[Glastonbury] Re: Glastonbury Digest, Vol 70, Issue 5

[info at wccl.co.uk]

Tim > When I joined my current employer in 1992, all the senior people in the
> office had been given laptops with WP 5.1. No one knew how to drive them
> - because I had it at home, I wrote a training manual in my copious free
> time and taught all my seniors how to use WP :) 

Interesting! 

> I upgraded as far 
> as WP 6 and then gave up, having paid full price for each version.

I never bought 6. I had 5.2 or thereabouts for win and it was OK. WP 6 had a 
terrible reputation for being buggy and when I used someone else's version I 
had to agree. It was completely horrible and looked cheap. But possibly they 
hadn't added service packs.

> Once Corel bought it, the product was doomed - just like Ventura
> Publisher.

I found the Corel WordPerfect 8 absolutely excellent. It was a revelation 
after 6, an absolute joy to use, very advanced at that time, and the graphics 
facilities were excellent. I could do so much more with it than with Word 
which always seemed a stage behind WordPerfect and Word was particularly 
tedious when it came to graphic insertion which I used a lot in WordPerfect - 
there was a lot more hassle doing it in Word. Everything in WordPerfect was 
so simple to use, everything in Word seemed to me (admittedly as only an 
unwilling occasional user) very difficult. But of course Corel would be 
interested in the graphics and make WordP look really attractive and fun to 
play with - they did wonders for the manuals too and those are still good. 

I upgraded to 11 assuming it would be a lot better still but it isn't much 
different that I can see and unfortunately the "look" of the basic screen 
setup is cheap, like going back to WordPerfect 6 in some ways. I'd say 8 was 
their real effort, the drive against Office. As I recall, after that 
Microsoft bought a big share in WordPerfect. At least I think it was just 
then. Anyway, MS got influence over WordPerfect Suite which had been 
challenging Office hard, and the challenge evaporated  although what I heard 
was the competition laws made it important for MS to have a rival. 

Worse, the Linux version seemed to die a death, just after they'd heralded it 
as a great innovation and we'd been trying out a freebie. Since then 
WordPerfect has been weak and the Linux version seems to get little attention 
whilst actually buying a copy seems impossible now. They keep saying they are 
redeveloping it but heavens, how long does it have to take? 

Ros