WordPerfect/Mac version 3.5 WordPerfect/Mac version 3.5University of Houston / WillWork Software
November 3, 1995
[NOTE: This longish review is being posted first to the H-MAC list and then to Compuserve's Mac Applications forum.]
WordPerfect was not one of the word processors available for the original Mac. Those of us who started using the Mac back in 1984 and 1985 had to choose between MacWrite and Microsoft Word. A decade later, many Mac users had never heard of WordPerfect when version 3.1 was selected by the editors of MacUser magazine as best new application of 1994. And yet, for years WordPerfect has led the way in adopting Apple technologies. It was the first Mac word processor to support QuickTime, WorldScript, PowerTalk, AppleScript, Easy Open, Drag and Drop, Apple Guide, QuickDraw GX and others. More important, WordPerfect was the first Mac word processor to be Power PC native; indeed, when the first Macs rolled off the assembly line, WordPerfect was one of the *only* PPC-native applications available.
WordPerfect/Mac version 3.5, released in early September 1995, offers a couple new bells and whistles, and a few improvements and other enhancements over its predecessor, version 3.1. But its core word processing features have been changed so little that inattentive users might not notice right away that they are using a new version. If you did not like WordPerfect 3.0 or 3.1, there is probably nothing in 3.5 that is going to make you abandon the word processor you are using now. On the other hand, if you liked WordPerfect 3.0 or 3.1, even a little, you will like version 3.5 more. It has a couple of definite new strengths, and on the other hand, there is nothing new *not* to like about it. If you have been using version 3.0 or 3.1 of WordPerfect/Mac, you will almost certainly want to upgrade. And what if you have been *tempted* to switch from Word to WordPerfect but so far haven't felt that WordPerfect would quite cut it? I'm afraid you'll have to read the whole review.
There are three kinds of changes in version 3.5: new FEATURES, IMPROVEMENTS to existing features, and ENHANCEMENTS (by which I mean changes that fall somewhere between new features and improvements). I want to begin by commenting upon these changes, for the benefit of users already somewhat familiar with versions 3.0 and 3.1. Then will I will make a few general observations about WordPerfect/Mac 3.5 for the benefit of those who are not familiar with any previous version.
Three of these new features -- bookmarks, HTML and speech -- are evident right away in three new ruler bars, whose buttons appear at the top of the editing screen. This makes a grand total of as many as eleven ruler bars running across the screen: Ruler, Layout, Font, Styles, Tab, List, Merge, BookMark, HTML, Speech, and -- if PowerTalk is installed -- PowerTalk. Opening all eleven bars at once takes well over half of my 13" color monitor, but that's an absurd experiment. In real life, I never have more than one or two bars visible at a time, and I have come to regard WordPerfect's ruler bars as one of the very best aspects of its interface. By comparison both with both of the widely used versions of Microsoft Word (5.1 and 6) and with Nisus Writer 4, WordPerfect's on-screen appearance is remarkably clean and intelligible.
Bookmarks and hyperlinks are really distinct features, but you access them both via a new "Bookmark" bar. As in other word processors (Nisus Writer 4, for example, or FullWrite), a bookmark is a placeholder. You select a piece of text, mark it and give it a name, and then later you can jump directly to that part of the document by pulling down in a menu list of bookmarks.
A hyperlink is a logical association between a marked piece of text and one of a couple other things: another piece of text (in the same or a different document), an address on the Internet, or even a macro. Text that has been marked as a hyperlink button is apparent on screen from the fact that it is underlined and in blue -- and by the fact that when you pass the cursor over a hyperlink, it changes from its normal insertion-point shape to a pointing hand, so you can use the "finger" to click on the hyperlink button. The disadvantage of this is that you cannot change the appearance of hyperlinks. They are only useful when the document is being read on screen, but unfortunately they appear in printed versions of your document too, even though you probably do not want them to. There does not seem to be an easy way to get around this.
The good news is that these hyperlinks are remarkably versatile. You can create a link to a bookmark, even to a bookmark in another document, so with WordPerfect it is now possible to create an elaborate hypertext system with a complex network of links between passages in one or many different documents. Hyperlinks can also connect you to Internet pages (for use apparently with the HTML editor). And hyperlink buttons can call macros, which gives you even greater freedom. It has long been possible to save document-specific macros within a document, but users could not run these special macros unless you told them where to find them in a button bar or in the Tools menu. Now you can have the button right in the document. This is my favorite feature in the new version. If your word processing tends to involve groups of documents that are related, this feature alone could be worth the price of the upgrade. Nothing in the competition comes close to this degree of power and flexibility.
