Court Clears Novell To Sue Microsoft Over WordPerfect 165
An anonymous reader writes "15 years after Novell sold the software to Corel, a court has given Novell the right to sue Microsoft over WordPerfect, which had a 50 percent market share in the early '90s."
I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?" (Score:5, Insightful)
There's closing the barn door after the animals have left and then there's just.... uhm... I'm at a complete loss as to what a metaphor for this would be.
Wordperfect was relevant once... I even remember using it.
But it isn't now. Live with it. Move on, for chrissake!
Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?" (Score:4, Funny)
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but now she is.
Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?" (Score:5, Insightful)
But Justice (and lawyer's fees) will have their day!
Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but do you remember WordPerfect? It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was. Some of it's features even modern word processors don't have. For example, it had a MakeItFit feature where it would make what you already wrote fit any amount of pages by making very small adjustments to font size, margins and line spacing to hit the desired page count. You can't imagine how much work that saved me in high school (both from going under and going over the requested length). What modern word processor has that feature?
WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product. It's more like closing the barn door after a competing farmer stole all your cows and torched your barn ten years ago, so you had to sell the farm.
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Word 2010 has this feature. It is called Shrink To Fit. http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-word/archive/2010/09/10/shrink-to-fit-in-word.aspx [office.com]
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Yeah, but Wordperfect's MakeItFit feature would expand it to fit as well as shrink it to fit. If you typed a paper that needed to be 7 pages, but what you wrote was only 5 pages MakeItFit would increase font size and adjust margins to make it work out. I loved that feature.
I think that says more about how retarded your teachers were than how great Wordperfect was.
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what? how about number of words, or characters?
you could easily increase lines per page by increasing margins, so that's not a great metric to use.
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"What modern word processor has that feature?"
Serif Page Plus :-)
Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?" (Score:4, Interesting)
WordPerfect lost its dominant position for one reason - their own miscalculation. In the early 90s, WordPerfect didn't think that the Windows 3.x craze would catch on, and they didn't put their development efforts fully into the Windows product. It wasn't until 1991 that they announced WordPerfect for Windows, and it was a disaster, just a GUI front end on top of their DOS engine. In late 1992, they finally came out with a decent Windows version. By then much of the world had moved on to Word. They were slow to support OLE, slow to integrate with PlanPerfect, and later with Quattro Pro, slow to see the power of an integrated office suite, slow slow slow! In addition, MS PowerPoint was orders of magnitude better than anything out there, and it worked with Word and Excel.
Sometimes in business, management makes a severe miscalculation. Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton blew it in 1989/1990. Maybe WordPerfect was better, but it was just too damn late.
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Nail on the head. Almost no one remembers DataEase [wikipedia.org] which was a 4GL database program from the 80's that just kicked serious ass. I would import over a dozen different data formats, export to just as many. It had a completely visual form builder and report writer that was based on SQL they called DQL, built in custom menus, quick reports, menu / form / field level security and was the first all in one database program to take advantage of the LIM spec for extended memory, supported optimistic concurrency a
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WordPerfect also blew a big chunk of the revenues from their office suite on tech support. You'd call in, and one of 1000 or so well-trained staff would answer almost instantly and talk you through how to solve your problem.
Ever try calling tech support for Lotus, or Microsoft, or just about anyone else? Endless voicemail maze, eventually you wait on hold for half an hour to reach someone who doesn't speak your language and has never used the product. Much, much cheaper for the company.
Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?" (Score:5, Insightful)
WordPerfect also blew a big chunk of the revenues from their office suite on tech support. You'd call in, and one of 1000 or so well-trained staff would answer almost instantly and talk you through how to solve your problem.
Ever try calling tech support for Lotus, or Microsoft, or just about anyone else? Endless voicemail maze, eventually you wait on hold for half an hour to reach someone who doesn't speak your language and has never used the product. Much, much cheaper for the company.
Yes, indeed, WordPerfect tech support was best in the industry, hands down.
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WordPerfect also blew a big chunk of the revenues from their office suite on tech support. You'd call in, and one of 1000 or so well-trained staff would answer almost instantly and talk you through how to solve your problem.
Ever try calling tech support for Lotus, or Microsoft, or just about anyone else? Endless voicemail maze, eventually you wait on hold for half an hour to reach someone who doesn't speak your language and has never used the product. Much, much cheaper for the company.
Thing was, you didn't need to call Lotus or Microsoft's helpline very often. Their products worked properly.
