Which is the better word-processing program, WordPerfect or Word?
(Posted in hopes this issue has not yet reached the pistols-at-dawn stage, like the MacIntosh-vs.-Windows thing.)
For better or for worse, IME Word (2000 and 2003, not 07) is the standard.
That’s it exactly. It doesn’t matter which one’s better at this point. All that matters is that Word is the de facto standard and if you want to share documents with the rest of the world you’re better off using it.
I used WordPerfect a long time ago, and preferred it to Word because of several advantages it had. The greatest was “Reveal Codes”, which let you see the invisible codes that provided formatting for text, and thus let you see why things were going differently from what you expected. Word still has no equivalent (probably because its fundamentals are so different), but I wish it did. However, I changed reluctantly to Word, because that’s what everyone around me has been using for a long time.
Word is the standard and in my own opinion Word 2003 is the best. Word 2007 dumbed down the interface and made it tougher to use for power users.
Word Perfect has some great features though for really controlling code and this is a big plus to some users. Word is a very simply to use HTML editor for making crappy but functional web pages fast. I think these abilities cancel out for value.
Word’s biggest advantage is simple market penetration and the interoperability with all the other Office Products. Word Perfect gives best printer controls, but the gap has really diminished over the last decade.
I have been using both since around 1989. I use to like Word Perfect much better, but Word caught up by Office 95 and by Office 2000 I preferred the Office products to the separate usage of Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Each were great, but their companion products did not measure up.
Jim
Word.
Dude!
And this is word for word what I would have said. When I tell my assistant, though, how much I miss WordPerfect and “reveal codes”, she goes “Tell me another story, Grandpa”.
Well, I am going to against the grain and recommend OpenOffice.Org. I realize that Word is the standard, but Open Office saves stuff in Word format. I really like the interface that Open Ofifice offers, and even more importantly the price is terrific.
pat
a) I will never use Word. I don’t have it installed on my computer. Oh OK yes I do, in various emulators for other operating systems, if that has to count. I hate Word. Always have, since version 2.0 Mac at least.
b) I will never use a knockoff clone of Word such as OpenOffice or NeoOffice, except as a crowbar to open Word files that were sent to me by folks who consider it to be a standard format.
I think Word 2007 is an amazing improvement over the earlier versions; more logically arranged and with all sorts of sophisticated features that others can’t match.
But, ultimately, it depends on your personal preference.
What s/he said, except that I use WordPerfect now, (probably) because my boss could afford it. Sending documents to the outside world is a pain because the formatting tends to go bad in conversion.
Not yet reached the pistols-at-dawn stage? It was there ten years ago, and it’s long since been decided. There’s simply no point to using WordPerfect anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I was one of the staunchest WordPerfect advocates around, but it’s just a waste of money and hard disk space now; the war is won, and it’s been over for a long time.
As for Word 07, I love it. It’s really easy to write a good-looking rulebook or outline in it (although the outlines come out totally unsuitable for turning in to a professor, which was irritating when I had a public speaking teacher who made us turn in word-for-word outlines of our speeches before presenting them despite insisting that she hated word-for-word memorization and wouldn’t make us do it 
).
Sheesh, that’s a hell of a paranthetical. All of that said, though:
Agreed.
Could afford it? OpenOffice.Org is free, and works seamlessly with MS Office documents of all kinds.
Admittedly I have to guess at some of the history, since I haven’t been there long, but I really can’t imagine very much research went into our computer/ software choices at work. My machine is running Windows 95 and the other computer that was there when I started was using WordPad for word processing.
Yeah, I need a new job :smack:
I am sure that is true, but the Op for whatever reason limited it to the big two.
Where do you recommend downloading from as long as you brought it up? Can it read the new 2007 formats yet?
That’s nice, what does it have to do with the Op? 
Well, it means I would prefer Corel WordPerfect to Microsoft Word. I would prefer Novell WordPerfect to Microsoft Word. I would prefer WordPerfect Corporation of wherever-it-was UTAH’s WordPerfect to Microsoft Word.
Other word processors I would use before I would resort to Word include Pages, AppleWorks, Nisus Writer, MacWrite Pro, Lotus WordPro, MacWrite II, Lotus AmiPro, MacWrite 4.6, Ashton-Tate FullWrite, Mariner Write, WriteNow, NotePad, TeachText, NEdit, pico, the open firmware prompt…
Yep, the reveal codes were the kicker for me, I loved those things.
I’m curious whether the latest version of OO.org opens Office 2007 files, too. I’m running Debian stable and, as such, have an old version of OO.o on there; it doesn’t read Office 2007 files, but I’d like to know if the new one does before I install a backport.
BTW: Minor note, Microsoft has a free download so that older versions of Word & Excel can read the new 2007 versions. This has already become important at work.