CompuServe Messages

Randy, with WordPerfect: I work as a consultant in the Business school's computer lab here at Columbia and the majority of questions are WordPerfect related. I obviously don't know anything about you or your usage of WP, but it seems to me that most people who use it don't ever learn the best ways to use it. So many people use spaces rather than centering, tabs, indent, flush-right to indent the lines. The way it seems to me, having been forced to learn it in depth for the job and having seen the way most of these people use it, to use WP effectively there is a STEEP learning curve but once someone goes past it things become easy. For example, the handling of graphics/equations/etc. may seem ridiculously clumsy, but once you learn it it gives you absolutely precise control. You can have it treat graphics boxes as characters, paragraphs or as placed in an absolute location on the page. Switching between them is easy. One of the other very nice things about WordPerfect is that, with 5.1, you can import Lotus spreadsheets directly, selecting a range, and it then creates a WP Table complete with lines separating cells. There is a special editing mode just for tables. None of this is easy to learn at first, but I would NEVER go to Microsoft Word on the Macs. It is just too cumbersome for me. Of course, I am also a computer science major and it is my future to think the way the computer thinks. — Ethan