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In addition, MS PowerPoint was orders of magnitude better than anything out there, and it worked with Word and Excel.
Where are the +1 Funny upvotes for this?
PowerPoint is like Heroin... Both were marketed as "The Cure for What Ails You" but they just result in lost productivity.
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WordPerfect lost its dominant position for one reason - their own miscalculation. In the early 90s, WordPerfect didn't think that the Windows 3.x craze would catch on, and they didn't put their development efforts fully into the Windows product.
And then later, they decided it wasn't important to have cross-platform capability for your word processor, so they killed the Mac version after the 1996 release. So every company that had both Mac and Windows users and wanted to edit documents was pretty much forced to migrate to Word, even if 95% of their users were running Windows.
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That may have been *a* reason, but it wasn't even *close* to the main reason.
Computers started shipping with hard drives of staggering capacity, 40 or even 80 megabytes of storage, as standard equipment. *Massive* amounts of blank space.
For a very small royalty, manufacturers could slap MS word & excel on every machine. And they did.
Until that, those products were distant thirds (ok, excel may have been a distant second). Once they shipped with machines, however, going out and buying an adequate prod
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Not really. Until WIndows 95 the majority of people still used DOS apps. WordPrefect 5.1 was used for years in the Legal profession after Windows was everywhere. IMHO what killed WordPerfect was what killed Lotus 123 and that was it was too popular of a DOS program. It was next to impossible for those and many other programs to make the move to a WIMP interface without ticking off their customer base. The Problem was they had two choices. 1. Make the program have all new WIndows user Interface and tick of
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Microsoft had no real market share with Word on DOS. They killed MultiPlan and then used the Mac as their development platform. Excel was originally an Mac program.
As were Word and PowerPoint.
MS had a fine DOS WP called Word. When they made a WP for the Mac, they called it "Word", but it had nothing else in common with Word for DOS---just the name. It didn't have the same feature set, and it didn't even work (much) alike, mainly because the Mac version was WIMP and the DOS version was text.
When MS decided they needed a WP for Windows, they ported the Mac version of Word (using an emulation layer) rather than adding WIMP features to the DOS version. Subsequently, they
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Microsoft Word for DOS was okay but it was SLOW. It used graphics for everything and worked with a mouse. Frankly nobody wanted it. I know because the computer store I worked at had several copies of it and the owner gave me one because nobody was ever going to use it.
We actually sold a lot more systems with Wordstar on them but that was when WordPerfect was just starting to get traction. Back then there was a lot of compitions. PerfectWriter, XYWrite, Word, Wordstar, WordPerfect, QnA "Loved that program" a
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Wordperfect (in both GUI and text version) was also available for Unix and Linux too (until it stopped at 8). Something that MS-Word never was.
We STILL use WordPerect 8 under Linux today although it is mostly for legacy- we have moved most everything to OpenOffice.
In many ways, WordPerfect still is better than MS-Word and OpenOffice Writer.
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Yep but it took WordPerfect a while to get a good GUI. I had WordPerfect on my Amiga as well.
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Having lived through the WordPerfect 5.x - Microsoft Word for Windows ("WfW") era and made the transition myself, all I can say is "bollocks." WordPerfect was far more difficult to use than WfW for the entry level user, lacked much in the w
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What was wrong with Wordperfect 7? I loved that version.
Most of peoples complaints were that Wordperfect was slow to get on Win 3.1, which I likely didn't notice since I was pugging away on an 8088 and upgraded only to a blazingly fast 486 right at the tail end of Win 3.1 before Win 95. Computers were expensive back then!
Wordperfect ran on both.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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That statement is equally true when you discard the condition. All the words after "desktop" are superfluous.
Almost Perfect (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but do you remember WordPerfect? It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was.
WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product.
That is not how the story is told by someone who was there from the beginning:
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
Afterword
What, in your opinion, were the critical marketing mistakes made by WordPerfect from your departure up until the acquisition by Novell?
WPCorp spent themselves to death. The last full year I was there (1991) sales were approximately $600 million and pre-tax profit was $200 million. In 1992, sales fell to about $570 million, but expenses grew to equal sales. 1993 sales were about $700 million (if that number can be believed), but expenses grew to more than $700 million. The employee count from early 1992 to the end of 1993 grew from about 3,300 to 5,500, and the company was bleeding cash.
