
Word vs. Word Pro


                                  WordProcessing  and the Suites
                             Copyright 1995 by Frank McGowan

About a month ago, I broke down and purchased the Lotus Smart-Suite - the Lotus answer to Microsoft Office Professional. While I haven't given all its components a real workout yet, I have had a chance to play with Word Pro. What follows are my impressions of the software while keeping in mind that I am an admitted Word bigot. This fact has caused a few teeny moments of domestic discord, since Sue, my wife, is a devotee of WordPerfect.

Installation
This process should be done just as Lotus says to do it: Because it's always worked before, I attempted my usual ploy of inserting the diskette, opening File Manager, then double-clicking the installation executable file.  I had installed about thirty disks,  losing count after twenty-five, when I got an error message telling me that a certain DLL file wasn't available because it was already in use by another task. The only other task running was File Manager, so...

I got to play disk jockey all over again, this time with a few muttered
imprecations, but the installation went swimmingly thereafter. With the SmartSuite toolbar onscreen, I opted to take Word Pro out for a spin. My initial misgivings aside (the screen looked odd to my Word-oriented eyes), I must say I'm impressed. This word processor has features similar to those of Word for Windows (no big surprise), and was a bit easier to use in one or two instances and a little quirky in one or two others.

The Word Pro screen, as I said, is significantly different from Word's, and a little disconcerting at first, even though I quickly adjusted to it. For one thing, there are fewer menu choices on the menu bar, which means that each menu contains more features. Once you've gotten used to Word's menu bar, Word Pro's  looks almost barren. This means that it is not possible to guess what each menu contains, a fault shared with Word, but exacerbated by having fewer categories. Why, for instance, is User Setup found in the File menu? And why doesn't the manual point me there to clarify the mysteries of the Undo feature? But I digress! More on the topic of documentation below, for those of you who can't wait for my brilliant insights and want to skip ahead.

Features
As for features, I looked at general ease of text creation and modi-fication, Spelling, Grammar, AutoCorrect (SmartCorrect), Help, and Mail Merge.

Text Creation and Modification
There's no perceptible difference between Word Pro and Word for Windows in the area of creating a text file. It's very straightforward. Worders will experience no discomfort here. Things change a bit when you get to editing, however.

For one thing, triple-clicking on a word doesn't select the paragraph in Word Pro. It simply toggles off the word's selection. To select a paragraph, you open the Text menu, then Select, then specify the unit of your choice. As someone who's gotten spoiled by Word, this seems very cumbersome. Nor does there seem to be a line select capability 
or, for that matter, any selection area in the left margin at all. But I do like the fact that the current text selection is extended when you hold down Shift and click the mouse button.

Still another difference, the Case Change feature in Word (Shift-F3) produces something quite different in Word Pro - you change fonts instead. The unanticipated change from Times New Roman to Algerian was quite a surprise!

However the Markup Edits feature is really neat! This feature changes the color of the onscreen font to indicate changes you have made to a file making it easier for co-workers to see your proposed revisions when they get the file to work on. You can do this in Word, but it   means selecting a color from the color palette, and then using that color when you type in the new text.

In fact, Word Pro is much more geared to the work team concept than the standalone worker-bee paradigm; much more so than Word. That would appear to be the major differentiating factor between them.

Spell Checking
I really like one particular feature of Word Pro's spell program: It shows you on screen, in the file, which word(s) it suspects of being misspelled, so you can decide in advance whether to skip over them, or make the correction before the flag goes up.  There are not many
differences between them except this one.

