I installed WordPerfect 8 in a night and morning a week ago. I
had a bunch of trouble, but I was trying to do some non-standard
things (see below). What caused me to do this was that I have a
spreadsheet I have to audit, and the auditing tools in Quattro
Pro 5.0 (DOS) were so much better than Excel 97 or Lotus 97, that
I wanted to use Quattro. However, I had done a "standard"
installation of 7.0, some tools weren't there, and so I would
have to re-install 7. Since I have 8, anyhow, I figured I would
install that, instead.
A full installation of Office 8.0 takes about 160 megs, according
to the help screens. I didn't install any of the 1000 fonts, and
I did a bunch of changes, see below, so I actually would up with
at least that much on the disk.
First, I found that the Quattro Pro 8 does not have the auditing
tools I wanted, and that were in Quattro Pro 5 (DOS) (which can't
load Excel spreadsheets anyhow). Unfortunately, I discovered this
*after* I had removed much of Word Perfect Office 7.0 (including
Quattro). So I was faced with the problem of reinstalling Quattro
7.0. to see if it had the tools I wanted. (It doesn't)
The Corel 7 installation program will let you try to install
Quattro 7 back to the Office7 directory, while leaving Quattro 8
in the SUITE8 directory, but it bombs out every time. I couldn't
make it work. (Moreover, it keeps trying to look for some files
in the Quattro 8 locations--I kept having to change paths.)
Finally, I just copied the Quattro 7 directory from the CD to the
hard disk. However, while Quattro 7 worked, I couldn't get into
its help (it was there, but it couldn't find it). At this point I
did a massive uninstall of Wordperfect 7 and Wordperfect 8, and
started again. In addition to the deinstall (using both Remove-IT
and Windows Remove Programs), I cleaned out directories by hand.
Still, there's a lot of trash, I'm sure. (If you install the full
documentation, in Envoy format, that's about 380 megs.)
The fresh installation of Quattro 7 worked fine. Then the fresh
reinstallation of Quattro, Presentations, Envoy, etc., 8 worked
fine (I hadn't removed WP 8). At this point I hadn't checked
whether Quattro 7 has the audit functions I need, but was to
learn that it was all for naught (about 5 hours sunday and maybe
3 saturday).
WordPerfect 8 looks fine. I had had troubles with WP 7: the font
menu and the Reveal Codes screen used a small, blurry font that I
couldn't read (15 inch monitor, set for 1024x768, .28 pitch). The
new program uses standard fonts and is fine in this respect. It
also seems to load fast. Others don't seem to have had the
problem of small, blurry fonts in WP 7, but I sure did, and I
could never find any way of changing them. Well, that's history
now.
QuickView Plus, 4.0 was a waste. Version 3.0 had been great, so I
had high hopes for 4.0. It is much more WYSYWIG, but they
interprete that so that if you right-click a file and view it, it
is usually too small to see. You then have to click to get it
full-screen. Anyhow, I found it so annoying, that I removed it
within an hour and reinstalled 3.0 (3.0 had no trouble doing a
fresh installation from the CD). I wrote the publisher
(INSO Corp.), with a copy to Corel.
The new version of Info Central did not ship yet, (there is a
demo that I didn't run). Info Central 7.0 is much less functional
than Sidekick 95 that shipped with 7.0, and which I continue to
use (at least until I again decide that a paper pocket agenda is
better). I had trouble getting the address book (7.0) to run. It
would tell me that my "profile" lacks the address book, but it
doesn't tell you that to edit the profile you have to tell the
machine (in setup) that each user can edit his own profile. Once
you edit it, you set it back to all users use the same profile,
so you don't have to log in on bootup. If I can find a way of
removing the whole profile business, I'll be happier. Sidekick
and Dashboard no longer ship with WordPerfect. (I also think
Sidekick 95 is somewhat more functional for my purposes than
Lotus Organizer, but I haven't tried the address book on that
one.) I never used dashboard.
Envoy 7.03 ships with WP 8.0. In my travails the Envoy printer
driver uninstalled itself and is lost. I'll have to restore it.
(This apparently happens often enough so there is a file in the
Envoy directory telling how to do it.) Envoy 7.03 is apparently
enough different from envoy 7.02 that ships with WP  7.0 so that
it should be reinstalled (as I read the documentation).
Barista claims to let you print to Java appletts. It now sits as
an additional printer driver. I haven't tried it, or the SGML
output.
