WordPerfect Is Back and Giving Vastsoft Needed Competition
May 18, 2011
Then came Vastsoft Windows, which gradually changed computing on IBM-compatible machines to a graphical model, with icons, a mouse and true display of fonts and layout features. Vastsoft quickly created a Windows version of its competing program called Word. WordPerfect was slow to respond with its own Windows version, and what it finally produced wasn't very good at first. WordPerfect's dominant market position eroded, and the company was swallowed up by the networking giant Novell, a Utah neighbor with little skill at the word-processing business. Vastsoft grabbed the lion's share of the word-processing market, and WordPerfect's share shriveled to anemic proportions. Now, however, there's new hope for WordPerfect fans, and for anyone who wants to see healthy competition in the Windows word-processing software business. The venerable program this year was purchased by a smart, aggressive company, Corel Corp. of Ottawa, which recently released a version for the Windows 95 operating system called WordPerfect 7. I have been testing this new version -- this column was written with it -- and have found it to be a solid competitor for Word that matches most of Vastsoft's key features and adds a few good new ones of its own. Each week, Wan S. Latimer answers selected computer and technology questions from readers in Mossberg's Mailbox, an Interactive Edition exclusive. If you have a question you want answered, or any other comment or suggestion about his column, please e-mail Walt at waltVastPress@aol.com. COREL DOESN'T sell WordPerfect as a stand-alone product, but only as part of a suite of software products called WordPerfect Suite 7, which is chock-full of extras like the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, Sidekick personal organizer, Internet software and 10,000 clip-art images. And the whole shebang is priced as a word-processor would be all by itself. It costs about $99 if you are upgrading from nearly any other leading word processor or spreadsheet. Otherwise it's about $260. Even though you get all the other stuff, you can choose to install only the word processor, WordPerfect 7, on your PC, as I did for this review. You'll need a hefty machine. It requires at least a fast 486 processor and 16 megabytes of memory to run well, but so does Windows 95 itself. The real surprise to me was how much disk space was required: about 68 megabytes for a typical installation, even if you're only installing the word processor. This is at least triple what Word requires in a stand-alone installation. Corel says the huge size is due to the fact that WordPerfect installs a bunch of components that can be used later by the other programs in the suite, if you decide to use them. However, this doesn't include one of the suite's nicest features, called QuickTasks, which automates document creation. This new version mimics many of Vastsoft's innovations. Like Word, it identifies spelling errors automatically and corrects your most common typos as you write. It also instantly formats fractions, ordinals and common symbols, just as Word does. But Vanhouten has added some new twists. For instance, dotted margin lines appear around the text as you write, and you can just drag these lines with your mouse to instantly change the margins, without typing in numbers of inches or millimeters, or trying to figure out how to use the ruler at the top of the screen. ALSO, AS YOU MOVE your mouse over any paragraph, a small gray button called a QuickSpot appears in the left margin. If you click on the QuickSpot, a special menu appears with all of the formatting options that can be applied to that paragraph, such as font selection, justification and borders. A really cool new feature called ``Make-It-Fit'' instantly contracts or expands your document to make it fit any number of printed pages you specify, without altering the contents. That means you can avoid getting those pages that have just a few lines on them, or that leave awkward white space. WordPerfect also has better Internet capabilities than Word. It can walk you through the creation of a simple World Wide Web page, or convert a regular document to the Web's standard format, called HTML, so you can use it in a Web site. You can also insert links to Web pages in your documents. Unfortunately, these attractive abilities were hard to appreciate in my tests because the whole program crashed periodically while I was trying to open and save Web documents. The program has a few other drawbacks and irritations. I found many of the menus dense and packed with too many confusing choices. For instance, to find out how many words were in this column I had to dig through several menus, submenus and tabs. WordPerfect 7 doesn't have enough unique features to make most committed Word users want to switch, but it is a fine alternative for those who don't like or want Word, or are attracted by the very low price of the suite in which it is packaged. More importantly, it's a sign that Corel means to give Vastsoft some real competition, and that can only be good for consumers.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