The other new feature that I think is especially nice -- and potentially useful -- is invoked by pulling down in the Layout menu to a new command called "Make It Fit." Say you have just finished the final revisions on an important document and you are ready to print it out, when you realize that the document is now just a few lines over seven pages, that is, page eight has only four or five lines on it. Using "Make It Fit," you can tell WordPerfect to adjust any or all of six different formatting elements (font size, line spacing, and/or the top, bottom, left and right margins) to squeeze the document onto seven pages cleanly. It works simply and well. Business users will find this a very helpful feature. Students writing papers for school might like it as well, since it can be used in reverse, that is, a three-page paper can be expanded to fit four or five pages. The one drawback of this feature is that its effect is not easily undoable. If you use it to squeeze 7.2 pages of text onto 7 pieces of paper, and then you decide to add a little more text, there is no easy way to get back the document that you had beforehand. For that reason, I would recommend using Make It Fit only after you are really sure that you are ready to print the final version of the document, and even then, I myself would probably want to save the document in its normal or original format, then use Make It Fit on a duplicate.
I am less excited about the other two new features -- HTML editing and speech synthesis. My uncharitable view is that they are press-release features, that is, features that sound good on paper, but that for most users they are useless. As section leader for word processing in the Macintosh Applications forum on CompuServe, I recently tried to provoke a discussion on whether features such as HTML support and text-to-speech really belong in word processors at all, or to put it differently, whether such features should be implemented when there are still so many other aspects of a word processor crying out for improvement. I hoped to draw the HTML and speech fans out. It did not work. I have heard from a couple people who claim they will use the HTML editing features of WordPerfect, and I also heard from someone who said he knows a lawyer who uses the speech feature in Nisus Writer (not WordPerfect) to read documents back to him before he sends them out. But I have concluded tentatively that most users are as indifferent to these features as I am. I wonder if more than one percent of those who use WordPerfect will be editing their World Wide Web page in WordPerfect more than once or twice a year. And how many will actually use the speech synthesis feature? I played with it a couple of times and took the trouble to install a bunch of voices in my System folder, most of which sound truly awful. I found it neat to play with, but not very useful.
A more charitable view of these features would regard them as reflecting WordPerfect's commitment to stay at or near the head of the Mac pack in providing new technologies. As I mentioned earlier, WordPerfect was first to integrate QuickTime, first with WorldScript, first to go native for the Power Mac, and on and on. In these two features, it is not first, but it is keeping up. (The WordPerfect 3.5 press release claims that WordPerfect was the first to "integrate" text to speech technology in a Mac word processor, but this does not appear to be true, since Nisus Writer 4 was out over half a year before WordPerfect 3.5. WordPerfect's Speech feature seems to me to be almost identical to the feature in Nisus Writer 4, although it is easier to use. I pointed this out in a question a Novell rep on Compuserve and have not received a response. Perhaps the people at Novell were so fixated on Microsoft that they were unaware that there are more than two word processors in the Mac market.)
Unfortunately, some improvements that are desperately needed did not make it into this version. You still cannot view and edit more than one footnote or endnote at a time. And WordPerfect's hyphenation feature remains inferior to Word's. In Word 6, you can override auto-hyphenation in individual words. This would be a very natural thing to do in WordPerfect, but the program does not support it. The "auto-aided" hyphenation feature is still very poorly implemented. (Turn it on, then try placing the insertion point immediately in front of the first character of the last word in a line, and start typing a new word.) On the plus side, WordPerfect's auto-hyphenation is still based on dictionary lookups rather than algorithms, which in theory means that it is more accurate than that in other word processors.
WordPerfect's styles, which in some respects are the best in the Mac market, are in other respects still extremely awkward to use. You have to be sure to store a copy of your base style (that is, the style you base all your other styles on) inside each new file that you create, because if you don't and you redefine the base style, you may discover to your chagrin that you have unwittingly and unintentionally reformatted every document on your hard disk--including documents you haven't opened in months.
Worse, the Document style, which is supposed to be WordPerfect's default, remains as dangerous to use as ever. It will, for example, keep you from suppressing a header on page 1. It wrecks the numbering of outlines. It frustrates your efforts to hyphenate documents. Novell claims that these are not "bugs," because "this is how the Document style is supposed to behave." (Honest. That is what I was told.) The solution is simple: DON'T USE THE STYLE DOCUMENT, AT ALL, EVER. Use Normal instead, and base your other styles on Normal. Still, this is more than an annoyance, it is a major design flaw.
