Kids today and their fancy Office 365.
Back in my day, and to this day, Microsoft offers such huge discounts in academia on licensing, and recruit so many students from university, I never saw anything but MS.
I’m glad we are at least in an age that there’s alternative to Microsoft in the free and open source space for individuals even when school goes down their path.
I miss old-school WordPerfect. Our school was largely using Office 97, but one teacher preferred WP, and we had to use it in that particular class.
My biggest takeaway from it was that, contrary to what MS would have you believe, it is absolutely possible to put formatting options in logical places in menus. Everything about WP was just so intuitive.
You never got stuck in formatting hell on word-perfect apparently.
It was pretty easy in creating new original documents.
Editing existing documents was an absolute nightmare. The list was extremely long of random shit that would happen we you deleted some text.
I never really ran into that, and part of the curriculum for that class was editing / correcting other people’s documents.
Was that only if you imported a document from a different format, perhaps?
There were a few times I encountered slight formatting glitches, but we were taught to just turn on Reveal Codes to easily find/fix those.
I am not quite that old, but I learned digital media creation in the Macromedia Suite… Dreamweaver, Flash… before Adobe bought them out.
Dreamweaver was my favorite way to create webpages back in the days of HTML 4.
I cut my hobby web design teeth on Macromedia Fireworks. Adobe’s output sucks in comparison to mm.
Look at you Mr. Fancy Pants using Windows.
Before Correl bought WordPerfect and made it usable!
WordPerfect was a nightmare to use, and I’m very glad that it’s dead.
I had Corel WordPerfect for Linux.
You could modify the SGML codes to create documents that were compatible with all other versions of WordPerfect and MS Word, but he features that were supported in the document format, but not in the software.
For instance, I could change use more than the 16 colours that the Word for Windows UI allowed you to use, even though the displayed correctly in the WYSIWYG editor and printed correctly.
Oh god, SGML. That’s a memory I had successfully repressed.
I used to write my Computer Science assignments in DocBook (XML). It would amaze the assessor’s when they said they wanted a PDF or PostScript or HTML or whatever and I would spit out a document custom formatted for whichever platform they wanted.
Then they would ask for it in Word DOC and I would be screwed.
Hell yeah. I ran Corel Linux their last gasp at a pivot….
I think this was the version right before WYSIWIG support was added. So you could still use fonts, and change font sizes but on screen it would show a strange notation but not the actual font. Complex layouts were tough 😅
Fun fact, I read that GRRM still writes using a DOS copy of WordPerfect
Maybe he just hasn’t written anything since it was the standard.
Daaaaaamn
WordPerfect 5. On DOS. Over NetWare. But XyWrite was the one true wordprocessor.
Word perfect in 1990 was better than Word is today.
I had MS Works for DOS at home as a ternager. Let’s just say I don’t miss the way spell check worked before the red squiggly line was invented.
I too was once a ternager 😉
