WordPerfect for Windows 95
Finally there is a version of WordPerfect specifically for Windows 95. Both WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (a spreadsheet program) are now owned by Corel, which bought them from Novell. They are both included in WordPerfect Suite 7, along with Corel Presentations, CorelFLOW, Envoy, Dashboard, Sidekick, Netscape Navigator, 150 fonts, and 10,000 clip-art images.
The price for this "suite" is similar to the previous price of WordPerfect alone. An upgrade is $90 to $100.
According to Corel, you qualify for the upgrade to WordPerfect Suite 7 if you own any word processor, spreadsheet, or office suite from Microsoft, Lotus, Novell, or Borland. In other words, nearly everyone qualifies -- but stores don't ask for proof of ownership anyway.
What does WordPerfect 7 offer besides Windows 95's long filenames?
Guidelines
Red dotted lines show the location of page and column margins. To change margins, just drag the lines to a new position. As you move a margin, its exact location is shown in a box.
QuickSpots
When you move the mouse pointer over a paragraph, table, or graphic, a small gray button appears. If you click the button, you get a menu of formatting options. The idea is to save time compared to finding the right formatting option on the Format menu.
Spell-As-You-Go
The QuickCorrect feature, introduced previously, corrects common mistakes, such as changing "teh" to "the." Spell-As-You-Go is an additional feature which checks each word as you type and puts red slashes under any word it does not find in the dictionary. If you right-click on a marked word, you get a menu which shows likely correct spellings. The menu also lets you add the word to the dictionary or skip it for the entire document.
Shadow cursor
When the mouse pointer is over text, a grey vertical bar shows where the insertion point will go if you click the left mouse button.
Unlike the preceding features, the shadow cursor cannot be turned off.
Tab icon
An icon appears in the left margin to show the location of a tab change. If you click the icon, a ruler bar appears in the text which lets you change tab settings.
Document review
Document comparison compares two documents and marks the additions and deletions. Document review, a new feature, is similar, except that a single document contains information about the changes made by several people. The person who initially creates the document is the "author" and everyone else is a "reviewer." Each reviewer is assigned a different color, so you can see who changed what.
When a reviewer adds or deletes text, the text appears in that reviewer's color. Deleted text appears with the strikeout attribute (a line through each letter). A reviewer cannot actually delete someone else's text. The idea is that the author will see the original text and all the changes.
When the reviewers have finished their changes, the author can review the document. The author sees all the changes and can move from one change to another and accept or reject each one. A single click can hide all the changes, accept them all, or even delete them all.
Sometimes reviewing a document can be confusing. If you accept a change that deleted a word, the word disappears. If you really meant to keep the word, not the change which deleted it, you can click "undo" to restore the word. Then reject the change, which removes the strikeout marks from the word.
We did encounter a problem with document review. Suppose you edit a document as a reviewer and delete a word. The word appears with the strikeout attribute. Now you change your mind and you want to restore this word (that is, remove the strikeout). You might expect the backspace key to do this, but it ignores the entire word and strikes out the preceding character. However, if you turn on Reveal Codes, then the backspace key works, removing the strikeout from each letter.
Address Book
Back in the days of DOS, WordPerfect Office had the Notebook, which was a simple database you could use to store names and addresses. When Office became GroupWise, the Notebook was dropped.
WordPerfect 7 has added a complete Address Book program. It can store names and addresses, four telephone numbers per entry, plus an e-mail address and notes. Each entry can be an individual or an organization. Multiple address books can be created.
You can easily insert an address into the current document, or select many addresses to merge with a form letter or labels.
The Address Book can dial the phone, which is only useful if your PC has a modem on the same line as your telephone.
Internet features
You can create HTML (World Wide Web) documents, and you can convert a WordPerfect document into HTML. A click on the Web icon starts your Web browser.
Should You Buy It?
You get a lot of software for the price of a WordPerfect upgrade. For some users, document review or the Address Book will be enough to justify the upgrade.
However, "32-bit" WordPerfect 7 is not faster than "16-bit" WordPerfect 6.1. We recommend at least a 120-MHz Pentium with 16 MB of RAM and a fast hard disk.
RTG Bills and RTG Timer are trademarks of RTG Data Systems. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.
Copyright © 1996 RTG Data Systems