Finally, WordPerfect's outliner is as crude as ever, at least as implemented. It does not have the built-in ability to fold subtopics, for example, or to assign character formats automatically to different levels. Fortunately, a freeware set of outlining macros for WordPerfect/Mac by WordPerfect maven John Rethorst works beautifully in 3.5, and gives WordPerfect much of the outlining power and flexibility of the famous Mac outlining program More. I have in fact come to like outlining in WordPerfect better than in Word, FullWrite or ClarisWorks, all of which have very fine integrated outliners -- and I do a tremendous amount of complex outlining. But it is something of a pain to have to find Rethorst's macros and install them, and it may be more trouble than many users are willing or able to go to.
I know that many users have given Novell an earful about these and other features, and have not so much begged for improvements as demanded them. I expect to see significant changes in some of these areas in version 4.
The other obvious enhancement is the "preselect items" preference setting. If you check "preselect items in ruler" in the Environment Preferences dialog, ruler items such as tabs, and buttons in the ruler and button bars, will be automatically highlighted when you pass the mouse pointer over them, *before* you press down on the mouse button to actually push the button or select the tab. If you are using a Powerbook, you will especially appreciate this feature. Additionally, buttons have everywhere been given a modest three-dimensional look. When I first saw this, it reminded me for a moment of Word 6's Windows-like buttons, and I disliked it. Then I realized that it is actually quite different, and kind of useful. Preselection makes it much easier to make micro-adjustments on the ruler, because you can tell precisely which tab you will grab if you press down the mouse button.
Are we better off having this variety of options? The variety of options does make it all the more painful that *no* single Mac word processor seems to answer my current needs the way that MacWrite did originally and Microsoft Word did for several years after I abandoned MacWrite. But in general, it is clear that this variety is very good for the Mac and its users. Every one of these programs provides the user the same basic functions: cut & paste, headers & footers and usually at least footnotes, some kind of table feature, and support for importing graphics. After that, they begin part company. Many of the programs share many features beyond the basics (outlining, style sheets, indexing and table of contents, etc.), but they implement them differently. To a degree, each program has a proper market, that is, a group of users whose needs are answered particularly well by that application. And this means that to some extent the question, "Which is THE best Macintosh word processor?" no longer makes sense in the way that it may have in 1986. The proper question to ask nowadays is clearly, "Which word processor is best FOR ME?"
Nisus Writer 4.1 is the most clearly "targeted" Mac word processor. It beats the pants off the competition in two areas: find & replace, and support for foreign languages, especially those with non-Roman alphabets like Japanese and Hebrew. Word 6's strength is less focused, although it seems in some ways to be the best Mac word processor for long-document creation (because of its master document feature). Word is also selling itself to business users who often need to share files between Macs and PCs and who therefore appreciate the fact that Word 6 looks & works the same on both platforms. WriteNow and MacWrite Pro are outstanding basic word processing applications, excellent for students and even business users whose needs are not too complex.
Note that when you buy a program, you are likely to ask yourself not just whether this program's features will suit your needs, but other questions as well. Two questions that kind of trump all the others are, "Will this program work well on my hardware?" and "Can I afford the program?" The prices of packages have come down dramatically. MacWrite Pro can be had these days for $49, and WordPerfect 3.5 is listing for under $200. But FrameMaker remains very pricey (around $500), and for many of us, even a single extra C-note can be hard to find. Hardware considerations are even less negotiable. You don't want to use Microsoft Word 6 on anything less than a fast '040 machine. If you are using an older Mac with limited RAM, you may be limited to WriteNow and MacWrite Pro, even if their feature sets do not suit you especially well. If you are using a PowerBook, Nisus Writer's ability to load entirely into RAM may be a plus -- but only if you have lots of RAM, since Nisus Writer demands a minimum of 3Mb.
Finally, there are several questions relating to what is called "interface." These are rather subjective issues, but none the less important for that. Will I like using this tool? Will I find it easy to use? Does the way the program works make sense? On my Power Mac, Word 6 runs tolerably well, and it is capable of doing just about everything I want to do with a word processor. But I loathe the interface, not because it looks like a Windows program (although that doesn't help), but because I hate having to move through a couple dialogs to do the simplest things, and because I hate the iconic bars which clutter up the screen. On the other hand, I loved using MacWrite Pro, because its interface was so clean and unobtrusive that I often forget it was there: I felt that I was writing directly on the page.
WordPerfect's interface is one of its biggest virtues. The menu bar makes great sense. After File and Edit, there are four menus for major word processing tasks: Insert (e.g. for inserting a file, or a page break), Layout (e.g. for creating headers, footers and notes, or for adding borders to pages, paragraphs or characters), Tools (e.g. for macros, spelling, graphics and outlining), and Table (for nearly all of the table-editing commands). And at the right side of the menu bar, the standard Mac character-formatting menus (Font, Size and Style), whose absence from Microsoft Word is both a violation of Apple's UI guidelines and a constant annoyance.
