to users, but to companies and OEMs. These decisions are made for us, just like the Wide/Narrow tie, hemlines, etc. Only a true revolution could change that, and perhaps this coulb be the true contribution of FOSS in America if it succeeds – computers OF, BY, and FOR the people.
[shoots off fireworks and waves flags]
#1 You know, it is never Microsft that is incompatible, it is the rest of the world, that is incompatible.
I remember when Microsoft took the Keberos protocol and slightly changed it (AFAIR they started utilizing a reserved comment field). The press soon called Kerberos incompatible with the new Microsoft invention.
Wordperfect was bundled on major OEMs for a really long time up until recently. I still have Wordperfect CDs from many Dells. In contrast, MS Office was never bundled freely. Unlike Wordperfect, it was always an extra cost.
What made Office take off was a mix of volume site licensing offered by the MS vendors and Wordperfect for Windows had a clunky interface that didn’t conform to the Windows UI style. Only previous Wordperfect for DOS users understood it. It lost flat out like Lotus. Office 97 was a clear winner.
To top it off, at that time, Wordperfect even made weird decisions like dropping Mac version. Which didn’t even make any sense at all. Which probably helped ClarisWorks in the end. They even shipped an half-baked version for OS/2. IIRC it was based on 5.1.
Office 97 was a clear winner because Microsoft literally gave it away to everybody and their brother. I got three free copies when I worked at a computer store just for telling the rep that I knew a couple of people who would like to have it. I knew of at least a few business that basically got it for free just because they used WordPerfect at the time. I say basically free because they had to pay like $5 or $10 for each copy, but at one of them almost all the employees got a free copy.
By the way I do agree with what you said.
Edited 2007-02-13 19:16
Yes story is nice but now u r hooked up for MS Office forever… since your all docs are in MSdoc format… they may give Office 97 for free but all the next copies you have purchased…
so in the end who is the winner? you or MS?
But what happened to you are stuck on Wordperfect forever since all your documents are in WP format?
You are not. There are several ways to convert WP-files to other formats.
OpenOffice converts WP-formats really well, though not 100% correct. But that goes for pretty much any documentformat-conversion – with exception of those based on open standards.
MS-word is just as bad a choice as is WordPerfect if you want to keep your documents around for decades. No application (incl. MS Word) has perfect conversion of MS-doc formats (incl. the 97 format and the later formats – which btw. are quite different from the 97-format).
The first version of PerfectOffice for Windows was not 6.1, but version 6.0 (which came later in two revisions 6.0a and 6.0b).
The last version (known to me) of WordPerfect+Quattro Pro named PerfectOffice was version 8.
And he also messes up the fileformats – despite the fact he has several good points.
But apart from those misses he’s quite right. WP2000 was a major letdown, and v.12 is in my mind much to bloated compared with v.8 – codewise that is – not functionality.
OpenOffice still has a long ways to go, in my opinion, before it can match WordPerfect’s document formatting abilities. Due to the fact that I have some specially formatted documents I dare not try to convert them into OpenOffice as past experience with version 2 shows me that they don’t convert all that well.
Open them in OpenOffice and watch all your hard work go to waste.
(I do use OpenOffice, but it’s just not capable of formating a document like WordPefect.)
I would say me since I use WordPerfect.
_Serious comment below._
That was the point. Microsoft didn’t really have to create the best product in the market they simply had to get the majority to use it. Back in the day I had absolutely no use for any office suite, but I wrote all my documents in Microsoft Office 97. I did it because I had it and at the time nobody really knew any better.
Yes, I admit it, I was part of the problem. Truth be told up until maybe five or so years ago I thought Microsoft could do no wrong. I believed hand over foot that they would lead us to the promise land. Then I got a chance to use Netware and I finally realized how easy things should be. Since then I’ve been pissing and moaning about Microsoft.
However, that doesn’t mean Microsoft doesn’t do anything good. From what I’ve seen and read about Office 2007 the interface, at least, is pretty darn awesome. I’ll still use WordPerfect though. I can’t live without reveal codes.
Wordperfect was bundled long after the war was over. I remember motherboards often came with a copy. Microsoft was already the standard by then.
As mentioned elsewhere, Office used to be an inexpensive add-on to new computers (back when there still was a war). I remember paying an extra $79 to have Office ’97 Pro added to my new Gateway laptop. Now that it owns the market, it costs an arm and a leg to add Pro to your purchase.
And I don’t plan on changing anytime soon.
WordPerfect has had it’s ups and downs and at the moment I think they are having an up. Corel doesn’t handle WordPerfect right. They, like many, have given up on it.
A lot WordPerfect does need to be rewritten to support modern features like Unicode. It’s not going to happen though. I personally don’t care that much as it works great for all that I do and it’s still a site better than OpenOffice in most areas.
