John Rumm wrote
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.

Sure, but choice of software is also about choosing what has
a future, because it a hell of a lot of waste of effort to have to
change to something else later when you discover that what
you chose has died in the market for whatever reason.

Like with the VHS/Beta choice, it aint just about what is technically better.

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)

All irrelevant to what makes sense now.

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.

In your opinion. Thats not universally agreed.

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.

And that is a dog/dinosaur of a user interface thats WAY past its useby date.

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.

And when it died in the arse market wise, thats all completely academic.

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.

But is what matters as far as it having a future is concerned.

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).

That wasnt the readability I was talking about.

I was talking about getting it on the screen where you can even see it at all.