WPCorp needed better products to compete, and they needed a suite of products. The products didn't get better, and selling a Borland Office (rather than a WordPerfect Office) was silly. By spending away all their cash, the company had no chance of recovering. By not developing better products in a productive and efficient way, the company had no chance of recovering. Given Microsoft's strength, perhaps WordPerfect Corp never would have been able to reclaim their number one position in the word processing market, but they could have survived if they would have kept their expenses in check.
Almost Perfect [wordplace.com]
In the DOS era, WordPerfect was supporting every platform known to man - and distracted by internal partisan rivalries. The transition to a GUI came particularly hard.
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Yeah, I really loved that blank blue screen, the lack of menus, the fact that you had to "just know" how to use the fucking thing, vi was free and just as unfriendly, hows about ed? Huh? I used Wordstar, it had menus, you didn't need to study a manual to use it, I don't know why it didn't catch on.
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Disclaimer: I have been to Provo, Utah, and they do not sell beer there)
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Do *NOT* mess with ed!
damn kids.
hawk, checking his lawn
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Self inflicted wounds (Score:2)
It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was.
Debatable on the DOS versions. Word for DOS wasn't anything great. Gotta disagree with you on the Windows versions. They were at least comparable and the consensus seemed to be that Word was regarded as the better product by most.
Some of it's features even modern word processors don't have.
A double edged sword if there ever was one... That's not necessarily a bad thing. I remember with little fondness the little cards you had to attach to the function keys so that you could remember the gazillion totally non-intuitive functions that were available. Virtually every keyboard in every office at one time had one of those little things attached to it. Ugh.
WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product.
"Deserved to win"? They failed to recognize that Windows was the future and came out with an late, buggy and arguably inferior product well after the migration to Word was under way. You can argue that Microsoft used some underhanded tactics but Wordperfect had the dominant position and they unquestionably screwed it up. Word was nothing amazing but some of the main reasons Wordperfect "died" was from self inflicted wounds. They had a dominant market position and failed to recognize where the market was going.
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Also, while I'm not positive on this, I believe WordPerfect introduced the grammar-check before Word. And even if it did not, WordPerfect's old grammer-check still beats Word's horrible grammar-check to this day.
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No, Word couldn't pilot a fucking space mission or give you a blowjob like WP probably could, it was a text editor with nice simple highlight and click-a-button formatting. Oh, and when you printed it came out like it looked on the screen, without having to learn a virtual programming language.
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Closing the barn door after the barn has been torn down?
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It's still relevant for me. I've got a copy open right now, writing a letter. You'll pry my copy of Wordperfect from my cold dead hands.
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It's still relevant for me. I've got a copy open right now, writing a letter. You'll pry my copy of Wordperfect from my cold dead hands.
Wordperfect, the choice of Osama Bin Laden.
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closing the barn door where velociraptors were kept ?
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I am an attorney, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice in this matter, my minimum retainer for antitrust issues is $10,000.
Anyway . . .
It all depends upon the damages.
If the court finds that Wordperfect lost 50% of the word processor market due to anti-competitive behavior, the damages are *staggering*.
Just how much is 50% of that market worth today--and then treble it. And that's before 15 years of lost profits, with interest . . .
hawk, esq.
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Slashdot title is a bit misleading (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
The issue before the appeals court was whether the Caldera settlement [from the 1996-2000 case] also included the associated office productivity software, WordPerfect and Quattro Pro
The way I read that, it doesn't have to do with how many years ago Novell sold WordPerfect, it has to do with an old court case in which the parties are disputing what the settlement covered.
Re:Slashdot title is a bit misleading (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slashdot title is a bit misleading (Score:5, Funny)
So you're saying that Caldera got to keep ¥16.8 billion?
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LoB
Justice is finally being done (Score:2)
Reveal Codes... (Score:4, Insightful)
is the only thing I really miss about WP. I only switched over to OO and then LO with my switch to Linux, but back in the day, I couldn't write without reveal codes.
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is the only thing I really miss about WP. I only switched over to OO and then LO with my switch to Linux, but back in the day, I couldn't write without reveal codes.
Literally every person I've ever talked to about it says the same thing, including my 65 year old mother. It was a killer feature and anybody who used it misses it.
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Creating content and formatting it for print are two very different things, which word processors try to combine into one. When writing a document, codes should be mostly irrelevant. When formatting, they should make all the difference. While WP did not separate both concepts well, the fact that the text entry wasn't WYSIWYG, all while it allowed users to enter reveal codes mode when working on formatting made merging the tasks make a lot more sense than it does today in Word.