Grammar Checker
The grammar programs of Word and Word Pro are also quite alike. Both nag you about things like passive construction and highlight words you might have mistakenly used in place of similar-sounding or appearing words.  Doesn't this come under the rubric of diction? All in all, this is probably a good thing. One I'd suggest is that loose be confirmed, since it's so often used when lose is the proper choice. Sue, my beautiful and brilliant wife would add everyday; as an adjective, or a fine everyday occurrence, but not in something like We work hard everyday. [sic]
If you'll pardon a personal anecdote, I was reminded of an announce-ment by a major computer manufacturer a few years back, proudly proclaiming their latest gift to writers everywhere: the Grammer [sic] Checker. Oh, well...Word Pro's Grammar checker also produces the same measurements of readability, letting you know whether someone needs to be a rocket scientist to understand your prose, or whether it's intelligible to little Johnny, the third-grade class clown. I have doubts about the validity of such measuring devices, probably because my writing is invariably deemed too advanced.   I have more faith in my readers than I have in Rudolph Flesch, however.

Automatic Correction
Word Pro's answer to AutoCorrect is called, what else, SmartCorrect. It seems to have a more extensive set of corrections already built in than does AutoCorrect. One of my pet peeves - alot in place of a lot
is one that chafes me, for example.  I was also amused to see that the word potatoe will be replaced automatically by potato.

I must carp at a few inclusions, as well as some exclusions, however. For one, the version of accommodate they replace is acomodate. It's been my experience that most people misspell this as accomodate. For another, the misspelling accidentaly is included, but not the much more common  accidently. And why is rasberry [sic] included?  Is this a word that crops up often in word processing jobs?

As for exclusions, I'd add kernal (kernel), which shows up all over computer writing, especially when the topic is UNIX. Also, how about some of the so-called stumpers, as long as we're being whimsical, like moccasin, exhilarate,  and  mayonnaise?

Help
I must confess that I'm not wild about Word Pro's Help system. Bringing me to a screen full of not-intuitively-obvious icons and telling me to select the one that will most likely lead me to the subject is not terribly helpful.  I'm still tied to text, I guess.  Once I got past the icons, however, things smoothed out nicely, and I was able to find what I was looking for without undue difficulty.

Mail Merge
Maybe it's because I've learned two different versions of this feature in Word v2.0 and v6.0, but when I got to Word Pro's, it seemed like an utter snap.  I mean, as in  no sweat, no strain.  I'm not sure whether it would seem that easy to the uninitiated, but I have to give them high marks from what I saw of it. For once, this process really seemed obvious and simple.  This is quite different from just saying it IS obvious and simple, which leads to an even higher level of frustration when the user can't seem to get it.

User Manual
Maybe we need a new term for user manuals, like off-line documentation?  Whatever. My first impression of the user guide titled EXPLORING WORD PRO; what is this, a safari?  It is small enough to be unintimidating, but big enough to have the information you need.  Well, maybe... 

As I discovered as I explored the topic of Undo, it ain't necessarily so. I just wanted to compare Word Pro's Undo with Word's. Naively, I went to the index, which pointed me to Online Help,  which I took to refer to the topic of Online Help described in the book.  Sadly, I was misled: what the index was pointing to was the Online Help files them-selves which I finally figured out after a fruitless search of the manual.  I can almost hear the person who created the index screaming that the asterisk would have led me to the note telling me about this, but my response is "I don't do asterisks; spell it out for me right there." Altogether, a typical lazy reader!

If I understand what I was able to uncover about Undo, there is a virtually unlimited level of undo's you can perform with Word Pro while Word is limited to a measly 100.  But I'm just surmising, since I was unable to locate anything  specific.  I confess to giving up trying after a few minutes  because I have  better and more interesting things to do.

And, apropos of nothing except preserving my mother tongue: Who made up the term versioning? Why does he/she still have a job in documentation? I suspect this was crammed down the writers' throats by an overbearing engineering honcho.

Summary
What I have seen so far leads me to conclude that Word Pro is an excellent product, especially for those in a work group situation where file sharing is of paramount importance. For lone wolf types, my preference is still Word for Windows, however.  Just an opinion!

Frank McGowan is a teacher, a science writer and computer consultant and  is a regular WindoWatch contributor.  This is the first in a series of articles evaluating
this pair of very popular suites. 
                         ww


