WordPerfect Office X5

I have an admission to make at the outset - I really don't like Microsoft Office. I use it because I am forced to, but I don't like it. I find it bloated, inelegant, unnecessarily expensive, and generally inimical to the best interests of those who have to use it. More to the point, it doesn't work the way I think. Fortunately, there finally is an alternative that addresses all of my objections but permits a user to work in an MS Office environment and seamlessly open and save MS Office files. Welcome to WordPerfect Office X5.

I have been a WordPerfect user since I first started working on a PC in the latter half of the 1980s. In those days, WordPerfect Corporation - a small company in Orem, Utah - had this easy-to-use, full-featured word processor that worked in the DOS window. Although it required a learning curve to be able to generate complex documents with proficiency, such as pleadings on ruled and numbered paper, once you climbed the learning curve, it became second nature, despite the white characters on a blue screen.

In 1989 WordPerfect released version 5.1 for DOS, which offered drop-down menus on a menu bar as a supplement to the function-key features. Version 6.0 for DOS offered a graphical editing mode that showed the document as it would print as an alternative to the classic text-based editing mode. Finally, with WordPerfect for Windows version 5 . 2 released in late 1992, WordPerfect had its first mature Windows version.

In 1993 WordPerfect became part of an office suite under a co-licensing arrangement with Borland, which included the Borland Quattro Pro spreadsheet application and the Paradox database application (originally developed by Ansa and Borland and now included in the X5 Professional Edition).

The product line was sold to Novell in 1994 and to Corel in 1996. Since then, despite the market power and marketing practices of Microsoft, WordPerfect Office has maintained a competitive market position versus Microsoft Office. WordPerfect Office compares well not only on price but also on features and architecture. It is no wonder that the Department of Justice and the Administrative Office of the Courts have licensed WordPerfect Office as their application suite of choice.

The most recent (15th)...