For any situation where the tex
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Gods yes. If OO/LO/whatever wants me to go through the bother of uninstalling my old OpenOffice and installing a new version, all they need to do is add something feature-identical to Reveal Codes. Hell, I'd consider switching to another suite altogether if it had that.
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I'd prefer to have the tools to fix problems available to me, even if it means I need to use them somewhat frequently. Not having the tools means that when something does go wrong you have no way to fix it.
But yeah, it all comes down to selecting the right tool for the job, LaTeX works better than Wordperfect in that aspect, and Word works better for the simple stuff.
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And that's why I use TeX.
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I, too loved Reveal Codes in its day. But that day has passed.
However, there is a simple secret to taming Word's formatting, that will serve you well if you heed it: For anything more involved than Bold, Italic, Underline, or a tab stop, always define and use a style rather than entering formatting commands. Yes, it's a horrendous pain in the ass. But it works.
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In other news... (Score:2)
The court also certified a class-action suit against Studebaker over frequent automatic transmission failures in the 1953 Studebaker "Commander" model.
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Hey, up until 5 years or so ago there was still a brand-new, never sold, never left the lot, Studebaker sitting in the dealer showroom right in front of a huge window.
Of course, the dealer had died decades earlier and the heirs were *still* arguing about the inheritance and kept it in limbo, so the property was kept untouched all those years, gathering dust and fading under the sun. Not too far outside Pittsburgh, I saw it a few years before it finally disappeared. My dad used to drive past it every time he
Another swindle with MS lurking behind the curtain (Score:2, Informative)
I was a Corel shareholder (then having major Linux and Office ambitions) when they were acquired in a shady takeover by company with MS affiliations.
WIKI: "In August 2003, Corel was wholly acquired by Vector Capital, a private equity firm, for $1.05 a share (slightly more than the cash in the company)."!!
I then invested whatever was left in Novell (then having major Linux ambitions, and the Office market manipulation suit against MS) when in March (this year) they were acquired in a shady takeover by compan
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What killed Corel was the Dot Com crash.
Before the crash, Corel was in talks to merge with software tools maker Borland. But when the crash happened, the merger fell through and Corel ended up on shaky ground (which resulted in the buyout and the end of the Corel Linux work)
Productivity my ass (Score:2)
Good call. Too much time is wasted using it...
As an engineering student at the time... (Score:2)
Word Perfect's equation editor language kicked much ass as well.
I preferred AmiPro, myself. (Score:2)
nt
I Was There (Score:4, Interesting)
At the same time, Novell was having a hard time showing the value of NetWare-connected machines. Companies were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to install NetWare, but weren't seeing the value of 'networked' machines without an application to showcase NetWare-connected PCs.
Novell approached Alan and Bruce with an offer to purchase GroupWise. But Alan and Bruce were unwilling to split the company into two. Novell insisted and pushed. Novell finally agreed to buy the company (WordPerfect + GroupWise) - as a whole - for the negotiated price.
This all happened right before mass production of the new and highly reviewed WordPerfect products was to begin. All that was needed was for the 'Golden Bits' to be delivered to the factories for mass production, duplication, packaging and shipping. The channel was primed and the companies were waiting with bated breath to purchase the new WordPerfect.
But that never happened.
As soon as the company was purchased, Novell ignored WordPerfect (the product) like an ugly stepchild. They wrapped all of their energies and marketing muscle around GroupWise and bundled it with every sale of Novell NetWare. As a result, people were finally able to see the value of 'networked' machines that you allowed employees to collaborate calendars and share intra-office email.
But it was Novell that killed WordPerfect. There is no one else to blame. Novell killed a cash cow that was handed to them for nearly nothing. In the resulting vacuum, Microsoft Word slowly made inroads that eventually established Word as the word processing standard for the majority of companies around the world.
If the facts come out, it'll be clear Novell has no one to blame but themselves. And not just for WordPerfect's demise - but for NetWare as well. They've failed to capitalize on so many opportunities it's a wonder they even lasted as long as they did.
Novell that killed WordPerfect? (Score:2)
An interesting piece of alternative history, in the real world the record has this to say:
"We are pursuing a strategy to keep WordPerfect on the defensive. In effect, this means acting like we are still the "trailer" and explicitly calling them out with aggressive switcher tactics" link [edge-op.org]
"In an email dated October 3, 199, however, Bill Gates ordered his top executives to retract the documentation of the browsing extensions, but only until Microsoft’s own developers of the Office suite of applications h
F5--Reveal codes was the shiznit. (Score:2)
I loved WP for DOS. The most perfect Word Processor ever. Now every 3 years MS keeps changing Word and it sucks.
