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What is old is new again: WordPerfect is back
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: November 21, 2014
Many, many years ago, there was a debate/war between Microsoft’s Word word processing program and a Canadian word processing program called WordPerfect. In particular, over time, WordPerfect tried to develop itself into a singular solution for the law office.
The war ended a long time ago, it seemed, won by Microsoft, although there are still a number of law offices who continue to use WordPerfect. I, myself, was a very early adopter of WP, and went to Word only after the market kind of forced me to.
Well, not so fast.
For about $350, and less for the upgrade, a WordPerfect law office solution is now available, with lots of features a law office might find very appealing. It is the antithesis of the current “unbundling” trend, but there may be many situations where a single-purpose law office word processing setup may be the most appropriate solution, of course.
The WordPerfect Office X7 Legal Edition includes a function called Perfect Authority (PA), which sells for $200 on its own.
PA automates the creation of tables of authority for brief writing, in a number of styles, including the Harvard Bluebook. PA finds the citations without any action on your part. Other options include settings for different courts and types of documents. The cites can be put on separate pages or within the text of the document, and hyperlinks to the cited material are added automatically. And there’s much more to this function.
The new WordPerfect’s dictionary function also stores citation forms.
The updated WordPerfect can now create PDFs in native format, as well as saving and editing PDFs, saving in PDF/A, and applying PDF security settings.
A new feature called favorites gives quick access to frequently-used documents, and allows several docs to be open simultaneously (and, yes, this is another suggestion to use two monitors). Several new macros have also been added.
Other features of this machine include bates numbering, metadata removal (yay!), redaction, a Roxio disc burner, and more. The package also includes training videos.
Check it out at www.corel.com.