WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows

Product Information

As the latest version in the WordPerfect product line, WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows offers improvements that set the standard for word and document processing. From simple ease-of-use enhancements to intelligent automation tools, WordPerfect's new capabilities strengthen the product's position as the best word processor for Windows.

Word processing is fundamental to almost any work environment, and more documents are created worldwide using WordPerfect than any other software. Each of the enhancements to WordPerfect 6.1 were made to simplify word processing tasks. New technologies such as PerfectSense™ let your computer do more of the work without getting in the way of what you want to do with a word processor—write, communicate, share your ideas, get your work done. The legacy of WordPerfect combined with exciting and time-saving innovations make WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows the perfect way to create better documents.

Development Goals and Results

WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows was designed based on product research and user feedback from four principal sources:

On-location field research with customers in their own environments to better understand their work needs and patterns and how our software can help them to get their work done better and faster. In this ground-breaking research, product designers categorized user work patterns and studied user intent—not just features used, but what people were actually trying to accomplish. Using this kind of work analysis, WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows moves beyond product feature lists with innovations that help people work faster.

Usability research conducted at WordPerfect's industry-leading usability center with hundreds of subjects, studying a myriad of product design and implementation issues. Usability is used to refine new product designs and test field research conclusions. The results of usability are evidenced in improvements such as the new interface design, simplified dialog boxes, and a more accessible help system.

Customer feedback via Customer Support lines, electronic forums, and WordPerfect's own regional sales staff. WordPerfect has always valued feedback from customers and uses their praise, concerns, and complaints to improve products.

Enhancement requests from users of WordPerfect products. WordPerfect has a formalized system for receiving and processing enhancement requests that feeds the information directly to the developers who use the requests in determining product improvements.

This information was carefully analyzed along with market demands and corporate objectives. This resulted in the formulation of four principal goals for developing WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, each to help customers:

Write Better

Work Smarter and Faster

Transition Easily

Integrate Perfectly

The overriding philosophy of all design decisions was to "get the software out of the way of the work." This means that the software needs to work with users, not against them, to help them get their word processing work done faster and with less effort. In addition, all product changes were coordinated with the other applications of Novell's new suite of products, PerfectOffice 3.0, so there would be consistency and a high level of integration among the products. Finally, as part of the Novell family of products, WordPerfect made efforts to be even more network aware than ever before, offering network customers new advantages and opportunities to use the software in a workgroup environment.

Each of the four product goals is discussed in more detail in this guide with examples of how each has been met in WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows.

Write Better

Word processors have long provided tools to help you format text, but they had no idea what your words meant. Now WordPerfect's advanced PerfectSense technology can understand words within their context and help you write better. Using PerfectSense, WordPerfect 6.1 can automatically fix your grammar, search for all forms of a word from the one that you supply, and replace words with the correct form. You save time, and your documents look better as the software does the work.

Grammatik 6

Grammar checking has traditionally been a process that checked your document for common errors and gave you advice based on proper grammar rules. The challenge was that you had to first understand the advice and then determine how to modify the text to make it better. Now with the new Grammatik 6 and PerfectSense built into WordPerfect 6.1, you can check your grammar as easily as you check your spelling. Grammatik 6 doesn't just offer advice that you need an English teacher to understand, but will actually rewrite your sentences for you. Just click Replace and let WordPerfect do all the work.

Find and Replace

The problem with find and replace has always been that it can only look for exactly what you type. What you told us you needed was a product that would let you specify a word and have it automatically find all forms of that word and even replace them with the correct forms of another word. Using PerfectSense technology, the new Find and Replace in WordPerfect 6.1 does exactly that. For example, you could find all forms of the word "buy" (buy, bought, buying, etc.) then automatically replace them with the proper form of the word "purchase" (purchase, puchased, purchasing, etc.). This capability is perhaps even more significant in languages other than English where word forms can be spelled much differently from the root.

Spell Checker and Thesaurus

In addition to the grammar checker, other WordPerfect writing tools use PerfectSense technology to offer you better writing assistance. Both the spell checker and thesaurus use PerfectSense to look up and replace words in the proper forms. The Thesaurus allows you to look up words using any form, even if the form is not in its word list.