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Where's the fucking money Lebowski?
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
F7...reveal codes, a godsend lost....
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F7...reveal codes, a godsend lost....
Really, if Microsoft could just pay Novell (or somebody) to put that in Word, it would do more to normalize the blood pressure of countless office drones than getting rid of the Mountain Dew.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the Word format, is that unlike WordPerfect, it isn't very sane. If you look at a Word document low level, it first has a lot of mark-up and formatting information, and then most of the text. Formats like WordPerfect, HTML, etc., have what I consider more sane formatting, in the sense that there will be markers intermingled with the plain text to indicate where styles, bold, italic and such start and end.
I don't understand the low level Word format, but if you look at it, it seems to be mainly geared at making at as hard as possible to understand what's going on.
It's also why in something like WordPerfect, you can delete all the text between a start tag for example bold, and an end tag and the software will remove both, while in Word pieces can remain, and all of a sudden text starts turning bold, or some other style, when you don't expect it.
Disclaimer: I've used WordPerfect up to version X3 (13), basically until I switched to Mac about 4 years ago. I consider it still better than Word in a lot of aspects. I've used a mix of OpenOffice, MS Office and LaTeX on the Mac. WordPerfect, CorelDraw and SmartDraw are the main reasons I still fire up my old Windows computer every now and then.
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"geared at making at as hard as possible to understand what's going on."
Bingo. You've hit on the problem, as well as the motivation for the problem. Don't you just love Microsoft?
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
This was true in Word for DOS. WinWord started making it a lot more complicated than that. Capsule summary: a document is now a file system.
No. In word, formatting is tied to the paragraph mark (PM) at the end of the paragraph. Delete the PM for paragraph #1 and all the text, etc. in that paragraph will inherit the formatting from paragraph #2. Hint 1: click that backward "P" on the format toolbar to reveal where the PMs are (I still use Office 2000 so have no clue how this is done in more recent versions of Office). Hint 2: copy the PM of the paragraph whose format you like and then past it at the end of the paragraph that got messed up -- problem solved.
Disclaimer: I still use Word 5.0 for DOS [slashdot.org] as my main word processor.
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Toolbar? I don't see any backwards-P on the 'ribbon'.
It is on the Home tab, in the paragraph block of commands. I don't use a new enough version of Office that has a ribbon, but 3 seconds on Google found how to do it. [freewindow...orials.com]
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It's not nearly the same. In WordPerfect the codes would display as if HTML under your text, in a half of the screen called the "underwater screen". And everything was there, all formatting codes.
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And you could cut and pase the codes just like text. The word "reveal codes" is not even a poor imitation; it's an "extinguish" feature.
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And paste it into a search & replace command! ...I miss wp51...
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./cry ....
Not in Canada anymore. Mountain Dew has been caffeine free since a while, and I so wish they had not changed it!
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I found out the hard way. Was at a con party in Canada. Late night, I was feeling a little drowsy, so I found a MD and downed it. Still felt drowsy, went for a second. As I finished it my Canadian host let me in on the news. By then I was on sugar high but headed to bed for the crash. Thanks for nothing Health Canada or whoever neutered Mountain Dew!
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Caffeine free Mountain Dew? That's...that's...that's not Mountain Dew at all...
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Ok, I'll bite... Mountain Dew increases blood pressure via caffeine...
It ain't just the caffeine
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12597970 [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.emaxhealth.com/1275/cut-soft-drink-consumption-reduce-blood-pressure.html [emaxhealth.com]
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I only drink diet, so how is it worse than Cofee with splenda (I use stevia whenever I have some).
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
TeX: Writing with reveal codes always on...
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TeX: Writing with reveal codes always on...
nice!
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If WP wasn't so pathetic in its editing and document management capabilities in the first place it would never need reveal-codes.
It was a crutch that every user had to learn because as long as that existed, there was precious little incentive for WP to ever fix the bugs that necessitated the crutch. You had typists (yeah, that's what they were called in those days) trying to micromanage the formating of every document, which just as often lead to way worse problems.
Not that Word was ever a whole lot better
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Someone who really worked a lot with WP5.1 (really the last great version before MS started to encroach in) F7 would exit the program.
Reveal codes was F11 :).
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Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I know! (Score:2)
Remember when people used to have this thing called a "printer" and spent hours filing away papers?
Seems so antiquated. And it wasn't even that long ago.