Jim Calloway has been making a series of posts about WordPerfect in which he makes the case that WordPerfect is still an excellent — perhaps the best — word processor for lawyers. Some of the posts have been a little Oklahoma-centric, but only by way of example of the great WP resources available to Oklahoma lawyers.
I'm a WordPerfect fan and have been for a long time. It was only with dismay that I used Microsoft Word at my previous employer, and I have used WordPerfect at home for several years. I hope Jim Calloway is right when he says that WordPerfect is ripe for revival in the practice of law. Read all four posts, as taken together they express quite well why WordPerfect's strengths are important ones and why many of its perceived drawbacks are illusory.
Jim Calloway: A WordPerfect Lawyer in a Word World
Jim Calloway: The WordPerfect Lawyer - Sharing Your Documents
Jim Calloway: Advanced WordPerfect Macros
Jim Calloway: The Past and Future of WordPerfect
My only concern with WordPerfect is that there is no WordPerfect for Mac, and I am flirting with the possibility of switching back to Macintosh technology sometime in the future (at least by buying a Mac Mini — I am, after all, squarely the target market for that computer). If I "switch," I'll still keep my homebuilt PCs around, but I'm the kind of user who likes having several computers capable of running even more operating systems. Most computer users aren't, especially in their businesses.
It has been years since I installed WordPerfect on my first Macintosh, and now I am typing on a Powerbook G4. I must say that Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is a great package that makes transfering files to PC users absolutely seemless. I am dismayed that Corel doesn't support the Mac platform, but I can also say that the joys of switching to Mac far outweigh any perceived inconveniences. I just hooked up my father's first Mac and he has been amazed by the simplicity and intuitive design of the machines. (He was considering a Mini, but ended up buying a Powerbook G4 off eBay for $750.00. After we wiped the hard drive and reinstalled OS 10.3, it ran like it was brand new.)
Sorry if I sound like an ad, but I love my Mac, and when I see some of my law school classmates STRUGGLE with PC laptops that break and crash constantly, I point them to the growing number of Macs people are bringing to the library.
When I went to college in 1995, I bought a Mac Performa (one of the last models with a Motorola 68LC040 processor), but when I upgraded in 1998, I bought a PC for typical computer-geek reasons -- I wanted to experiment with Linux, which was then still very experimental on the PowerPC, and I wanted to have access to a wider variety of games. Since then I've been building PCs because I can get a lot of power for a relatively low price by doing so.
But the operating-system geek in me wants to play with OS X, and as I have needed to do more and more unobstructed work, I miss the truly smart interface design that tends to appear more often in Mac software than in Windows software. Though I generally enjoy computer problem solving, I just don't have the time to tinker with the software. It has to "just work," and it has to work in a way that maximizes intuitiveness to the user. I know that ultimately depends on the software designers, but I've seen more of it over in the Mac world than I have in the Windows world. If I get a Mac, though, I plan to keep the Intel-based machines and to keep upgrading the one I'm using right now.
Your concern about Wordperfect is no small thing. In my opinion, any proprietary file format is a *bad* thing, and it doesn't seem like you can get any more proprietary than a wordperfect file -- nothing will open those things except wordperfect! I use a Mac, but my job last summer used wordperfect. Fine. But now I have a cd full of the work I did last summer and I can't use it (for writing samples or reference) b/c it's locked in wordperfect format. (Yeah, I know I could ask a friend w/WP to help me access the files and save them as RTF or HTML so I could work with them, but I'd rather complain about WP.)
I loathe Word, as well. Bloated, proprietary, slow, Microsoft, etc. Why don't we all just use OpenOffice or something?
ai-
I definitely favor open formats. I have OpenOffice, but I don't use it for much yet because it doesn't give me as much typographic control as I want (I'm big on typography). For one thing, I strongly dislike anything that locks users into a particular piece of software. Another issue that has been circulating in legal circles is accessability -- we want governmental documents stored in a format that people can get to easily without having to purchase special software. There's been some back-and-forth between the State of Massachusetts and Microsoft on this recently, and an EU committee recently came out with a report favoring "open document exchange formats."
Apparently there's an effort to have a particular Open Document standard approved by ISO. ISO can be great when it settles on a standard-- unless that standard gets ignored. Still, the OpenDocument standard is supposed to be the default format in use for OpenOffice 2.0. (GrokLaw story here.
I hope that word processor designers will take up the open document standard. Users' word processor selections, on the other hand, will depend on their experiences using the software. Some of them will continue to experience lock-in; they'd rather work with Word (for example) than re-train staffs and convert or re-design templates.
MacLinkPlus handles translating WP documents into Word (or other) formats. While it used to be bundled with the OS back around the OS 8 era, it must be purchased separately today. It is a worthwhile if you exchange documents with WP users.
"I loathe Word, as well. Bloated, proprietary, slow, Microsoft, etc. Why don't we all just use OpenOffice or something?"
If you think Word is bloated and slow, OpenOffice is even worse....