QuickFinder

QuickFinder, WordPerfect's patented file indexing and searching program, lets you find files on your hard drive or network faster than similar standalone applications costing hundreds of dollars. This searching ability applies to WordPerfect documents as well as other word processing, spreadsheet, database files, and more. You can search for filenames or types or for specific text in the files, using wildcards and Boolean operators. When searching with QuickFinder indexes, your results are displayed in seconds.

In WordPerfect 6.1, QuickFinder also offers new capabilities, such as an interactive browser to speed directory selection; UNC (Universal Naming Convention) support for network and device- independent indexing; the Concept Builder that uses PerfectSense technology to help you construct searches on word forms, sounds, and even common misspellings; and Relevance Ranking that sorts files in search results by the likelihood of significance.

QuickCorrect

QuickCorrect, first introduced in WordPerfect 6.0a, now has several additional capabilities to automatically fix errors and improve your writing.

QuickCorrect includes more than 130 of the most commonly misspelled words and you can add hundreds more to automatically correct spelling errors on the fly. QuickCorrect can now automatically remove extra spaces in between words and sentences, capitalize the first letter of a sentence, and insert typeset-quality quotation marks. You can also use QuickCorrect entries to expand text, such as having your initials become your full name when you press the spacebar. QuickCorrect makes you a better writer; you just have to turn it on.

Work Smarter and Faster

Your word processor should work with you and for you, being smart enough to take care of common and complex tasks without extra effort on your part. It should also provide quick tools that will save you time and effort. WordPerfect 6.1 does this with a host of enhancements, only some of which are listed below, that let you work smarter and faster than ever before.

Templates and Document Experts

Our research showed that most people were not using document templates, in WordPerfect or other products, for two principal reasons: 1) they didn't know how to use them or even that they were there and 2) if they did find them, they didn't think the supplied templates were relevant to their personal work. To address these concerns, WordPerfect 6.1 now ships with more than 50 new document templates all nicely grouped and easy to discover each time you select File, New to create a new document. These templates can be used for common tasks such as letter writing, fax cover sheets, memos, and much more, making them immediately useful. They are based on accepted standards for formatting and content, so you can immediately use them for your work with confidence. They are also fully automated, so they prompt you for the information they need to be accurate and complete. In addition, you can easily create your own templates with our new Template Coach and Prompts Builder, letting you make custom solutions for specific tasks in your environment.

Document Experts supplement the templates by providing an additional level of automation in creating some of your most common documents. For example, the Letter Expert will help you build your letters as you work on them, complete with openings, closings, enclosures, and content assistance. The Calendar Expert can help you create calendars in any of four formats, either portrait or landscape, and for as many months as you would like. Other document experts are available for newsletters, faxes, and memos.

Table Expert

Formatting a table to look just right can be a time-consuming task, often with many selections to make using borders, lines, fills, and text styles. WordPerfect 6.1 makes this easy by providing the Table Expert, a simple way to choose from a large number of predefined table styles for instantly improving a table's appearance. But WordPerfect 6.1 doesn't stop there—if one of the styles in the Expert doesn't meet your needs, you can easily create your own and add them to the list. And because these are styles, you can modify the table, such as adding rows and columns, and it will still retain the look you have chosen.

Another change in WordPerfect 6.1 is that table columns can be sized automatically to their content using the Size Column to Fit option. This makes it a one-click operation to get table column widths matched up exactly with your data and is another example of how WordPerfect saves you time and effort. Combine that with nearly 100 table formulas, named ranges, and automatic data fill for numbers, days of the week, months, and more, and you have the most powerful table feature in any word processor.

Make It Fit Expert

If you have ever spent time changing fonts and other settings to make a document fit on a certain number of pages, you'll appreciate WordPerfect's new Make It Fit Expert. This step-saver can, for example, take your letter that is just slightly more than one page and shrink it down to fit on one. But Make It Fit doesn't just shrink a document. It can also take your 9-page report or newsletter and automatically expand it out to 12 pages or more. The best part is that you decide what settings can be changed—fonts, spacing, or margins. You write the text, and WordPerfect 6.1 will use Make It Fit to increase or decrease the size of your document up to 50 percent.

Multiple Level Undo/Redo

In order to give you the freedom to safely explore document editing and formatting options, WordPerfect 6.1 offers you up to 300 levels of Undo/Redo. Anything you do in your document can be undone, and then redone if needed. To make your shared documents secure, Undo/Redo gives you the ability to erase the changes from the document when you save it.