Personally I would love to see Corel put some effort into making WordPerfect the best damn word processors money can buy, but I would love to see them do that to Quatro and Presentation. If it were up to me I would take all the knowledge gained from working on WordPerfect and start over from scratch recreating the second coming of WordPerfect Office Suite. I would fully support Unicode and ODF. I’d work toward making Quatro better than or at least as good as Excel. I would look to Keynotes as the goal for Presentation. And lastly I would either kill Paradox or turn it into a front end for other database engines like MS SQL Server, Postgre, MySQL, etc.
The other thing I would do is dump WordPerfect mail. It sucks. I would look at creating, licensing, or using a real challenger to Outlook.
I would also make it as platform agnostic as humanly possible. I might even go so far as to open source the whole damn thing. As a matter of fact I probably would.
Then again I’d probably just run the company into the poor house and end up turning WordPerfect into some bastardized child that was buggy and didn’t work at all. At least I could say I tried which would be a lot more than Corel can say.
“””
At least I could say I tried which would be a lot more than Corel can say.
“””
You can’t really blame Corel. They have a responsibility to their stockholders, and to the Citizens of The Planet Earth.
And they know that they will be allowed to survive, even flourish, after a fashion, as long as they do not compete too successfully with Redmond.
If it’s money one is after, there is a fair amount of space available that lies between making good, and threatening Microsoft.
<cue audio=”America The Beautiful.mid”>
Microsoft is a Great Company. And it has made so many wonderful things possible.
It is the pinnacle of the American dream. And many a grandmother has pictures of her grandchildren that she would never have had if Microsoft had not invented The Internet.
Microsoft has revolutionized this world. Poor people have fud^Wfood that they would not have had otherwise.
They have fostered a better understanding between the generations, and between the peoples of the various countries of the world.
Can Complete World Peace be far away?
The possibilities are infinite.
But those possibilities will be unrealized if this Great Company is required to waste its resources competing with lesser companies, and is not allowed to focus upon the Innovation which is its forte.
Corel is simply doing their duty. To themselves. To their shareholders. And to *all* of us.
And perhaps, one day, to all who call the Milkyway Galaxy their home.
</cue style=”fadeout”>
The Vista adventure is just beginning…
Edited 2007-02-13 20:29
Ah Vista. We hardly wanted ya, but you were here to stay.
Indeed. How many products do most people more or less *have* to buy.
If I decreed that everyone had to drive a GM car, brush their teeth with Pepsodent, drink Jolt Cola, and use Preperation H, I wonder how far I’d get.
Edited 2007-02-13 21:02
You don’t *have* to buy Vista or even Windows. Of course it that’s the only platform you applications run on it makes it hard not to.
“if Microsoft had not invented The Internet.”
I hope you are taking the p*ss
I started on Word Perfect back in its 5.1 days. Prior to that I had used Allwrite on a TRS-80. Word Perfect was as stable as Allwrite, but its text output was inferior, and it was a real memory hog. Why did I need 512K to edit files, when 32K was all anyone needed?
Part of the answer was bloat. Allwrite was written in machine language, while Word Perfect was compiled from C (or some other language). The other reason was capabilities. Word Perfect handled graphics and text together, and did it reliably. That the program did it under DOS was quite an accomplishment.
User interface? Come on! Function key hell is a good description. You either lived inside the program, or you used one of those keyboard templates. Still, I came from Allwrite, so what was I complaining about?
I switched to Windows and installed version 5.2 for Windows. Big mistake. It was basically the DOS version with the thinnest of Windows window dressing. It also tended to crash.
6.0 was a disaster. 6.1 was about as stable as 5.2. I faced stability issues through version 10, service pack three. That version was and is marvelous. I vowed never to upgrade again. Still the damage was done. Word Perfect’s stability was so bad for so long that I offloaded my more complex layouts onto Microsoft’s Publisher. The Word Perfect phase out had begun.
I moved to Linux around version 11, and found a semi-serviceable Word Perfect import filter. OpenOffice 1.0 had none of Word Perfect 10’s speed and grace, but, hey, it worked. OpenOffice 2.0 was a significant improvement, and with 2.0.4 and good KDE integration, I’m pretty happy with it.
My father hung on to Word Perfect Office 9 for ages, but has recently made the switch to OpenOffice. He did a fair amount of basic spreadsheet work with Quattro, and finds it better than OpenOffice Calc. Still, Calc does the job, and OpenOffice does a better job at handling all the Word files his friends send him.
There are a few things I miss. Word Perfect’s “reveal codes” function was a Godsend. The ability to position elements on a page was second to none (when it didn’t crash). Still, I don’t miss the periodic deletion of certain configuration files, the copying of whatever I could rescue from one file and pasting it into a “clean one,” things like that. If OpenOffice lacks some of Word Perfect’s intuitive grace, in the end, it’ a little more powerful. The ability to flow text from one text box to another is a nice addition.
