WordPerfect 3.5

It's a war out there, and I'm not sure who is winning. Sometimes it's Microsoft against Apple, and sometimes it's Microsoft against the World. Right now, it's Microsoft against Novell/WordPerfect, and at least sometimes, WordPerfect is winning.

Consider MS Word for the Macintosh and WordPerfect for the Mac.

Microsoft Word 5.1a was, for some people, nearly perfect. Tables, page-layout, graphics, fast. It wasn't small, but it would fit on nearly any hard disk. It dominated the marketplace - nearly everyone had it. So in order to sell new copies, Microsoft decided to create a new program, with new features - Microsoft Word 6 for the Macintosh.

The IMPROVED version, MS Word 6.01, is huge, slow, cumbersome, and is INTENTIONALLY based on the interface and much of the code from the Windows version. It runs poorly on many current desktop and portable Macs, and desperately slowly on legacy (Mac II, Centris and many Quadra-class) machines.

Fortunately, in our American free-market economy, such a disaster creates an opportunity for someone else. Waiting in the wings, with a fine program and a useful upgrade, was WordPerfect.

For starters, WordPerfect 3.1 (and the announced, soon-to-be available 3.5 upgrade) will run on a Mac Plus with 4MB RAM and 9MB of hard disk, although with extras, this will increase. Although it takes advantage of new Apple System Software, it only needs System 6.0.7 to run. Microsoft makes writing macros (a collection of keystrokes that can be reused) an exercise in programming, but WordPerfect comes with a collection of macros that can be customized and put to use immediately. You can customize the toolbars and your work environment, use the built-in drawing program - in short do just about anything that you might want to do with MS Word, if you could wait and if it would even run.

New in WordPerfect 3.5 are a number of useful tools including

• easier envelopes with a preview mode
• built-in WWW-conversion utilities and Netscape

Navigator browser (helps you make your practically- perfect Web HomePage)

• text speaking ability (it will TELL you about the the typos and the run-on sentences that no-one could say in one breath)
• new data conversion filters (Word 6 doesn't really want to write Word 5 files, but WordPerfect handles both).
• you will be able to put in pop-up bookmarks or hyperlink parts of one document to another or even to Internet addresses - type your class notes and connect a particular concept to last week's notes when it was first discussed.
• And finally - it has to be exactly 7 pages long? No problem- - WordPerfect has "Make It Fit"which will adjust margins, font size and spacing to make it exactly 7 pages. Or 17, or 700! (But I might suggest writing more than 500 words if you need more than 100 pages.)

For these and other reasons, Academic Computing Support Services (ACS), the fine people who bring you the User Areas and the CAs (Computing Assistants), will officially support WordPerfect for the Macintosh.

This new and fast word processor for '95 will be shipping in August, and should be at the Back to September 1995