![]() Editor’s Note: For this assignment, one of the writers for the oldversion.com blog was given a daunting assignment – to use for DOS for some of his writing assignments for a week. Below are his thoughts of the experience. Do you still use WordPerfect 5.1? Feel free to discuss this in the comments below. BuyThe first problem was installation. Initially I attempted to run the application in a virtual machine installation of Windows Advanced Server 2000. The DOS window here seemed to run the application without any problems until the actual point of tapping Enter to install the software post-setup. Creating a large-size disk image for the application didn’t work either. While dropping down to Windows 95/98 was an option, it was one that would require a trip into the attic. With this in mind, I opted for a sidestep – I would try installing WordPerfect in DOSbox! Running through the installation, I was presented with a lot of screens that in a modern day application would be dealt with via a single check-box or radio button. Rip your movies to M4V, MP4, AVI, and MKV formats, and choose from between 5 audio mixdown effects. Any dvd cloner platinum for mac. A grand variety of supported formats awaits you with Any DVD Cloner Platinum! Create perfect copies that are ready to go on your iPhone, PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, and more. Complete lossless quality copy on your Mac OS X system! Whether for portability or backup purposes, Any DVD Cloner Platinum is destined to meet your needs with the power to copy DVD to DVD, a DVD folder, or to an ISO image. At the end of the installation with mention of printers and restarts, the application gave the impression of needing to be reinstalled; indeed, I attempted this at the first run, realizing when I reached the end the second time that this was either the beginning of a trip into the box room or I would have to try something else. Typing WP at the prompt got the software running, however. So, how would I use it for the rest of the week? The first thing was to track down the help function (F1) and try and work out what keys did what. As a keyboard-driven application, the most important thing to appreciate is that all of the functions were on the keyboard – the mouse is almost completely useless. Pleasingly, the array of keys to the right of Enter and Backspace come in very useful – as an “old school” user these have always been a part of my keyboard use, and it is good to be able to rely on these 30 year old legacy options. The various options and functions available in WordPerfect can be found via the Function keys, presented via Shift, Ctrl, Alt or with no modification. ![]() So with everything ready, I was set to go. My first task would be to introduce this challenge, the results of which you can see above. But would I be able to use the application daily? I certainly wouldn’t be able to get away with outputting all of my work using WordPerfect – the majority of material that I am involved with requires a pretty quick turnaround, which usually means writing directly into the browser window and submitting. However there are enough suitable features in WordPerfect to be able to use this application daily Day 1 I left WordPerfect running in the DOSBox window overnight, and found that I was unable to restore the document! The whole scenario of saving and closing is a confusing one at best, and discovering that my most recent save file wasn’t being displayed in the “Retrieve” screen was jarring. Fortunately closing the app and restarting “rediscovered” the file. I have also noticed that the lack of an auto-spellcheck (used in Microsoft Word to resolve common typos) is slightly annoying. Indeed, I’m noticing a lot of errors that I really shouldn’t be making! Day 2 Something else I have noticed with the application is the difficulty in applying formatting to text. Via Help (Shift+F1) I discovered that this done by selecting text using the block command, placing the cursor at the start of a word, activating Block (Alt+F4) and then taking the cursor to the end of the word. Once the word or passage is selected, the appropriate formatting can be applied, using the corresponding keyboard shortcut. For instance these bolded words were originally achieved using F6 after selecting the text as a block. Day 3 Remarkably I found myself up and running with WordPerfect without mistyping DOS commands today. As someone with experience of DOS going back to 1990, installation and running of the application had been somewhat frustrating until now, but it all seems to be coming back to me! If you’re planning on using WordPerfect – and if you are limited by hardware and budget it is worth considering – then printing out the keymappings for the Function keys is a good idea. In the absence of an on-screen menu system, having a reference for what key does what is going to prove useful.
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