Actually, it’s pretty well known that WordPerfect was written in asm. The coders at WP corp even had to write all the little utilities that every programmer needs in asm. Even the very first version of WordPerfect for Windows wasn’t written in C (or Pascal or C++) but asm. My wife wrote one of the first books on that version, in WordPerfect 5.2 for dos on one machine while trying to reach the functions she wanted to describe on another machine before WPwin crashed.
I started with Tasword for the ZX Spectrum, then used the Quill for the PC, WordPerfect 3-6, Word 2, Word 6, Abiword and Word 97 (I think). Then we slowly, from 1995 to 1998 moved all our work to Linux where I and my wife used the Linux version of WordPerfect, the motif-based one. My, was I miffed that they didn’t include the character-mode version that was available for other Unices! StarWriter 3 followed when WordPerfect just wasn’t available anymore. StarOffice 5.0.
And then I was just done. I don’t care how much a certain file format was a de-facto world-wide standard (like .doc or .wp or .sxw). I suddenly realized while converting about 50 megabytes of old WordPerfect texts with StarWriter that I couldn’t read all my old Quill texts _at all_. I needed a file format of which at least the implementation code was out in the open, and preferable the specification, too.
Because it’s not now that’s important, but ten years in the future. When _nobody_ will sell any wordprocessor that supports .doc-version-97 anymore. Not even Micrsoft: they are leaving the .doc format right now. Replacing it with something that is basically un-implementable.
Open, complete, impartial standards. That’s where your formatted text is safe. OpenDocument is the only one around. You’ll, as long as the magnetic particles cling to your disks, be able to read your own documents.
Actually, it’s pretty well known that WordPerfect was written in asm…Even the very first version of WordPerfect for Windows wasn’t written in C (or Pascal or C++) but asm.
Thanks for the information.
Then we slowly, from 1995 to 1998 moved all our work to Linux where I and my wife used the Linux version of WordPerfect, the motif-based one.
When I was making the switch, I wanted nothing to do with Word Perfect 8, which would have been something of a regression. It was 10, or nothing. I was under the impression that a Linux version of Word Perfect also relied on Wine. Perhaps you could flesh that out?
I still have old Allwrite files lying around. They have the advantage of being in text format, with formatting codes interspersed. If you can remember what the codes mean, you can reconstruct the document easily enough on any platform. Ah text, the one, true, open format.
WordPerfect 8 for Linux was native. WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux was run through a custom implementation of wine.
I too HATE MS word & I HATE excell….I loved Lotus Wordpro and 123. They were so easy…all of my stuff was in their formats…. Those formats are dead now. Thanks IBM. IBM is supposed to the be the big daddy rabbit for Linux, and yet they refuse to open source these programs or update them. I made the jump to OOo and now save most of my text files as…..text files. Anything can open those. I have struggled to learn Calc (Excell), I still don’t like it. I hope Apple’s new spreadsheet will be so much better…..
by not quickly enough adopt the ODF format. They would be in a much better position to provide support to e.g. government organizations that opt to switch to a standardized format.
Together with OOo they could have broken somewhat of the MS-word network effect. When ODF reached ISO standard, Corel would have had an easier job in selling to government and large customers that usually are the ones the requires following standards.
When/if Microsoft OpenXML format reaches ISO standard status, they could argue that they were used an ISO standard implemented by multiple vendors. This is actually what new legislation tend to require.
Instead they settled for being number two in market share, and at that a questionable number two as market share usually is counted in dollars and not in installed user base. The problem is that future orders will follow installed base.
i contend that there is still a place for alternative word-processors, spread-sheets, presentation tools and other office software.
what we need is to have standard file formats. this doesn’t, incidentlly mean limitations; an intelligent format is extensible sensibly. the word-processors, or other software, then compete to provide the best approach for creating these files. they can compete on spell-checkers, entry-codes vs mouse clicks, plain editting vs pretty user interfaces, whatever.
this has the benefits of open “data-secure” formats, fewer interoperabilit headaches and encouraging competition on the “approach”. at the moment, microsoft office doesn’t compete – it just sits on its file format.
this has in fact already happened in some areas. different people use different text editors or IDEs to generate the same C or Java format files. people exchange PDFs – some people prefer to export from MS Word, some from OpenOffice, others from Lyx/Latex.
a very good example is the image editting arena – you can use photoshop, paintshop pro, aperture, corel paint, gimp, krita, and many more to target your common set of file formats – jpg, png, tiff, and so on. these applications are compeing much more vigorously than office software.
to summarise – compete on approach/implementation – agree on file formats.
I have not enough experience to step into the WP debate. But I know where non technical users can find professional support for OpenOffice.org – http://openoffice.screencast-tutorials.com/index
Check it out
K<o>