 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group WordPerfect 6.0 Ray Beatty raybea@melbpc.org.au |
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There's always a certain pain involved when you get a new version of an old favourite program. It's a bit like your wife coming home with a new haircut. You know it's an improvement and you're supposed to like it (it cost enough!), but you're going to feel uncomfortable with it for a time, till you get used to the new look.
I'm feeling that way about WordPerfect 6.0. When I first installed it, I hated it. It didn't look like WordPerfect, the colours were wrong, the typeface looked strange; some old commands worked, others didn't. I was on familiar territory yet I felt a stranger.
However I'd heard enough rave reports, seen enough demonstrations, to know that there were wonders to be found. So first of all I worked my way through the unfamiliar Setup menu and persevered until the new 6 looked just like the old 5.1. I put my macros through the conversion utility and about half of them passed unscathed. Unfortunately there's no utility for the keyboard so I'll have to laboriously re-create my old one.
Once I'd proved that old WordPerfect was there like a security blanket I could run back to, I switched to Graphic Mode [Ctrl-F3], clicked up all the button bars and scroll bars and pull-down menus, and tried to do the things I'd seen demonstrated at PC93.
Mouths Agape
Now as you know, demonstrators at computer shows are direct descendants of the fairground spruikers of old, producing rabbits out of thin air and gold coins out of the village idiot's ear. We stand watching with mouths agape, then rush forward to pay hard-earned money for the magical potion which will cure all our ills and Aunt Bertha's cancer too. Once we get home and open the box only stones and barren sand pour out.
Well, home with 6.0, I tried pulling the "dragon" graphic into a document like the fellow had done at the Show-and to my amazement, up it came with a click of the mouse. What's more I could actually see it on screen. Another couple of clicks and the text formed itself round it; and when I dragged it down the page with the mouse, the text flowed around it like foam round a beachside pebble.
So then I got excited - something that works! I played with other things: the spreadsheet that's now built into e program. This turns out to have far more range d functions than my rudimentary knowledge of Lotus, and more than enough for anything I'll ever need. At long last they've produced a decent outliner with collapsible levels-I've been asking for this for five years. And then there are things like hypertext and watermarks and envelope functions and fax services-these will keep me busy until Christmas. Most importantly, you can run up to nine documents at once. The two-document-screen tyranny is over.
Now, to those of you who have hung around the computer world in recent times most of these things won't light your Roman candles. Even WordPerfect was offering many of them in WPWindows a year ago. But for those of us who are long-term WordPerfect junkies, and learned about [Shift-F5] and [Alt-F6] when computers were little more than oversized calculators, it's thrilling to have all these new functions and the old commands at the same time. Die-hard Word Star users will know the instinct well.
Thrilling
For me the other big thrill is being able to use my new HP Deskjet colour printer. I haven't had the chance to try it out with a real word processor before, so I dipped into the small sample graphics file again and pulled out that concession to California computer hip-ness:
Gandalf the Magician. Added to this, I started rummaging through my over-cluttered hard disk for other graphics, to see if they'd be accepted.
So it was that I pulled in some files from DrawPerfect, thought the dinosaur would be appropriate for current fashion-this year they're bigger than Schwarzenegger (thank goodness).
One thing I did find frustrating was the inability to pull in files in other formats-it didn't recognise any of my Micrografx Designer drawings or Harvard Graphics illustrations, for example. It wouldn't even accept hoary old COLUMBIA.GENffrom Ventura, and that's been around for ever. No doubt if I exported the files from their programs into some common format-there must be one, WP6.0 offers dozens of choices-I could then pull the file in. Something to play with on a wet Sunday afternoon. Certainly at the moment I'm gaily throwing graphics into my letters and articles without concern for boring things like looks and style; consequently my current work looks like a caesar salad in close-up. Ah, but it all makes writing fun.
Translation Woes
The greatest bitch I have against WP6 is its incompatibility with WP5.1 or WPWindows. It will retrieve those files all right, and it will give them back when you select an option from the Save As... menu; but inevitably something seems to get lost in the translation, going out and coming back.
So in my office, where every computer seems to be a different age and speed and the one thing we had in common was 5.1, I can't work in WP6 because no-one else (including the print server) can read the files without hassle. I can't put WP6 on every computer because the old ATs don't have the speed or disk space to carry it, so we'll have to stay put until time takes its toll and the computers get renewed.
Mind you it can hold its own on the older machines so long as you do the work in text mode, then switch to one of the two graphics modes for fine tuning. This retention of DOS is a very smart move on WP's part. After all, WordPerfect are already world leaders in the word processing field and now they've covered their bases with both DOS and Windows versions, which is going to increase that lead.
Certainly for a word processor, WP6 makes a great desktop publisher. Way back when WP5 came out like a missile we started predicting a blurring of the distinctions between the two categories. The leapfrog with MS Word has continued - now you can produce a pretty passable newsletter or book with WordPerfect. And you can do it without all the hassles of tags and formatting complexities which seem inherent in the desktop publishing packages.
As usual, WordPerfect provide an incredible number of print drivers, more than any other program I've seen (I'm still annoyed with Ventura for not having a driver for my HP500-and not caring, either). And as I tell anyone who asks me to recommend a word processor, WordPerfect's Customer Support is miles ahead of anyone else's, is free (Microsoft please note) - and over a year or two is worth ten times the cost of the package.
Premature Death
So here it is - this is the Year of the Sixes: between DOS 6 and WordPerfect 6, the much-heralded death of DOS has proved to be premature: there's life in the old girl yet and she can still turn a trick or two to shock the younger floosies. In WordPerfect 6, DOS has come up with some very good reasons for not joining the throng in the Windows queue: first, you don't have to retrain your computing staff, most of whom will have a reasonable grasp of WordPerfect. Second, it can do anything the others can do and a hell of a lot more. Third, it seems to have answered most any of the objections about WordPerfect in the past: it's now fully WYSIWYG(if you want it), it is thoroughly comprehensive in what it can do (you're hard put to find anything it can't do) and it recognises that the English spoken in Australia is different from that spoken in America. Who could ask for more?
Reprinted from the October 1993 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
