In computer news this week, 05/01/2001

Finally - revenge for Word Perfect users !

Back in the pc old days, meaning the 80's, a Utah based company named Word Perfect emerged to dominate the word processing marketplace with its most popular version - Word Perfect 5.1 - which prided itself on being a typists dream and the best and most logical program for serious typists. Word Perfect was #1, and had demolished its only competitor, a program called Wordstar.

But as the pc world went forward, Word Perfect struggled to maintain it's leadership in a Dos-based marketplace that was quickly converting to windows. Microsoft had released a windows-based word processing program called Word, and was beginning to have some serious success with it.

Word Perfect came out with version 6.0, which gave a windows-like look to their program, but it couldn't stop losing it's customers to Microsoft's true windows-based Word, and the pc world took up the mantra "Windows is the future, windows is good, everything must be windows ..."

The specific dagger that Microsoft used against Word Perfect was their claim that Microsoft Word was mouse-based and thus far superior. This meant that Microsoft Word users could easily click on menu commands to do text editing and other common word processing functions that Word Perfect users could only do by remembering dozens of keystroke commands.

And so the battleground became mouse-based over keyboard-based commands, and today Microsoft Word has over 85% of the word processing marketplace. Word Perfect has been sold twice, and is now owned by the Canadian Corporation Corel. Word Perfect is now fully windows based , has a tiny market share, and is still loved by small pockets of diehard users.

So for those Word Perfect fans, and even those of you who liked it but migrated to Word because you got tired of people calling you a keyboard-based raw meat eating grunting Neanderthal, here's a bit of news that should bring a smile to your face.

This week Windows Guru and author Brian Livingston, columnist for Infoworld magazine and author of several windows for power users books, has a power user tip for users of Microsoft Word.

The key sentence in this article reads: "... Word has a huge number of keyboard shortcuts. It's been said that the average PC user exploits only 10 % of an application such as Word. By studying and using Word's (keyboard) shortcut charts, you should be able to increase that by a few points."

He then goes on to instruct you how to create and printout a list of Word's keyboard shortcuts that you can refer to - and get this - it's 10 pages long !

(View the MS Word shortcuts) http://www.mtamicro.com/rb/commands.html

So Word Perfect fans rejoice -You were right after all!! It does make sense for a program that requires a keyboard - such as word processing - to use keyboard commands - as opposed to having to pick up a mouse.

But let's not celebrate too loudly, otherwise our KPBX movie critic Bob Glatzer might hear us, and then we'll have listen to his rantings and ravings about the virtues of his favorite old dos-based Leading Edge word processing program, which his wife and family had to pull him from kicking and screaming and clutching his keyboard, into the future.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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