Many of WordPerfect's menus have pop-out submenus. If you find these submenus awkward to deal with as I do, you will appreciate that WordPerfect does not force you to: If you pull down in the Layout menu to "Footnotes" and do not want to try pulling over to the right to select from among the submenu options ("New...", "Edit", "Discontinue", etc.), you do not have to. Just let go of the pointer-button while the point is on "Footnotes," and the submenus suddenly pop up on your screen as a separate menu palette, from which you can make your next selection. Very nice. EVERY Mac program should work this way. (Moreover, you can assign a keystroke to the main menus themselves, so that you do not need to touch the pointing device at all to select from a menu.)
I've already mentioned WordPerfect's ruler bars, which are slick and unobtrusive. Some of what you can do with ruler bars could also be done from the menus at the top of the screen, but some of it cannot. The only built-in way to apply a paragraph style, for example, is by using the Styles ruler bar. (I don't care for this, so I wrote a set of macros that allow me to apply styles by typing their names.) I like the fact that these bars do not overemphasize iconic buttons. In the Styles bar, for example, there are no icons at all. If you want to edit a style's definition, you click on a button helpfully named "Edit" in the Styles bar. I have used Word for years and still find many of its iconic buttons baffling. The best thing about the ruler bars is that you can hide them or show them simply by typing Command-R. That causes any currently visible ruler bars to be hidden; typing Command-R again immediately brings back the bars you were last using. NO other Mac word processor puts so many editing and formatting commands at the user's disposable so conveniently. By comparison, the palettes that MacWrite Pro and ClarisWorks depend heavily upon are annoyingly obtrusive.
WordPerfect also has a "button bar", which sits beside your editing window, wherever you want it (to the right, above, etc.). The program comes with a number of default button bars, for general use and for use in specific editing environments (graphics, equations). Or you can create and edit bars to suit your personal needs. I did not use any button bars at all for a long time. I now keep half a dozen of macros and a few editing commands that I use constantly handy in a Button Bar that I made for myself. These buttons are iconic, but if I forget what a button does, I just place the pointer over it, and the status bar at the bottom of the screen tells me.
WordPerfect has some extremely nice 'extra' features that don't have much to do with word processing at all, like its unique and astonishing sorting & filtering feature, its powerful graphics editor, and its not-so-unique-anymore HTML support. But it's not a substitute for a true database or graphics program. WordPerfect's three types of columns, its flexible borders feature, text boxes and overlays make it a capable tool for certain types of desktop publishing -- you could create a decent newsletter with it, for example -- but it's not a substitute for Quark XPress or PageMaker. Its long-document features (table of contents and index creation) and academic-document features (footnotes and endnotes in the same document, multiple user-definable lists like tables of authorities) are flexible and powerful, but not without some problems. You cannot edit more than one footnote at a time, for example. If you are putting a complex book together, FrameMaker is probably a better choice, or perhaps Microsoft Word.
Many Mac users have over the years come to expect a fairly large amount of desktop publishing capability in their word processors. I know that I ran out and bought MacWrite Pro when it was first released because I had heard that it had genuine em-space tracking (the ability to make minute adjustments in character spacing measured in a typographer's unit called an em). No other Mac word processor then or now can touch it, although most other Mac word processors give you *some* degree of control over character spacing, if it is only by providing character styles called 'extended' and 'condensed'. WordPerfect on the other hand does not cater to users with advanced and probably indefensible whims of this sort. It doesn't even have the 'condensed' and 'extended' character formats. WordPerfect also lacks a "space before" setting for paragraph spacing. There a numerous other ways in which WordPerfect lacks the formatting finesse of some of its competitors.
But what WordPerfect/Mac 3.5 *is* really good at, however, is creating and editing *moderately-complex* documents. If you need to knock out a ten page report, with a few paragraph styles, a couple tables and a graphic, there is not another word processor that will do the job more efficiently. When I am working in WordPerfect, I spend less time fiddling with line spacing than I used to. (Should I stick with 13 pt line spacing or go to 14 pt?) It's not that WordPerfect makes fine control over such things impossible, it's just that it discourages me from wasting time on them. In return, I spend more time working on my document's content. I can't deny it: I liked playing with MacWrite Pro more than I like working in WordPerfect. But I get a lot more done with WordPerfect than I did with MacWrite Pro.
For permission to repost, please contact the author, at
75430.1351@compuserve.com or wmporter@jetson.uh.edu