QuickFormat with AutoUpdate

If you already use QuickFormat in WordPerfect for Windows, you know how easy it is to "load" formatting from one section of text and "paint" it to other locations. Now with WordPerfect 6.1, QuickFormat lets you tie text together so that if you make formatting changes in one location, all other text you painted is automatically and dynamically updated to match. This is especially useful for headings and titles that might be scattered throughout your document but need to look the same. QuickFormat is the easiest way to automatically keep your documents looking great.

QuickSelect

After typing, selecting text is the most common editing task performed, so it makes sense to build as much intelligence into that process as possible. WordPerfect 6.1 does a number of things with selection: 1) automatically selecting entire words as you extend your selection to multiple words, 2) applying attributes, such as bold or italic, to an entire word if nothing is selected, and 3) giving you easy access to selection options, such as sentence, paragraph, page, and the entire document, by clicking the right mouse button in the left margin.

Intelligent Cut and Paste

Whenever you move text using cut and paste or drag and drop, there are many cases where you have to go back and manually add or delete space characters, often in both the old and new locations. WordPerfect 6.1 is intelligent enough to automatically perform these steps after copying or moving text, letting the software work for you.

Open As Copy

Our research showed that one of the most common things people do is open existing documents and reuse them for new tasks, but their concern is always accidentally overwriting the old file with the changes. So WordPerfect 6.1 made this common task easy with an Open As Copy option in the Open dialog box. Simply check this option when opening a file, and it will appear in WordPerfect 6.1 without a name but with all the content and formatting of the original. You can then edit it as needed without worrying about losing the original document. A simple thing perhaps, but one that we know will save you steps, because you told us that's how you like to work.

Drop Cap

A great way to add a professional touch to documents is to use a drop cap at the start of a paragraph. In WordPerfect 6.1, this is done easily by choosing Drop Cap from the Format menu. You can choose from any of 14 predefined styles or customize your drop caps with line size, margin positioning, borders, and fills. When you use a drop cap, your documents will look nice and your paragraphs will still function correctly with all other features such as the speller and grammar checker.

Drag to Create

For years, WordPerfect for Windows has had great graphics handling abilities, including graphic styles that let you determine the position and appearance of images and text boxes. Now WordPerfect 6.1 includes a Drag to Create option on the Graphics menu that lets you draw your box so you can position and size it just the way you like. After drawing your box, you are immediately prompted to insert your content so inserting an image is a one-step process. Once you have selected Drag to Create, you can continue to use it for graphics, text boxes, equations—any kind of box you might use to enhance the look and functionality of your documents.

Transition Easily

WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows provides a host of tools, in the form of conversions, Experts, Coaches, Tutorials and more, to make the transition from DOS or other environments to WordPerfect 6.1 as smooth as possible.

Document Conversion

WordPerfect 6.1 provides the best conversions from the WordPerfect 5.x file format, the most popular file format in the world. Unlike other word processors who have WordPerfect conversions, WordPerfect 6.1 conversions retain the structure as well as the appearance of WordPerfect documents so users can easily edit them. In addition, WordPerfect 6.1 supports conversions for other major application formats, such as Word 6.0 and Ami Pro 3.01, and is the only word processor to offer conversions for WP 5.x macros.

QuickStart Coach

To get you up and running quickly on WordPerfect 6.1, the QuickStart Coach will launch the first time you use the product. This brief product tour will familiarize you with the product interface and let you immediately feel at home in WordPerfect 6.1. If you need to, you can come back to the QuickStart Coach any time through the Coaches dialog box.

Upgrade Expert

WordPerfect 6.1 makes it easy to upgrade from a previous version of WordPerfect or from other competing products with the Upgrade Expert. This Expert highlights commands from various word processors and displays the equivalent commands in WordPerfect 6.1. Providing "Show Me" and "Do It" buttons, as well as access to related Coaches and Help file information, the Upgrade Expert is the place to start to make your transition to WordPerfect smooth and pleasant.

New Coaches

Coaches have proven to be a popular tool for getting things done and learning more about WordPerfect in the process. New Coaches for WordPerfect 6.1 cover topics such as templates and styles, letting you easily take advantage of some of the most powerful features the product has to offer.

