WordPerfect Enhances 6.1

November 1994

The race for market share is on. In spite of Microsoft’s huge success with Word, aggressive marketing, and adept claimsmanship, WordPerfect still has more than 17 million users on all platforms, with 11 million DOS users and 6 million Windows users. (WordPerfect admits to having lost about 1.2 million users to Word for Windows, largely among Suite buyers.)

In fact, word processing is important to WordPerfect for two reasons:

* It’s still one of the single largest categories of software. Success here guarantees high volume sales and giant revenues.

* In the suite market, the two primary factors in selecting a suite are:

(1) Ease of Use; and

(2) Word Processor of choice

This means if the customer wants the word processor in your suite, you have a much better chance of making the sale.

WordPerfect’s theory is that now is the time. Lotus has continued to lose market share to Microsoft in the Suite market and word processing is not the Lotus Suite’s strong point. (This is very interesting, since nearly everyone with a professional interest agrees that Lotus’ AmiPro word processor is a beautiful product, certainly competitive with Microsoft and WordPerfect. It’s just never garnered the market following it needs in a very competitive market.)

WordPerfect doesn’t expect to gain a lot of market share at Microsoft’s expense, but it does expect to end up Number Two in the Suite market. It expects to do that quickly, and largely on the basis of leading the way with its word processing product.

All of that said, it was time to give WordPerfect for Windows the once-over, spiffing up the product so that it would really show its stuff and removing every possible customer objection, while adding as many seductive goodies as possible. There’s too much here for any newsletter article -- you’ll need a full dress review of the product for all the details, but we couldn’t resist pointing out some of the best bits.

The most interesting thing that’s going on here is that WordPerfect has been conducting field research for the past several years. Its Tapestry Research Group focuses on how customers do their day-to-day work and what kinds of new products or enhanced functions WordPerfect might provide to improve productivity, increase accuracy, or just make work more pleasant. WordPerfect has also been doing extensive usability research which has resulted in extensive changes in the design of the interface, essentially in making it simpler and more consistent.

Many of the enhancements in WordPerfect 6.1 fall under the heading of helping users to "write better," and many of them use engines and technology from the WordPerfect acquisition of Reference Technology (the developer of the Grammatik product line). These include:

* A new level of grammar checking that will actually rewrite your sentences for you, rather than offering difficult to understand advice. (As a professional writer, with a quirky and eccentric style, I’m not sure I’m ready for this kind of help, but I’d certainly like to have some of my correspondents use it!)

* PerfectSense, a fuzzy match Find and Replace technology that understands how to find all the forms of the words you’re looking for and make the correct substitutions. Teach, teaching, and taught, for instance become Tutor, tutoring, and tutored

* Extensive spelling checker and thesaurus. With PerfectSense built-in they find word forms that aren’t listed, too.

* A patented file indexing technology called QuickFinder which builds an incrementing index of all the words in your document. This allows you to avoid the use of a separate indexing application. While many indexing applications have an overhead of 50 to 100% of storage for their index, QuickFinder uses only 4-6% above the files themselves. This technology means you can search through all the documents in storage for the right document, without the need to previously create keywords or other laborious techniques.

* QuickCorrect is an on-the-fly spelling and typo corrector which has 130 common mistakes built-in. You may add more than 500 additional personal ones and abbreviations of up to 137 characters. Among its tricks it automatically fixes double initial caps (caused by a slow finger on the Shift key) and will let you drag and drop text strings for intelligent cut and paste, with the system doing the necessary clean up.

But the part of the system I liked best were a series of experts, with built-in templates (and visual thumbnails to choose from) for document styles and tables. WordPerfect 6.1 will even prewrite standard letters for you, much like the text from a handbook of standard business letters. All of this expertise is intended to reduce the "fiddle factor" and automate as much as possible. Since you can add your own templates, tables, and formats, it’s entirely customizable at the organizational, departmental, or personal level.

WordPerfect has built in automatic conversion for 5.1 files, to ease the migration process, as well as coaches, experts, and help. All of 6.1, of course, integrates perfectly (pardon the word play) with PerfectOffice, Novell’s own office suite, which WordPerfect predicts will gain the Number Two position, ahead of Lotus, in the first half of 1995. WordPerfect couldn’t resist telling us that PC Computing gave 6.1 a 5-star rating and PerfectOffice got a 4.5 rating out of a possible 5 (against Lotus SmartSuite’s 3.0).

But the suite business is about more than word processing and Lotus customers are concerned about access to 1-2-3 and integration with Notes, so WordPerfect may find that Lotus is harder to displace than they had planned. Nevertheless, this should be an interesting competition -- and the seductive user features such competition generates will certainly find a ready audience.

Comments or Questions: Send Email to opinions@wohl.com

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Entire contents © 1994 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.