On 07/03/2012 02:58, Rod Speed wrote:
John Rumm wrote
Rod Speed wrote
The Natural Philosopher wrote
Rod Speed wrote
The Other Mike wrote
Rod wrote

Its arguable if its worth bothering with the pre 2007 UI of Word
and Excel when few will bother to get those older versions for their own systems and the student versions of the
latest UI are so cheap.

Word 2007 or better? That'll be WordPerfect For Windows 6.1 then

Complex text manipulations were a piece of **** in WP6.1,
they took an age in anything else. Combine that with Lotus
123r5 and it was IMHO almost a perfect combination.

And so few felt that way that they didnt survive.

No.

Yep.

It doesn't work like that.

Fraid so.

WP was infinitely better than word.

Thats just your opinion.

Welcome to usenet, that's what we are here for!

We arent just here for opinions.

Its a pretty fair assessment though IMHO...

Not in mine.

For technical documents WP is far more productive.

And learning wise it aint.

Early versions, that was fair comment. From 5.1 on, when in acquired
menus and context sensitive help etc is was really little different from
word at the time in accessibility. Note we are talking early '90s here,
when the best DOS version of Word was a toy in comparison and lacked
many features. (remember the anti-trust trials of MS? even then MS's own
legal team were still producing all their documentation in WP)

However there is one of the keys. If you are a techie user you will get more done with WP.

I dont. The user interface is a dog and it died too.

The user interface was better than Word's in many ways for power users.
Since its origin was as a keyboard driven app, it retained all those
capabilities even when it acquired its WIMP capabilities. If you could
remember all the arcane keystorkes (remember the keyboard templates to
give you a reminder of the three or four sets of overlayed functions on
every F key!?) you could drive it without needing to fiddle with the
mouse at all, which made it fast.

The reveal codes window was a godesend for resolving complex formatting
problems. (and something that could never work in Word as well due to
the less flexible way it applies effects on text). The cross referencing
was far more sophisticated and useful.

Whether an application succeeded or not in the market (especially when
competing with Microsoft) frequently had little to do with its quality
as a product.

Word is probably easier to do the basics.

Absolutely certainly easier to do the basics like
producing documents which others can read effortlessly.

Neither have much impact on readability - that's down to the author.
(although the WP grammar checker was better).







--
Cheers,

John.

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