Microsoft Word

October 26, 2011

Wordperfect Office X5 Home And Student

It was with WordPerfect 5.0 that I cut my teeth in the late 1980s. I believe I was one of the last holdouts in our office and I stubbornly stuck with WordPerfect until Word for Windows 6.0 arrived on the scene in 1993.

When Corel acquired WordPerfect and released X3, WordPerfect 13.0, in 2006, reviewers hailed the new version of WordPerfect with its innovations as a winner, even if it did not provide native support for OpenDocument formats or OOXML. With its succeeding release in 2008, WordPerfect Office X4 incorporated native support for PDF, OpenDocument and Office Open XML.

In the first quarter of 2010, WordPerfect Office X5 was released to market. The latest version of WordPerfect includes improved PDF support, full-compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007, OpenDocument format and Office Open XML including full integration with Microsoft's web-based collaborative content management environment SharePoint Server and other similar content management services used by government and business users.

WordPerfects X5 version has a Home & Student Edition that provides basic office suite capabilities to home users and students whereas the Professional Edition is described as the indispensable office suite for business and power users. The Professional edition provides the capability to create multimedia documents, spreadsheets and presentations, including database and email management.

Many years ago I remember how I was able to produce a 100-page cookbook complete with pictures and illustrations using WordPerfect. Back then, it was tedious, time consuming and very frustrating because that type of document layout was not yet supposed to be done using a word processor!

Everything changed when Microsoft gave discounts to OEM manufacturers to pre-install Word for Windows on new PCs. This was a bonus for new PC owners since they no longer have to buy new software, they started using Word - pushing the program to its limits, writing macros and evaluating the program's capability to handle large documents.

It was WordPerfect's late release of a fully functional Windows version that allowed Word to catch up, overtake and establish itself as a de facto leader in the office genre of software applications.

Another factor that contributed to WordPerfect's loss of market share is their failure to reconfigure and adapt their function-key-centered user interface to Windows' mouse and pull-down menus. The situation can be referred to as a classic case of a topnotch software application being rendered useless overnight by the Windows operating system! WordPerfect's time saving keyboard shortcuts in the DOS version became its undoing when Windows entered the desktop computing scene.

Fast forward to the present. Although Word (and the MS Office Suite) still remains the dominant choice of computer users in today's shifting landscape of computing that calls of interoperability, WordPerfect and other office productivity suites are slowly gaining ground and are able to hold their own against Microsoft Office.

With its latest reiteration, I am tempted to give my old word processing software another spin around the block and see what it can do in terms of page layout and design.