© 1994 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 16, no. 5, May 1994, pp. 17, 19-20.
No, I haven’t seen the movie. No, WordPerfect 3.0 for the Macintosh probably will not cause many people at Microsoft to lose sleep. But they should: it is a gem. If not a perfect gem.
Word processing programs are fiendishly difficult to write. Trying to find the right balance between features, responsiveness, and flexibility while maintaining rock-solid reliability is a gargantuan task. For nearly a decade, the Word Processing Wars in the Mac world have been dominated by Microsoft Word, the most popular Mac program ever.
This domination is no doubt a sore point down in Orem, Utah. WordPerfect dominates word processing in the world of
And with this, their third attempt, WordPerfect may finally make a decent showing in the world of Macintosh. It is faster than Word. It takes up less space than Word. It usually costs less to buy and upgrade than Word. It is, literally, fun to use, with a much more Mac-like interface than Word. And it is pretty.
Speed may not seem like a major problem in a word processor; after all, you can’t really out-type a word processor, can you? But you can age several years waiting for Claris Mac Write Pro to load; double-click on the application, and the cursor will change into a watch face, ticking off the centuries. Microsoft Word is somewhat faster, but WordPerfect 3.0 could actually be called quick.
Scrolling through a long document is another way to age quickly. WordPerfect scrolls quickly compared· to either Mac Write Pro or Word. Paging to the end of a long document is also fast; Mac Write Pro accomplishes this almost instantaneously, with WordPerfect not far behind. With Word, you will have to wait.
Need to spell something? The WordPerfect spell checker is the best available in any word processor. Not only can you look up misspelled words, you can also cheat at Scrabble and crossword puzzles, since you can type in wild card characters. Type in la??er and WordPerfect will quickly offer 17 six letter words that match that pattern. (And you thought your friend Jim was just using his PowerBook to keep score.)
Grammatik, the top-rated grammar checker, is now integrated into WordPerfect (it used to ship as a separate application in WP 2.0). The thesaurus is also top-notch.
What about graphics? WordPerfect includes a solid, if basic, set of drawing tools, but appearances are deceiving. In addition to the drawing tools, WordPerfect also supports a drawing layer over the top of text as well as a watermark layer under the text, offering incredible flexibility when it comes to integrating text and graphics. Positioning graphics is also a snap since you really can just drag a graphic around the page and let the text flow around the picture automatically – something you can’t do in Word.
WordPerfect was the first word processor to include native support for QuickTime, and this support continues in 3.0. In addition to the traditional Mac graphics types – PICT, Paint, TIFF, and EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), WordPerfect also imports two very popular MS-DOS formats, PCX and WPG (DrawPerfect). In terms of graphics capabilities, no other word processor comes close, and even the page layout programs shy away from PCX and WPG files.
But is it a good word processor? Yes. The interface is far more Mac-like than Microsoft Word, and is almost endlessly customizable. For those who want to pretend their Mac is an MS-DOS machine, you have the option of using bizarre function keys and emulating the “Gold key” system found in the DOS world. Saner heads will probably prefer the intelligently labeled and arranged menus, button bars, and my favorite, the status bar. Covering the bottom edge of the screen, the status bar can display such things as the time and date, current line and page, and various other options (including battery status on a PowerBook). But its best feature is an unobtrusive hint function: run the pointer over a button or bar, and the purpose of that tool is instantly shown in the status bar. No slow, obtrusive balloons (though you can turn on balloon help if you are masochistic), no pawing through manuals or a help menu – it’s just there. Quickly.
Owners of compact Macs may not be as enamored of the various bars. In addition to a tool bar running along the left (or right, or top, or bottom) edge of the screen, and the status bar at the bottom, you can also have up to seven bars, in any combination, at the top of the screen: Ruler, Layout, Font, Styles, Table, List, and Merge. Depending on how you configured it, WordPerfect 3.0 could be the first word processor that is so feature rich you don’t actually have room left over on the screen for writing.
Drag and drop editing, one of the best features of Microsoft Word 5.0, has now appeared in WordPerfect. Tables, another fine Word 5.0 feature, are now available in WordPerfect, only the WordPerfect version is far more intuitive, easier to use and, most important, easier to change. WordPerfect has always had better control over columns, and the combination of the various column and table options can make you giddy just thinking of the possibilities. When the table options are combined with the multi-level sort functions and easy to use, if basic, math features, WordPerfect can do a pretty good job of pretending to be a spreadsheet or database.
But there’s more! WordPerfect has a full macro language, something Word has long promised but not yet delivered. WordPerfect has an excellent equation editor, for those who need it. WordPerfect is fully integrated into WordPerfect Office, allowing you to send and receive mail from within the word processor. It also fully supports Apple’s new PowerTalk mailer. And since I didn’t even try any of the options mentioned in this paragraph, we’ll have to take all this on faith. The wealth of options can be overwhelming.
On the other hand, you don’t have to tum on all the options, which is a boon to both compact Mac owners and PowerBook owners. This “low calorie” option extends to the installation: a full install will suck up 8.5 megabytes of disk space, whereas a minimum install requires just 2.6 megabytes.
Is there a Dark Side to WordPerfect 3.0? Yes. I do not like the way it handles margins, tabs and indents. Every Mac word processor and page layout program handles tabs, indents and margins the same way – except WordPerfect. Who knows – maybe WordPerfect’s way is the best way. But it is sufficiently different from every other Mac program to cause consternation.
WordPerfect does not appear to have any way to search for ASCII characters. In fact, the term ASCII doesn’t appear in the index. Word, in contrast, will allow you to search for a linefeed by asking it to search for ^10, and you can search for a carriage return by looking for ^13 or ^p. You can also search for unprintable characters (handy when editing imported text) by just typing the value, such as ^249. WordPerfect will look for a tab, or a carriage return, but not a line feed, and not an unprintable character.
WordPerfect also appears to be a bit more fragile than Word. I
On the other hand, WordPerfect will automatically save your work at a user-specified interval, and the save function itself is much faster than Word. Word, by comparison, can be set to nag you about saving – but it won’t automatically save anything. The documentation is not very complete, which is a surprise. WordPerfect2.0 came with five manuals of various sizes, covering everything, including things you probably never wanted to know. In contrast, there is a single 3.0 manual~ and it does not cover the macro language at all, and has only rudimentary coverage of the graphics capabilities (there is no mention, for example, of the ability to read WPG files). The index is also quite poor, with no mention of WordPerfect Office or PowerTalk. Note, however, that my copy is an upgrade; WordPerfect’s technical support thinks that the full retail package may include other documentation (but they obviously weren’t sure).
Technical support is good, but not the same as it used to be. At one time, WordPerfect offered unlimited, toll-free technical support for all their products, current and obsolete. No longer. In the New Era, you must register your software, and from that point you get toll-free support for a limited period of time (described at various times as either 90 days or 180 days). I’d rate this as superior to Microsoft’s technical support in terms of coverage, and the WordPerfect support staff seemed very familiar with their product, though obviously confused by policy questions.
Should you use WordPerfect? If you have a machine with at least 4 megabytes of RAM, running either System 6 or 7 (I’d recommend System 7), with at least 5 megabytes of free disk space, you have the required hardware. Compact Mac owners will not be able to take full advantage of the various bars and buttons – a major advantage of WordPerfect 3.0, but a screen-consuming advantage probably beyond the reach of those with small screens.
On the other hand, if you have a 13″ monitor or larger, or any model of PowerBook, WordPerfect 3.0 is a gem. Not a perfect gem, but a gem worth having. Especially when you consider how many computers there are in the world, most of them running WordPerfect on far less perfect computers.