Against the Word

Well, I'm always happy to read of people who think Word is pretty horrible as a word processing program, but Jason Wilson's explanation of why he doesn't like it is a bit odd.   Seems to be something about the purity of a program that does the bare minimum in terms of getting words on a screen that appeals to him.  As some people say in comments, he makes it sound like he should just use Notepad.

My beloved Wordperfect (windows versions) gets mentioned in comments a few times:  there is even a purist who has found a way to use WP5.1 on Windows 10!   That is taking things a bit far.

But the simple truth remains:  in terms of fixing formatting issues, Wordperfect with its "reveal codes" function is still much, much easier to use than the secret format coding of a Word document.

I still marvel at the way a university student who has only ever known Word will not know how to stop some formatting issue that I could fix in a flash if it was Wordperfect. 

I have been using Wordperfect X4 nearly daily for many years, and I don't see any great need to upgrade.   I see the latest version (X9) is pretty expensive though.  I don't know that Corel is really trying to sell it any more.

Oh look - you still get people posting stuff as recently as this year saying "They're still selling Wordperfect??!!"   And a couple of people in comments do note the wonder of the "reveal codes" feature.

I am not alone...