 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group The Perfectionist Ray Beatty raybea@melbpc.org.au |
 |
The mood at the WordPerfect User Group's February meeting was gloomy. The members had gathered with a sense of siege: the battle against Microsoft Word is not going well.
The product's not the problem - WordPerfect 6.1 has been acknowledged as the world's finest word processor by reviews in the US and around the globe. The problems which dogged version 6.0 for its first two years have long been solved and now the power and functionality of this package is unsurpassed. No the problem is not Word, it's Microsoft. The marketing juggernaut continues to gobble up site after site, leaving competitors no ground to stand on - after all they own that too, it's called Windows.
Here in Victoria the rape has been wholesale. The anchor WordPerfect sites have gone: National Bank, ANZ Bank, and now the State Government. Public servants complained that they were being forced into using Word in their department as a matter of policy - policy made by administrators who have never used a word processor in their lives.
Alan Ashton, WordPerfect's founder, saw this coming - he's a very clever man and the direction of the industry must have been obvious to him long before the rest of us saw it coming. He fought the trend through the 80s and 90s but in the past year or two the resurgence of a new, stronger Windows - and a new generation of computers powerful enough to allow it to work - spelled the end of the DOS program.
In retrospect, there was no option but to sell to Novell. And of course Novell was under the same pressures so it was a marriage of great convenience. Looking at Novell's Perfect Office, it seems the obvious way to go when you're battling Microsoft Office and its pervasive presence on the networks in the land. Certainly Perfect Office is a sexier looking program than MS Office but whether it can withstand the pressure is still to be proven.
So the WordPerfect User Group meeting was called to decide: should it continue, or disband as the Sydney group had done? The meetings had dwindled, and Novell seemed uninterested in user groups. Probably too preoccupied with the bigger battles in the corporate boardrooms. Yet there were still a lot of users out there - particularly home offices; secretarial services; law firms with heavy document-preparation needs; and the many un-networked users. Who could they turn to?
A particularly strong feature of the Melbourne group is NewsLetter Perfect, the monthly newsletter edited by the redoubtable Colleen Wooley. Each issue is gobbled up by WP users for its tips and tricks and ideas, selling nearly as many outside Victoria as in. Losing it would be a killing blow - yet if all the corporates who abandoned WP also quit the user group, funding would shrink below the point where the publication would be viable.
In the end the decision was no decision. Let's carry on a little longer and see if things improve. Perhaps they can pick up the homeless members of the Sydney group, as newsletter subscribers at least. And maybe meanwhile Novell will pull some spectacular rabbit out of the hat. After all there are still millions of devoted users out there and while there's life there's hope.
Sexy cover sheet
So let's take a look at a typical example of Colleen's great advice. Here's instructions for a document cover sheet which she created for WordPerfect 5.1 using a Canon LBP laser printer. I'll recreate it using WordPerfect 6.1, for printing on my NEC SS610 laser.
|
|
First set the page dimensions (I won't bother saying OK each time, I rely on you to figure this out yourself):
Now let's get it in the right position. Your graphics button bar will have appeared so click Position, then place 0c, from Right Margin, Vertical place 2.5c from top margin, OK. Then click Size, set 8c width, then Wrap, no wrap.
Now for some of the fancy bits. Let's put those lines in, but we do it with the clever Watermark feature.
You should now have on your main screen, a bird in the right-hand corner and a broad grey line down the left of the screen. Now let's add the horizontal lines.
You now have a page set up graphically, all you need now is the words. The type available depends on your printer and fonts, but use these as a guide.
Let's type some copy:
So there you are - a sexy cover page for your document, guaranteed to make your boss ask, "Did you do this with one of our programs?" To which you'll probably answer, "With the dimwits we've got choosing software in this place...?"
Reprinted from the April 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
