The various eulogies are up on the internet now that Bruce Bastain, the original programmer and co-founder of what was then WordPerfect Corporation, has died. Many people my age remember WordStar and WordPerfect as the first two word processing programs we used. While I was not a WordStar groupie, I definitely was a WordPerfect one. I remember one of my first purchases as a graduate student with a new computer was WordPerfect for Windows 5.2, although I had used what many considered the definitive version of WordPerfect: WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Ah, the blue screen and white text.
There are a variety of places where one can find the history of WordPerfect vs. Microsoft Word. I don’t feel like re-litigating that, only to say that WordPerfect was for many years the better word processor. I don’t know if that’s true anymore — the latest WordPerfect version is WordPerfect 2021 (!), and I think I stopped at WordPerfect 16, primarily because I didn’t see much reason to upgrade. And in some ways, that’s both the blessing and the curse of the software industry. The comment sections of the various eulogies mention people who still use WordPerfect, even 5.1 for DOS. The people who still do are lawyers and authors, two groups who know the importance of the written word. And I’m sure I’m not the only one whose dissertation was written in WordPerfect.
I still remember how bad Word used to be — it couldn’t even be trusted with conversions from Windows to Mac and in reverse. I still recall the master’s thesis draft of one of my former students which had all the footnotes change to Roman numerals from Arabic numerals (which wouldn’t have been a huge deal, except this student had a couple of hundred footnotes!).
There were two features that made WordPerfect so special — the one everyone talks about is Reveal Codes, which allowed a person to see every single formatting and other type of code and delete the extraneous or misbehaving codes without deleting the text. It was brilliant. But I want to pay homage to the other feature it had: Make It Fit. For those of us who had that document that went a couple of lines past the requirement, it was easy to (literally) make it fit to the desired length while still making the document look good. While Excel ended up having that feature, it still doesn’t look as good as what WordPerfect could do. [1] Yes, I know, I’m mixing metaphors of word processing and spreadsheets, but it’s fair since Microsoft has hyped that feature. It was — and still is — a revolutionary feature because WordPerfect did all the calculation behind the scenes to ensure that the document would still be fine, and rarely could I get it to mess up. There are days when I am creating my syllabi that I wish I could do them in WordPerfect. I wouldn’t spend so much time laying them out in InDesign to hit a page count.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, my dream is that WordPerfect would become available for the Mac, and that Corel Alludo would spend the time and money to make it so.
This has me thinking — are the PDF’s generated by WordPerfect more accessible than Microsoft Word’s? If so, that would be a good reason to use it again. (New project added to list!)
Long live WordPerfect!
Notes
| ↑1 | Yes, I know, I’m mixing metaphors of word processing and spreadsheets, but it’s fair since Microsoft has hyped that feature. |
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