 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group The Perfectionist Ray Beatty raybea@melbpc.org.au |
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Hunting for the Big Bang of Computing
You may recall that Albert Einstein went to his death at the end of a lifelong, fruitless search for the Unified Field Theory. This was the Big Bang of all physics, the Holy Grail of human knowledge: the conviction that at heart, all forces of energy - nuclear, electrical, magnetic, gravitational - were just manifestations of one source. And that one day that source would be found and we could then pass effortlessly along some great mathematical arc, moving from energy to energy as needs required.
I'm convinced that the folk at Novell have much the same dream and that their goal is the Unified Field of Computing. Their latest documents make it plain that they believe the rise of the single-user application has plateaued and from now on all the running will be made by those who pull applications together.
Novell's purchase of WordPerfect is part of this strategy. Its Unified Field needed a word processor, and what better than the world's most popular, with squillions of users already in tow? What's more, the Salt Lake software had already made considerable moves in that direction with WordPerfect 6.0, both Windows and DOS. So all that was needed was to add them to the network.
New WordPerfect 6.1
Novell is well aware that the economic trends of the past decade are accelerating, not slowing. So there will be more competition facing every business; profits will shrink and so will the workforce. So what's a company to do? Well the same answer keeps coming back: get more efficient, tighten up, leverage your resources - especially information.
The preview glimpses I've been given of 6.1 in beta show that this has all been taken on board. Within the box Novell has extended the integrated Draw program; built in presentation elements and a database, and added a considerable number of refinements.
Most importantly Novell/WordPerfect has made the program very other-friendly. Using an alphabet-soup of protocols like MAPI, ODMA and most especially OLE2 and DDE, it now enables you to do much of your computing not just by multitasking but within the word processor.
Take a look at the illustration on this page with two WordPerfect documents, one of which has Quattro Pro actually running on its page. This trick will also let you run WordPerfect's Presentations from within the program, and a stack of other programs like Paradox, Lotus, even MS Word. (If you thought you now have all the memory you need - where have you been during the past 10 years?)
Home-Made Suites
Even before the merger, WordPerfect had discovered that users hate suites. Of course its researchers could have come to a couple of our SIGs and gained the same knowledge for a lot less cost. They found companies buys suites in the belief it will make employees more productive, happy, economical. Yet only a small percentage use all the bits supplied, making the purchase a false economy.
So WordPerfect's new suites are suit-yourself. Want to marry WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, a desktop publisher and a multimedia tool kit? Well they can all sit on the Novell network and slipping between them will be as easy as turning a page; and drag-and-drop technology will allow you to move data between the programs. Taking it further, fax and e-mail will let you move beyond the computer, beyond the network. Tomorrow the world!
Programs keep getting smarter and this one is no exception. Even the greatest klutz can never exhaust 300 levels of Undo, surely? Perfect Sense employs advanced linguistic technology to allow things like intelligent Search and Replace. So if you're changing "buy" to "purchase", it will seek out "buying" and "bought" and replace them with "purchasing" and "purchased"
Chicago Bound
The program has been created very much with Chicago in mind - or as it's now called, Windows 95*. I've got to say that I'm not very impressed with Microsoft's newly-designed tool bar buttons. As you'll see from the screen dumps, they're very spartan compared with the more graphic icons currently used. I hope we'll get an option to be able to keep the icons we want. Apart from anything else, it takes me so long to memorise what the minute squiggles are supposed to mean.
That Unified Field is well on its way. As Dolf Boek, WordPerfect's peripatetic troubleshooter, explained: "WordPerfect has gone from being a developer that shunned standards, to one that now supports them". And like any converts, they've joined the faith boots and all.
The philosophy is that you start with a blank screen and then assemble the programs that suit your needs. There's even a program in 6.1 called QuickTask that acts like a kind of super-macro working across applications. Quite literally it can move from within WordPerfect, start Quattro, pick out a defined set of figures retrieved online, export them to Presentations, create a graph and then drag that back into the WordPerfect document.
Does that sound ambitious? Well that's exactly the kind of regular manoeuvre a stock broker might be doing several times a day, so why not automate it?
Einstein may not have found his unified field, nor Galahad his Holy Grail, but the people at Novell aren't about to stop till they've created the Unified Computer Field.
From the Internet
"What does the 95 mean?"
- The number of megabytes you'll need on your hard disk.
- The number of disks it comes on.
- The number of people who believe it will release on time.
- The number of upgrades before it's working right.
Reprinted from the November 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
