Many years ago, I had a website dedicated to the comparison of Corel’s WordPerfect (and other products) to Microsoft and other software manufacturers. This is a revival of that site, although I don’t know if I will be doing any serious updating on this site.

The old host, Netscape, flat out scrapped the site that I had spent so long to build, and I could have set up a new site, but I would have had to build it from scratch. Instead of doing that, I simply let Netscape kill the site (they killed millions of sites back then).

Anyway, this one, I am paying for, and intend to leave it on the internet for a good long while.

Here are the various files which you may peruse (by the way, since these are old documents, many of the links found in these documents are no longer good links):

A History of the Changes made to WordPerfect HTML PDF WPD

A 5 Suite Comparison HTML PDF WPD

I spent a great deal of time here comparing WP 9, Word 2000, WordPro 9, and Star Writer 5.1. This is a fairly long and thorough document, the most thorough comparison of these products available on the internet.

WordPerfect 8 vs. Word ‘97 HTML PDF WPD

WordPerfect Versions HTML PDF WPD

I compare WordPerfect versions 7–11.

Presentations 9 vs. Powerpoint 2000 vs. Star Office 5.1 HTML PDF WPD

Quattro Pro 9 vs. Excel 2000 vs. Lotus 123 version 9 vs. Star Office 5.1 Spreadsheet

HTML PDF WPD

I did this a long time ago. I took a math course in statistics and found that I used QuattroPro and Excel almost equally. There were things that each did which were sometimes easier than the other program. Furthermore, everything had to be eventually changed to Excel for the professor (which QuattroPro can do quite easily).

At one time, when I worked for a school district, I had to battle it out to use WordPerfect and other software products. Now that I am semi-retired, and can use pretty much anything that I want to use, I have become a little less militant about this. Over the years, I have had various discussions and arguments with many users of Word. In fact, when I first found that I had Word on my computer, I was rather excited about that, and retained this excitement until I actually tried to use it...that put a serious damper on my excitement. When I later found that I might be restricted to using just Word, I became a little more militant in my approach, eventually going to the school board in order to continue using WordPerfect. Had the administration and IT types at my campus had their way, the thousands of documents which I had created with WP would have become unusable, as Word just will not accurately import them. I would have had to take all of my document files home, exported them to Word on my home computer (thousands of files) and bring them back to school on dozens of floppies (this all occurred back in the days of floppies). It would have been hundreds of hours work just to be able to use Word; and then, editing any of these files would have been a pain, as Word just cannot do what WP can.

One of the things which I have never understood is the argument, everyone uses Word; it is the default word processing program; if you want to read other documents, you have to use Word. This always seemed so silly to me; I can read any Word document that I want in WP; I can export any WP document to a Word or PDF file, and share my work with anyone else. I was not hampered or restricted; those who used Word were. Therefore, I could see no reason to set aside a superior program for an inferior one just because everyone else used the inferior program.

Anyway, enjoy. At some point in time, I will include links and other items of interest, but these should help you if someone is twisting your arm to make you change.

By the way, one last blanket statement: I don’t believe there has ever been a time when Word had a program version superior to the contemporary Wordperfect. It is possible that when Word switched over to a Windows interface, back in the 90's, there may have been a month or so of Microsoft superiority; but not before that or after that. I know that, nowadays, most people don’t even know WP is still cranking out new and updated versions of its program, with new and usable features. Those I have talked to, still think back to WP as that blue screen version from 15 years ago or so. Being #2, WP does have to try harder, and they do. Being #1, Microsoft has to do very little to keep people happy or to update; they dominate the market, so there is little impetus for them to improve what they have. Most of the time when I read about a new improvement in Microsoft Word, it is a feature that WP has had for a half dozen years already.