Once upon a time there was a software package that was so powerful and so ubiquitous, it was almost impossible to compete with it. It was called WordPerfect, and by the time version 5.1 was released, it had become the de facto standard for DOS-based word processors. There were a few competitive products out there, but their market share was minuscule.

Venerable challengers like WordStar were lying bloody and broken on the ground, and upstarts like Microsoft Word couldn’t seem to achieve sufficient critical mass to become viable. And then came Windows, WordPerfect’s transition to the world of graphical interfaces, where pointing and clicking was shaky at best. Version 6.0 for Windows was notoriously buggy, crashed constantly, and often brought whole corporate networks down with it. By the time WordPerfect Corporation had worked the kinks out, Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0 had slipped down the middle to take an insurmountable lead. WordPerfect was wounded and could no longer survive on its own, and it was soon purchased by networking giant Novell for a reputed $855-million (U.S.).

Novell’s stewardship of WordPerfect was less than stellar, and the program continued to slip into also-ran status. When Novell announced in mid-1995 that it was no longer supporting the product, many wrote it off, consigning it to the dustbin of software history. Then came Corel Corporation. In what PC Magazine called the most notable American export to Canada “since Doug Flutie went to play in the Canadian Football League,” the Ottawa-based graphics software firm purchased WordPerfect and its associated programs from Novell for the reputed fire-sale price of $185-million (U.S.), of which only $10-million was paid in cash.

Corel doubled in size overnight and was suddenly head-to-head with archrival Microsoft. An aggressive marketing campaign kicked into gear, and the heavily loaded Corel WordPerfect Suite 7.0 for Windows 95 was released to great fanfare in May of this year. By all accounts it’s working. Five months after acquiring the franchise from Novell, Corel was crowing about outselling the comparable Microsoft product with 50.9% of the total market share for office suites (Microsoft trailed at 44.7%, Lotus was eating everybody’s dust at 4.3%). With aggressive discounting of their product, what this translates to on Corel’s bottom line is debatable, but the company has certainly pulled WordPerfect back from the brink. Corel may also be affecting the bottom line of computer book publishers like IDG, Sybex, and Que.

Despite its awkward title, WordPerfect 7 for Windows 95 and Windows NT Essentials by Laura Acklen is an excellent primer for word processing novices. With its spiral binding and subdued design, this book is clearly aimed at the educational market, and its contents reflect this. More a workbook than a full-fledged text, WordPerfect 7 for Windows 95 and Windows NT Essentials is broken into a series of “Lessons” and “Projects” which take the reader through WordPerfect 7 step by step. This offers people with only elementary computer experience an excellent means to get up and running on the basics quickly, while still learning many of the bells and whistles over time.

Overall, the book has a pleasantly calming effect, cutting a massive, overpowered program down to size and making the overwhelming complexity of modern software somewhat less overwhelming. Designed for classroom use, WordPerfect 7 for Windows 95 and Windows NT Essentials comes in both student and instructor editions. In my view it would also serve perfectly well for the individual user working alone, but whether the book will be available in a mass-market edition is an open question.

Jan Weingarten’s Teach Yourself… Corel WordPerfect 7 is quite a bit more detailed than Acklen’s book, and though it is certainly usable by beginners, it seems aimed more at the intermediate level – those users who might conceivably be interested in more sophisticated functions like templates and macros. Like the other books in the Teach Yourself… series, Teach Yourself… Corel WordPerfect 7 is clearly written in a relaxed, breezy style that never quite slips into the sometimes inane antics of the Dummies and Idiot’s books. Unlike Acklen’s book, Teach Yourself… Corel WordPerfect 7 is subdivided more along program functionality lines than along a linear learning path, but it’s hard to imagine how else one might organize a book such as this. In fact, virtually all the books reviewed here take this smorgasbord approach to some degree. No one reads a computer book cover-to-cover like a novel; browsing and picking and choosing are the order of the day.

One extremely nice touch is the book’s first chapter, entitled “Jumpstart.” It’s a rough-and-ready, ultra-concentrated-detergent version of the entire book, aimed at “Type-A personalities who can’t be bothered with a lot of details.” Chapter 2 starts the book anew, providing necessary meat to the bones of the software for people with patience. A bound-in diskette featuring 20 WordPerfect macros of various sorts is a nice little bonus, but of course this sort of thing is really just the adult equivalent of the prize at the bottom of the cereal box.

Without giving short shrift to Using Corel WordPerfect 7 by Joshua Nossiter, one can pretty much just repeat the review above (inserting the requisite title changes with WordPerfect search and replace). Nossiter is equally light and breezy, and the book is well written and well designed, with good use of icons and call-outs. Nossiter takes a slightly different path through the program than Weingarten, but he eventually ends up in exactly the same place. How many different ways are there to describe the same piece of software? (Sometimes, punch drunk after hours of reading the same instruction sets over and over again, I begin to fantasize that there’s really only one book in each category, shared by all the publishers, packaged under 10 different covers. Tell no one….)

One way in which Using Corel WordPerfect 7 distinguishes itself is its coverage of the non-WordPerfect programs in the WordPerfect Suite. The suite comes bundled with the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, Corel Presentations, CorelFLOW, Sidekick 95, Dashboard 95, Envoy, 150 fonts, 10,000 clip art images, the Netscape web browser, and a sign-on package to the AT&T WorldNet Service. Each one of these pieces of software might have cost more than the entire list price of this Suite in years past. All of them are fully functional programs that really require books of their own. None of the books reviewed here do more than glance at them; a couple ignore them completely.

Personally, I would be unlikely to buy books like Alan Simpson’s Mastering WordPerfect 7 for Windows 95 or WordPerfect 7 for Windows 95 Bible by Stephen E. Harris. They’re thicker than the Montreal phone book, they’re chock full of absolutely useful WordPerfect information, but frankly, they’re intimidating as hell. Though they both claim to cover the gamut from absolute beginners to sophisticated power-users, I don’t believe that any book that features a chapter on programming in the WordPerfect macro language is suitable for newcomers, or even nervous intermediate users. The “Oh my God, I’m so stupid!” factor is high enough when dealing with overpowered, overfeatured software like the WordPerfect Suite. Throwing too much functionality at novices is a sure method of freezing them in the headlights.

Given that caveat, both of these books could be quite useful to more sophisticated users, particularly those who have enough computer knowledge to want to customize their settings or wring high-end desktop publishing or web-editing functions from WordPerfect. WordPerfect 7, like its competitors, is far more than a simple word processor. If you want to use it to the full extent of its abilities, one of these cinderblock books is probably a good idea, and I would give a slight edge to the WordPerfect 7 Bible in this regard. It is an excellent reference source, somewhat better organized and much better designed than Mastering WordPerfect 7. Though the latter is by no means a bad text, working your way through it is somewhat more complex. The former also comes with its own Crackerjack surprise, a CD-ROM loaded with macros, fonts, and other goodies, though the book reflects it in a higher cover price.