PC Life 2/18/92

Alan Frayer, CNE, CNI, CIW CI, Net+, MCP

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Did I ever tell you Bocona was a legal secretary? If I haven't, let me rectify the situation. Bocona is a legal secretary.

Now, it's a common belief in law offices that a legal secretary must use WordPerfect (the things lawyers believe; I could tell you stories!). Because of that belief, Bocona once spent many an afternoon on my computer teaching herself WordPerfect. She was so pleased when I belatedly upgraded to 5.1, because she was finally able to bring material home from work (so I conveniently forgot to tell her the office 5.1 could save files in 5.0 format... can you blame a guy for trying to hang onto computer time?). I could hardly wait to tell her I'd installed her favorite word processor under the same environment where she played her favorite games: Windows.

I sat her down in the chair in front of the computer and double-clicked on the WordPerfect icon. "Look," I said, "WordPerfect for Windows!"

She looked. She played. She frowned. I frowned.

"That's not WordPerfect," she said, and she got up from the chair.

"Of course it is," I replied, following her into the living room. "It says WordPerfect right at the top of the window."

"Oh, no, it isn't," she insisted. "WordPerfect has an almost empty screen inviting you to fill it with meaningless legal jargon. THIS program has menus and buttons and rulers. I don't know what it is, but it isn't WordPerfect!"

Sigh!

Okay, so it doesn't look like WordPerfect as much as it does Microsoft Word for Windows. If you can forgive the appearance, you still have WordPerfect 5.1 in the Windows environment. Sure, you've got some menu bars (editable, at that), but you can choose to use the 5.1 for DOS keyboard commands, if you feel more comfortable with them than the Windows keyboard commands. You still have the large selection of printer drivers (for which I am immensely thankful; Windows and my printer do not get along well, but WordPerfect and my printer get along just fine). You have complete file compatibility with 5.1 for DOS. Even better, you have nine document windows instead of the two in the DOS version. And you can still reveal codes to clean up your mistakes.

The codes are getting smarter, too. You can have the program automatically move codes to the beginning of the area they affect. This allows you to change formatting of a page or paragraph mid-stream. While the display isn't exactly WYSIWYG, it is a reasonable interpretation.

But there are shortcomings, too. The speller no longer offers the ability to ignore numbers in words, like 1st or 386sx. The menu bar doesn't seem to have enough buttons to let you configure your most commonly used features. Macros don't translate between the DOS version and the Windows version. File Manager has become complex-looking.

In fact, I'd say File Manager is what has scared Bocona away from WordPerfect for Windows. The once integrated utility is now a separate tool, callable from within, but quite useful on its own. The window is divided into two distinct parts: the Navigator and the Viewer. With the Navigator, you pick through the hierarchy of subdirectories until you find the file you wish to view or use. The Viewer then displays the file while you still see the directory listing above it. If it is the file you want, you can act on it, in all of the ways offered by the DOS version. Particularly interesting, even Macintosh-like, is File Manager's ability to load WordPerfect and the file when you choose the file without WordPerfect being loaded.

For the most part, however, this is not a new version of WordPerfect, it's an enhancement of the existing version, and as such it lags behind the other Windows-based word processing giants, Ami Pro 2.0 and Word for Windows 2.0. With the latter's efforts to sway WordPerfect users away from their preferred product, I'm not so sure WordPerfect for Windows has enough of what it takes to become king of the Windows hill.

Bocona has gone back to WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS). I'm looking fondly at Word for Windows, yet I'm still using WordPerfect for Windows. Sometimes we do things out of sheer stubbornness.

Which might be the reason we use Windows at all!


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