IE9... Will It Suck?

[A Black Falcon]

Well first, I've been using Wordperfect versions for Windows for a long time, so one thing I like about it is that I know WP well. I know where the menu options I use are, I know how the menus are all arranged, etc. Word arranges things very differently; it always did, but even more so now that 07 and beyond have that bizarre tabbed layout. WP's layout makes much more sense to me, everything is where it should be. This is, I'll admit, one of my top reasons for liking WP more. A lot of things aren't where I expect them to be in Word, it's all strangely laid out. And WP has a visual look somewhat unlike OpenOffice or Word; even aside from the menu bar on top, the presentation of the page looks a little different. OO puts the part of the page you can write in in a grey box of sorts. WP uses less obtrusive dashed lines. Both look better than that odd blue backdrop of Word 2007, though, and unlike Word 2007 both have rulers marking distance on the page, to let you easily alter the margins.

Some actual things though:

-Misspelled words are underlined by default, but the grammar checker is much less intrusive than Word; for the most part you don't even notice it unless you do a specific grammar search. There's a thesaurus too of course.

-WP has always been easier to insert images, tables, presentations, etc. into than Word. Text and graphic formatting is easy, unlike Word. Text formatting is easy too - columns are simple to put in and end, etc. I know that Corel only bought Wordperfect in the mid '90s or so, but I do wonder whether part of the reason for this is that Corel also has a drawing program, CorelDraw...

-Wordperfect doesn't open each document in a different window. Instead, all documents you currently have open open inside the one Wordperfect window, and you can switch between them within the program. This was a HUGE difference in Win 3.1, and in 95 and on back before Vista (or was it XP?) added the 'combined tabs' thing that merges all open windows of the same program into menus on the taskbar, but it's still a difference. WP's design here uses less system resources, works better, looks better, is better designed, and is just all around superior.

-Corel hasn't followed MS's lead with that atrocious new menu system Word 2007 uses, WP X5 has a traditional interface. Good, Microsoft's is just terrible, what in the world are they thinking... WP, in contrast, has a consistent look. They update things in each version, but never do radical changes that confuse you and force you to relearn the program, as MS has done.

-Reveal Codes is, as I said, an awesome feature. Reveal Codes is an option you can enable which opens a window on the bottom of the screen that shows the "code" of the document -- that is, it shows exactly where every formatting mark is, so you can know precisely what will happen when you delete any one. With other word processors, getting your formatting right can be a real pain; with WP this is sometimes true as well, but Reveal Codes makes things make much more sense, because you can see exactly what's going on behind the scenes.

-X5 has PDF editing in it (you can save and edit PDFs). Word doesn't have that. It's also got web service integration for auto-updating data.

-Full support for all the major document formats, without Word's issues.

And other things I'm not thinking of, I'm sure.


Overall though, I agree -- any of the major word processors works. If you're just writing basic papers and stuff, any of them will be fine. Still, it's worth trying the major ones, I think, to see which one you like the most.