I was also brought up in a household that made us look things up in the dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia ourselves. (before the internet), and have continued to do so and have added the internet and YouTube to my arsenal of resources. I went to classes, read newsletters, etc. Understanding what falls under each menu heading helped. Fast forward to having to convert (ugh!). I went through the book (when they still made those) and went through every menu item to see what it did.
When I first learned WordPerfect, I had the luxury of just playing with the software for 3 months.
I went from an electric typewriter to a memory typewriter, graduated to DOS/WordStar environment then on to Wang to WordPerfect on Apple/Mac then on to WordPerfect for Windows and ultimately to Word. I loved WordPerfect and its reveal codes. Why scale a learning curve for the heck of it?īut the more we move toward collaborative editing and electronic document exchange, the harder it will become to remain an island in a sea of change. If you're happy and completely functional on WordPerfect, then stay there. I'm not trying to force Word on anyone who doesn't have to make the switch. If your law practice doesn't require you to produce documents electronically in any format other than PDF, if your clients don't want to collaboratively edit the documents you draft, if there's no external factor driving a transition to Word, then don't make the switch to Word. So they have a much higher financial interest in catering to our needs. We're pretty much all that's left in the WordPerfect world. WordPerfect is "the lawyer's word processor" mostly because that's arguably most of its market now. If fewer than 5% of your customers need certain customizations, why would you invest time and money into them? It's a reasonable if infuriating response. The employee's response was pretty blunt: "Given that the legal market makes up less than 5% of our user base, why would we?" I once heard an anecdote (I wish I remembered where, and I wish I could verify it) about a lawyer confronting a Microsoft employee about Word's limited support for the legal market. In practical terms, though, making that argument is like me insisting that English is a better language than Japanese because it's easier for me to speak it. Technologically, one could probably make an argument in either direction. We can all argue until the cows come home about which is "better".
WordPerfect documents are built as text "streams" (hence why Reveal Codes is actually possible in WordPerfect), whereas Word is built as a series of nested text "containers" similarly to the way web pages are built. WordPerfect and Word are built on completely different paradigms. Much the same thing is true of the WordPerfect to Word transition. Plus, there are all those cultural assumptions you didn't grow up with that influence the language in ways you can't possibly anticipate. Then there's differences in verb tense, intonation, etc.
Sure, you're going to have a lot of French vocabulary to learn, but you won't have nearly as difficult a time as you would learning Japanese with its different sentence structure (subject > object > verb). The basic sentence structure (subject > verb > object) in English and French are the same, for example. Given that French linguistically has a lot in common with English (including some common origins), a lot of things in French are just going to make "intuitive" sense. Without knowing a lot about the structure of either French or Japanese, you've probably already "intuited" the answer: Japanese. Which native English speaker is going to have a harder time: the one learning French, or the one learning Japanese?
Take the experience of learning a new language.