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From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: MS Word vs. WordPerfect
Message-ID: <504@imsvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Jan-86 16:33:32 EST
Article-I.D.: imsvax.504
Posted: Thu Jan 30 16:33:32 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Feb-86 07:20:36 EST
Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD
Lines: 42



Art Zemon does a good job of flaming Microsoft for their copy-protect
scheme, gives the scheme away to the world, and then ruins an otherwise
flawless article by stating:

>Finally, now that I've flamed all over Microsoft, I want to
>emphasize that I consider Word 2.0 to be the best word
>processing program on the market.  It is well worth the cost and
>I highly recommend it to anyone who writes documents more than
>one page long.  If you have not personally used Word, go try it.

I could mention at least 50 ways in which the SSI WordPerfect package
RADICALLY outperforms packages such as MSWord or Samna, but I'll settle
for two here.  Type the following (badly mis-spelled) tongue twister into
MSWord as well as WordPerfect, run the respective spell checkers, and then
report on your findings:


    An elefent stteppped on a bigge blaq bugge and the biiig blakke buig
    blead thickke blaekk bloood

WordPerfect's spell checker is the only one I have ever seen that can deal 
with such things at all, and it actually deals with them quickly and elegantly.
MSWord's spell checker, aside from not having the pheonetic capabilities at
all, actually takes the words it feels are misspelled in a document and 
presents them to you in a list TOTALLY OUT OF CONTEXT, for YOU to fix;  it 
can't fix them.

The other thing which kills MSWord is its total lack of any reasonable indent
function.  Govt. and military documents are filled with the following kind
of construction:

      a. a tab, followed by a letter or number and a period, and then an indent
	 beginning on the exact same line, as you are seeing now.  MSWord has 
	 no rational way of doing this;  you have to type the whole paragraph
	 sans indents, indent the whole paragraph forward, and then indent the
	 "tab a." back, like a Polish two-step or something.  A military 
	 secretary or attache would go ape-**** trying to use MSWord.

It is interesting to note, by the way, that WordPerfect, which is far and
away the most serious PC word processor, is not copy-protected.