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WordPerfect coming to an end? 2

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Masalla

MIS
May 10, 2004
1
CA
Does anyone else have this feeling? I love WordPerfect and as a writer, have used it since 4.1. It is the best! And I think it once had about 85% of the word processing market. However, as usage of WP has fallen it gets increasingly difficult to use it in relation to what others have. Namely MS Word. I can contruct a page or article in WP, but when I send it to someone, they can't open it unless they have WP installed. Which is increasingly rare. The WP (wpg) graphics extension is useless because no one can open it to see your product with the intended graphics or positioning. I would hate to quit using WP, but it looks like I will have to desert this fine product soon, simply because Microsoft have finally plowed them under. Too bad. Anyone else thinking the same thing or have any suggestions?
 
It is a problem when sharing documents.

It just depends on how you need to share documents. WP has a publish to pdf whereas MSWord does not. That can help if all they need is a graphic. This can be a good thing. I don't want others modifying what I've done generally.

I like wp because I don't have to worry about worms or viruses. No one seems to worry about that with MSOffice programs even though it may crash their whole system.
 
I don't think it is coming to an end for the time being, as they have just announced or have come out with 13, but WP doesn't do a great deal to make it easier for its users to play well with others, for sure.

Still, there are a few things you and those who receive your material can do to work "cross platform", if that can be said of a word processing program.

First and probably easiest, you can save your wp documents as word files by clicking >file >save as, then chosing MSWord or Rich Text File under File type. The document you send should be whatever.rtf or whatever.doc. The recipient target will be able to open it nicely. The nice thing about rich text is that it is generally not susceptible to virus infections.

Second, from the standpoint of the word user, Msoft has a free conversion utility available. I believe it is actually on the instsallation disk, but if not, it can be downloaded from the MS site (as can conversion uitlities for just about everything but Clarisworks..Bill is still playing hardball with Jobs, apparently).

The windows user can open your documents then by opening them directly from Word (>file >open etc) or can right click on the icon and choose "open with" >Microsoft Word from the right click menu. Once they have done this, wpd files should continue to open in word.

Downside here is that some fancier formating may be a little boondoggled, but if all you are sending is text (as an author/writer) the fancy lines and text boxes probably matter less.

Note that Word Perfect has fewer conversion options than Word. For this reason I have both of them on my computer. They play together very well.
 
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