DAD8, (Desktop Applications Director) loads the applications as
icons on the taskbar tray. This makes them very quick to access,
without having to put the icons on the desktop. It works well,
and I was able to install Sidekick and CorelDraw 7 (Draw 6 had
shipped with WP 7, but Draw 7 does not ship with WP 8) as well as
unrelated programs (Timeslips, Word97, Excel97, and Lotus123-97). I
will uninstall the DAD for Presentations and Envoy, I think. It
has its limitations (you can't control the icon, or the name that
the tip will show), but it seems more stable and to work better
than the "trayminimizer" program I had been working with.
Basically, the programs are not open and running on the taskbar
(unless you open them and then minimize them to the tray), but
they are still very accessible. (The start menu is a zoo, and it
will be a while before I can try to organize it.)
As a result of all this, Drive C was low on space. I decided to
move 100 megs from D to C, using Partition Magic 3.0
This worked fine, after a couple of reboots, (reduce D by 100
megs, move D so the space is between C and D, instead of D and
E), expand C by 100 megs. Worked fine, except that Partition
Magic trashed its own directory--14 chains of clusters, including
some Partition Magic files. It's hard to say why this should have
happened, since, except for enlarging it and installing and
uninstalling all that stuff, Drive C was untouched (I didn't move
it, as I did with D, and I didn't change the FAT to FAT 32 and
then change it back). So I probably ought to reinstall partition
magic.
After all this, it turned out that Quattro 7.0 does not have the
functionality I wanted. I checked a book on Quatto 6.0, and it
doesn't either. I think there may be other ways of doing what I
want, but it's a PITA.  Essentially, Quattro 3 & 5 DOS (I skipped
4) have a "map view" that gives an overview of the spreadsheet,
with each cell represented only as to its type. This is helpful
in getting an understanding, and also looking for mistakes. Then
it has options on Tools>Audit to let you highlight all formulas
that reference blank cells or titles. This again can spot some
common problems (though the formulas *might* be correct, anyhow).
Quattro 8 does have some ways of letting you highlight precedents and
descendents of a formula or cell. This is nice, but one would
like to do it for all formulas at once (the financial modeling
package, Javelin, which is no longer sold, did that beautifully).
Also, it lets you print out the formulas in each cell, rather
than the values. This has been an audit tool since the days of
Multiplan (Lotus 1A didn't do it right), but isn't in the current
Excel. Quattro also lets you edit headers and footers directly,
if I understand the documentation. (for various reasons, the
stuff I'm working on right now is in Excel). (What you do is make
the cells wide enough, and the font small enough, so that the
formulas will print. Then you print the spreadsheet, and you can
check what's going on.)
I did load a huge (3.3 megabytes!) document (actually in WP5
format. I had a couple of problems with it locking up, and it was
a bit slow moving around, but it did seem to work. (I should say
I'm running a Pentium 133 with 64 megs, a Diamond 3200
accellerated graphics card, and a 3.2 gig SCSI hard disk) I can't
say whether it was faster than 7.0 (which has been uninstalled),
but it does seem to work better. It also seems to have a slightly
different keyboard option (there are 4 keyboards that ship with
it: 6.1 DOS, 7.0, 8.0, and Equation Editor), but I'm not familiar
enough with WP 7.0 to comment.
It comes on 1 CD, vice the 3 CDs with 7.0 (office professional).
No Paradox. No Sidekick or Dashboard. No Draw. But a new picture
editor that handles GIFs nicely. No copy of reference books
(competitor to Microsoft library). 1000 fonts, and a ton of
clipart and photos. The clipart library has changed. (Some of the
stuff my daughter used to illustrate reports this spring is
gone). So you may want to keep both disks handy.
It was the upgrade and came with 2 volumes. One is a general
text, and the other is a catalog of the fonts and clip art. Other
documentation for each application is in Envoy files on each
disk. (the envoy viewer did install; it's only the driver to
*create* envoy files that didn't. (Envoy is a competitor to Adobe
Acrobat, but I've never seen anyone but Corel use it.)
All in all it was probably worth the upgrade, even though it's
more of a 7.1 than an 8.0. Because I had bought 7.0 between May 1
and June 30, I got it for $49 (US). (I had posted a message here
about the deal back in June or July.) I've since seen it
discounted, and I'm seeing 7.0 academic and full version in the
remainder stores. 7.0 Academic doesn't have any printed
documentation, but is otherwise complete, and that's what I
upgraded.
And what do I actually use? Good old 5.1+.
--
  ___   __      chessler@mix.cpcug.org
   d_)--/d      chessler@capaccess.org
 * Evaluation copy of Silver Xpress. Day # 42653
 * Silver Xpress V4.3
--- PCBoard (R) v15.3/25
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