Bob Blacksberg, whom you all know as our “Word of Law” columnist, had a thought-provoking response:
“David’s perspective seems to be that of a sole practitioner, and doesn’t take into account many of the issues that apply in a firm with many lawyers, no less with multiple offices. Standardization in legal writing has significant benefits to the efficiency and quality of conducting a law practice. Microsoft Word’s structure, when used well, enables and encourages that standardization. My motto for legal documents is that they should be consistent, reusable, interchangeable and transformable.
It can be difficult to achieve these goals with WordPerfect. Its stream of text and codes makes it very easy to develop “easy” personal solutions to formatting that can be very hard to replicate and share. The results of cutting a fragment out of one WordPerfect document and inserting it into another vary, depending on the techniques used to format it. Style based paragraph formatting in Microsoft Word addresses many of the issues. To paraphrase David (in a sense), properly formatted Body Text, plus a Heading 1 through 9 styles, when backed by shared templates with proper format settings for the styles and the special text and formatting of the opening and closing sections of documents, cover much of the ground in legal documents. Keystrokes can support the application of the Styles without any VBA formatting. In our work, we assign Body Text ALT-B and Heading 1 through 9 ALT 1 through ALT 9.
WordPerfect 5.1, a terrific program, had a number of shortcomings, even for legal writing. The fixed character screen display made use of proportional type faces difficult. A typical line of Times Roman 12 point stretched past the right edge of an 80 character wide screen. We adopted tricks, including special display alterations, but all of these gave way to the clarity of the Windows display, especially on a larger monitor at screen resolutions of 1024×768 and above. Control of the formatting, editing and navigation in tables in WordPerfect 5.1 was frustrating and difficult. Again, this essentially visual task benefits enormously from the Windows display and the additional visual controls available on it. While I am a major fan of keystrokes for editing, a mouse can be very helpful when adjusting the width of a table column.
WordPerfect 5.1 did not support collapsible outlining. As an attorney who wrote complex documents, including financing agreements and disclosure materials, the ability to manage and navigate text through the entire structure of a document is very significant. The outline view of Microsoft Word, combined with the use of Heading Styles for outline headings, achieves this well. It could not be done in WordPerfect 5.1, and, although incorporated in subsequent versions of WordPerfect, has never been satisfactory for me.
WordPerfect 5.1 did not support new document templates. One could create such a structure with macros, but later versions of WordPerfect have used this feature, as have all versions of Microsoft Word. The Word of Law column has covered the benefits and capabilities of templates many times.
Keystrokes are not hard to find or use in Microsoft Word, although Microsoft hardly goes out of its way to point them out. Some of the most valuable keystrokes for navigating and editing text are in fact shared with WordPerfect, especially the Windows versions. CTRL plus the direction arrows have the same functions in WordPerfect 5 on and Microsoft Word (word left, word right, paragraph up, paragraph down). CTRL + SHIFT plus the direction arrows makes that navigation a selection tool. These are extremely powerful. CTRL Page Up and CTRL Page Down navigate by the last selected Browse Object. This sounds technical, but can make navigation by last search, table, figure, page or section very easy.”
This 2001 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.