Help

Unlike some other Windows programs, WordPerfect 6.1 includes Help that is really helpful. Research about Help led to three significant improvements that make Help more visual and accessible: 1) more synonyms in the Search terms, 2) better organization, and 3) a visually appealing interface. With more synonyms, you are more likely to find the term you want when searching. Help is now better organized with a hierarchical structure so you can quickly move from general to specific topics. And a visually inviting interface lets you click pictures of sample documents to see how they were created.

Customer Support

WordPerfect, the Novell Applications Group, has the most renowned customer support effort in the industry. In fact, WordPerfect recently won the PC World World Class Award for the best support—for the fifth year in a row. WordPerfect, the Novell Applications Group, is still the only major software vendor to offer toll-free support. So to get all your technical questions answered, you can use free, toll-free support for 180 days after your first phone call.

Integrate Perfectly

WordPerfect 6.1 plays a key role in Novell's new suite of applications, PerfectOffice 3.0. Many enhancements have been made to make the applications in PerfectOffice work well together. In addition, WordPerfect 6.1 supports key integration technologies that let it work with all other Windows applications so you can get your work done in the way that is best for you.

Common Interface

The products in PerfectOffice 3.0 share a common interface; the menus, Toolbars, and general appearance are decidedly similar, making them easy to learn and use. This standardization and simplification of interface benefits all users of WordPerfect 6.1, but especially those who use more than one application from PerfectOffice 3.0.

PerfectFit Technology

PerfectFit technology allows WordPerfect applications under Windows to share a number of features and capabilities, as well as a common macro language. PerfectFit reduces the amount of memory and disk space required by the applications by letting them share common code and it enhances the common look and feel of all PerfectOffice programs. For example, with PerfectFit, all PerfectOffice 3.0 applications, including WordPerfect 6.1, have a common spell checker and the same file management tools in the Open and Save dialog boxes. One third of the code in WordPerfect 6.1 is shared by other PerfectOffice applications.

PerfectScript

As part of PerfectFit technology, PerfectOffice 3.0 is the first suite of applications to offer cross- product macro recording, called PerfectScript. Just like recording a simple macro in WordPerfect, PerfectScript makes it easy to create custom automated solutions that use one or a combination of PerfectOffice applications. Included with PerfectScript in WordPerfect 6.1 is a new visual Dialog Editor so you can easily create custom dialogs for your macros.

OLE 2

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) is a powerful way to build compound documents and let applications work together. WordPerfect 6.1 supports OLE 2 as both a container and a server, allowing for in-place editing of objects in WordPerfect documents, drag-and-drop movement across programs and documents windows, and linking or embedding of any OLE object such as graphics, data, sound, or other multimedia elements.

Network Support

If you're working on a network, WordPerfect 6.1 is designed to make it easy. From powerful network installation and configuration abilities to full Universal Naming Convention support at install time, the product runs well on a network right out of the box. You have the ability to set it up as freely or as tightly controlled as you like for your environment.

Object Exchange (OBEX)

OBEX provides the ability to easily share data across a network, phone line, or other method of communication, something other standards do not offer today. WordPerfect 6.1 supports OBEX publish and subscribe, allowing you to easily exchange data with other OBEX-enabled applications such as Quattro Pro and Paradox.

ODBC and IDAPI

WordPerfect has long provided the ability to directly access spreadsheet data in documents. WordPerfect 6.0 added database access for dBase, Paradox, SQL, and other formats, making it simple to import or link data from any of these sources. Now with ODBC and IDAPI support, WordPerfect 6.1 supports the latest database programs, including Microsoft Access and Borland dBase for Windows. You can access all data tables and fields and perform queries on the data before importing it into your documents.

TWAIN

TWAIN support in WordPerfect 6.1 allows you to easily include scanned images with your work. Just select Acquire Image from the Insert menu, scan the image, and bring it right back into your document. WordPerfect is the first and only word processor to support TWAIN, the industry standard for scanning created by major vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Logitech.

Open Document Management API (ODMA)

WordPerfect 6.1 supports ODMA for document management, which provides tight integration with products such as Novell SoftSolutions. Support for ODMA, the industry standard, allows WordPerfect and SoftSolutions to work together seamlessly to provide users with the best combination of word processing and document management services