as the winning product," wrote James Gleick in The New York Times Magazine.
"Time and again its strategy has been to enter a market fast with an inferior
product to establish a foothold, create a standard, and grab market share."
menus. Another problem was that WordPerfect took too long to migrate to
Windows 3.0, which became the most popular operating system ever. But the
main problem was that Microsoft engineers had advance information about
Windows.
withheld "critical technical information" about Windows. Novell also charged
that Microsoft deliberately excluded WordPerfect from the marketplace by
using monopoly power to prevent hardware manufacturers from offering
WordPerfect to customers.
were simply able to "fly in formation," as CEO Steve Ballmer liked to put it.
Only this formation was more like a bomber run.
shows a preview, right in your document, when you are considering changing
the font, size, or alignment of the text, allowing you to change your mind
before committing to alterations. It offers a "reveal codes" feature (see Fig-
ure 4-6) that lets you "open the hood" on any section of text and make changes
to formatting by changing the codes directly. As a result, WordPerfect is less
likely than Word to surprise you with automated reformatting. It also uses its
own settings for print options rather than forcing you to set them each time
in the Windows print driver.
Office doc formats and RTF files with almost perfect back-and-forth compat-
ibility. It can also save documents in the PDF format, with hyperlinks if you
use them. WordPerfect's "compatibility toolbars" let you save documents in
Microsoft's formats with a single click--you can even substitute icons and
menus that approximate Microsoft's user interface instead of WordPerfect's.
A Legal toolbar provides easy, one-click access to specialty tools for the legal
community, including the Pleading Wizard, the Clipbook, the Concordance
tool, and support for EDGAR electronic document filing. WordPerfect 12
Office is not just for lawyers; it's a solid product for all kinds of word process-
ing, and Corel (www.corel.com) provides adequate support that is as good as
if not better than Microsoft's.