WTF is up with secertaries and Word Perfect?

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CVSiN

Diamond Member
Jul 19, 2004
9,289
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Originally posted by: L3p3rM355i4h
Every single secertary that I support uses word perfect. Is this like a national thing for secertaries or something? It gets annoying having to support two platforms...

nope we are 100% MS products only for Office....

we only support MS. so they either like it or leave :p
 

Carazariah

Senior member
Aug 11, 2003
336
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Originally posted by: L3p3rM355i4h
Every single secertary that I support uses word perfect. Is this like a national thing for secertaries or something? It gets annoying having to support two platforms...


Word Perfect was the default standard for the legal industry for years. The simple functionality of WP 5.1 for DOS won over many a law firm back in the day. Law Firms give rise to some of the most adept, dilligent and hard working secretaries around (At least High Class Firms do) Thus WP became a standard. Functions like "Reveal Codes" provided a depth of precision editing still lacking in today's Word for Windows and its just in the last 3 to 5 years that firms have dumped WP and started moving in mass to Word. . .
But many secretaries learned WP from the ground up, and the shortcut keys make certain replacement funtions a breeze.

So WP loyalty and knowledge among older secretaries is pretty high, and possibly among firms that haven't switched to Word yet.

FYI
Wiki 411 on WP

C
 

40Hands

Diamond Member
Jun 29, 2004
5,042
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Originally posted by: L3p3rM355i4h
Every single secertary that I support uses word perfect. Is this like a national thing for secertaries or something? It gets annoying having to support two platforms...

I hear ya man. Our firm has been slowly veering away from WP. We still have it installed to deal with other firms and clients who send us WP docs. Other then that I really dislike the program but some people swear by it. I don't get it.
 

Steve

Lifer
May 2, 2004
15,945
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There are people in my office who use Word 2002, WP10, and WP12, all on the same machine.
 

andylawcc

Lifer
Mar 9, 2000
18,183
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actually, some government agencies, perhap due to some anti-microsoft practice, exclusively use non-MS applications like WP and Lotus 123.
 

Phoenix86

Lifer
May 21, 2003
14,644
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The legal community was hooked on WP for a while, even when MS Word was the starndard document type.
 

GeekDrew

Diamond Member
Jun 7, 2000
9,099
19
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I've been using WP since its DOS days... then I went to WPWIN, on Windows 3.1... and gradually moved up. I didn't bother reinstalling it the last time I reformatted, though.

I know many, many secretaries... and almost all of them greatly prefer WordPerfect over Word. I can't really blame them... they are more familiar with WordPerfect... plus there is the almighty "reveal codes"... which I admit is something that I really like about WordPerfect. Things just seem to "make sense" in WP, whereas they do not necessarily make as much sense in Word.

I haven't dabbled in OpenOffice much... I wonder how its word processor compares to either WordPerfect or Word.
 

Homerboy

Lifer
Mar 1, 2000
30,890
5,001
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We have ~400 mergable letters and pleadings designed for WP... if somebody wants to convert those for us we'd be happy to switch to Word :)
 

Joemonkey

Diamond Member
Mar 3, 2001
8,859
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Originally posted by: Homerboy
We have ~400 mergable letters and pleadings designed for WP... if somebody wants to convert those for us we'd be happy to switch to Word :)

Heh, I've been there. At the law firm here management wanted to switch from WP to Word exclusively. The Collections department has a thousand or so WP only merge documents that get exported from their very old DOS based software, and I converted one file over so it could merge with Word and said "if you want to switch collections to Word it will take me a month to redo the merge documents"

Haven't heard much about it since then

And it is true, back when computers were starting to be on everyone's desk, WordPerfect was the standard. Secretaries are generally technophobes, lawyers too, so after you twist their arm and make them learn WP you switch them to Word 5 years later. Not a pretty site.
 

Linflas

Lifer
Jan 30, 2001
15,395
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Personally I think WordPerfect is a superior product vs Word but MS won this battle long ago with the competative upgrades to Office for anyone that had WP 5.1 along with WordPerfects delay in coming out with a real "Windows" version of the program coupled that with the fact that MS was practically giving Office away with business desktops from Dell and Gateway back in the early days. It didn't help that when Novell got their hands on it they released a buggy version that crashed a lot initially. They actually did come out with a very stable version which they then sold to Corel. People that stuck with them through all that are not likely to change.
 

GeekDrew

Diamond Member
Jun 7, 2000
9,099
19
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Originally posted by: Spooner
Where does NotePad and WordPad fit into the mix?

They are the programs that nobody dare speak about when attempting to actually do word processing. Notepad is better suited as a text editor only... and WordPad... well, it's just not suited for much of anything.
 

Fullmetal Chocobo

Moderator<br>Distributed Computing
Moderator
May 13, 2003
13,704
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Wow. I didn't know they actually still had Word Perfect. I remember some of the hotkey thingys still from WP5.1
Tas.
 

ElFenix

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Mar 20, 2000
102,402
8,574
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yup everyone uses WP here. except me.

i wish i had a show codes feature. word sometimes just does not do what you think it should.
 

sharkeeper

Lifer
Jan 13, 2001
10,886
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Yes the legal community is stuck in WP real for sure.

Last time we used WP for real work was in 1992 (DOS 3.3 / WP 5.1). I liked the format. :)

The Reveal Codes feature in WP is *ALWAYS* the answer I get from paralegals and diehard WP users when I pop the question. (Why aren't you using MS Word?)

Why doesn't MS Word 2003 have this feature or does it? Do you have to have some kind of debugger package running to do this?

Then of course most of the applications like needles/pins that PI firms use have specific merging within the program that was discussed about earlier. Trying to get macros to work within these would be a major PIA I suppose unless you have people that are willing to do this.

All in all yet another FORMAT WAR! Beta vs. VHS. When will it EVER end?
 

Leper Messiah

Banned
Dec 13, 2004
7,973
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the worst part is that since we're migrating them all from win98 to XP, WP8 (the newest version) doesn't work properly. Spell check crashes the program, and if you run in compatibility mode, spell check doesn't work at all...