Description:
A solid, fast, and easy-to-use word processor that also has advanced features is a powerful tool and a good find, especially when it bears the legendary name of WordPerfect. Now being published by Corel, WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac is more than a word processor. With the ability to export HTML files for the Web and import QuickTime movies and sounds, as well as its use of interactive dialog boxes, WordPerfect is a hybrid page-layout application and multimedia tool. Along with the usual array of spell checkers and grammar checkers, layout options, tables, and a wide assortment of document templates, Corel has thrown in 5,400 clip art images, 150 fonts, 200 high-resolution photos, almost 200 textures, and almost 500 sound files. One thing that WordPerfect has always excelled at is its handling of large files, i.e., novel-length documents. Built-in memory management, combined with efficiently written code, makes writing large documents a pleasure. Navigation (scrolling) is fast, as is spell checking and document reformatting. Since this is an older application, the system requirements are very modest by today's standards--5 MB RAM, a Power Mac (which all Macs are now), and about 16 MB of disk space are all that's needed. Yet the program is robust and flexible and, in light of its age, fairly crash free even under Mac OS 8.6 and 9. There aren't too many competitors in the word processing arena, but even if there were, WordPerfect 3.5 would be a tough one to beat. In light of the feature set and the cost, it's an outstanding value. --Mike Caputo
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