Hi LOTR

You know, when I used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, way back when, I always thought it was a clean, elegantly designed word processor. And although it did not have a wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) with a little practice you could print out excellent looking documents. In fact, I used WP5.1 to write and format computer instruction manuals for my non-technical colleagues.

When you check into WP's history, you will see that it was first produced in a university, i.e. designed for lengthy writing, while MS Word was primarily pushed out to win market share.

See: WordPerfect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

However, since retirement, I no longer need to write long documents, i.e. nothing longer than two A4 pages. So MS Word's shortcomings don't really affect me other than that silly one where it freezes from anything from one to four minutes for no apparent reason (I understand that this problem affects all versions). But there is a work-around, instead of starting a new document get an old one, use "Save As" to save it with another name and amend this document accordingly, problem solved.

Although I started out liking WP (for DOS) when the windows version came out (and got passed MS's sabotaging tactics) it required a powerful PC to get the best from it, I guess because WP for windows incorporated "Desk Top Publishing" facilities. And because back then memory, cpu chips and HDs were relatively expensive so I never got back to using WP ever again.

That said, MS Word does have a security flaw and that is if you send a Word file to a recipient that file can reveal how many times it has been amended, all the registration details on your PC, file location, etc. And the file's recipient does not need anything special to see this info either, some email clients will reveal this info as part of their normal function.

All in all, most people, like myself, use MS Word and most other MS applications by default rather than by our own design.



UK Bob