Corel WordPerfect: It's the Codes!

Okay, you're not stupid. Neither am I. But I've used Corel WordPerfect at home and Microsoft Word at work, for years.

WordPerfect is better.

Not because it has a better learning curve; it doesn't. Not because of this or that cool thing that you can do - I mostly type text, whatever word processing program I'm using, and there's not much I do that's cool.

No, it's the codes. Only the codes. Those delightful codes!

Now, if you use Word at work, of course, you're used to the way it functions. But I'll bet you still find yourself, now and then, with some formatting you didn't ask for - with your words looking Extremely Strange on the screen and printing Extremely Strangely on the paper.

I'd like to say that never happens with WordPerfect. But I'd be lying.

Of course it does.

With Word, I have resorted on occasion to copying the text into a fresh document, or even copying it into Notepad to lose its formatting, then copying it back into the fresh document, hurling imprecations the while.

And I'm not (really!) unusually stupid. Nor unusually tech-unsavvy.

It's true that at work (in a library), I was often working with children who had no idea how to use a word processor, but were required to do so by their school. They could mess up a document faster and more creatively than you can imagine!

But I make mistakes at home, too, even though I'm a grownup. Sometimes the fingers go faster than the brain; sometimes I think I know what I'm doing, but I don't. And sometimes I'm trying out something new to me.

So, suddenly my page looks funny.

When that happens, because I'm a keyboard kind of guy, I usually hit Alt-F3. Sometimes, instead, I click on the "View" menu and scroll down to click "Reveal Codes."

Bang! Suddenly, I have a gray window at the bottom of the page. The gray space shows my text, the formatting codes, and a cursor that keeps up with my cursor. I can make the window larger or smaller; often, I just leave it open, sized at three or four lines deep.

This window shows everything! This paragraph, for example, looks like this with its codes revealed -

This*window*shows*Italceverything!Italc**This*paragraph,*for*example,*looks*like*this*with*its*codes*revealed*-:4:33HRt

In the real WordPerfect, the asterisks would be little diamonds, and the numbers, HRt's and Italc's would be in variously shaped little boxes, very easy to find (and searchable, too). They show exactly when you switched to italics, exactly how many hard returns you used between paragraphs.

None of this is necessary for robots, but for those of us who are human and make human mistakes, this is an enormous benefit: You don't have to have any idea what you did wrong! "How did that code get there?" you say, but you don't really care. You just take it out, and the screen above reverts to something normal.

Sometimes it's not that simple, but most of the time, it really is.

Oh, I do love codes! Thank you, Corel!