Novell announces WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows; New version helps users write better and work faster

Business Wire, Nov 8, 1994

OREM, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 8, 1994--WordPerfect, the Novell Applications Group, Tuesday announced WordPerfect(R) 6.1 for Windows(TM), designed to help users write better and work faster.

First released in 1979, WordPerfect is the best-selling word processor of all time, with more than 17 million units sold worldwide. This new version will be available on retail shelves next week. WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, along with the new Quattro(R) Pro 6.0 for Windows, will be a key component of the new PerfectOffice(TM) 3.0 suite, scheduled to ship later this year.

"Studying user work habits and patterns has shown us that users want their word processor to help them write better and get their work done faster," said Glen Mella, vice president of marketing for the Business Applications Division. "This product showcases what we have learned from studying what users are really trying to accomplish with their software."

PerfectSense(TM) Technology Helps Users Write Better

PerfectSense is new linguistic technology that helps users write better by understanding the meaning of words in context. PerfectSense technology in the Find and Replace feature lets users find all forms of a word, then replace them with the correct form of another word.

For example, a user could find all forms of the word "buy," such as "buying" or "bought," and replace them all at once with the proper form of the word "purchase," such as "purchasing" or "purchased."

Grammatik(R) 6, included in WordPerfect 6.1, uses PerfectSense technology to give users grammatical advice they can understand and is the first grammar checker to actually rewrite sentences. PerfectSense technology is also available in the speller, thesaurus and in QuickFinder(TM) for fast and accurate text retrieval.

QuickCorrect(TM) helps users write better by automatically correcting spelling errors on the fly and has been enhanced to include 130 of the most commonly misspelled words. QuickCorrect also automatically removes extra spaces in between words and sentences, capitalizes the first letter of a sentence and inserts typeset-quality quotation marks.

New Experts Help Users Work Faster

To help users quickly create professional-looking documents, Document Experts automate the process of creating letters, memos, fax cover sheets, newsletters and calendars. Document Experts are automated templates that prompt users for information.

The Letter Expert, for example, interviews users for information and then lets them choose from a selection of pre-written documents. In addition, users can create their own automated templates for custom documents.

"Our research revealed that many users were not using document templates in word processors because they couldn't find them, or if they did find them, they didn't think they were relevant to their work," said Steve Weitzeil, director of WordPerfect for Windows development.

"WordPerfect 6.1 now ships with 50 new templates which are nicely grouped and easily discovered by selecting New from the File pull-down menu. They are based on accepted stylistic standards so people can use them with confidence."

The new Table Expert lets users select from a number of pre-defined styles to instantly improve the appearance of a table. In addition to the 43 styles, users can create their own styles and add them to the list.

Users can also modify the table and still retain the look they have chosen. The Size Column to Fit option gives users a one-click solution to automatically size columns to match the table content.

The Make It Fit Expert solves the problem of trying to fit a document on a certain number of pages. This step-saver can, for example, take a document that is more than one page and either shrink it to fit on one or expand it to fill two or three pages. Users can choose to expand or shrink a document up to 50 percent more or less than the original size.

WordPerfect 6.1 also includes significant speed improvements in spell-checking, scrolling, printing and in working with documents that contain headers, footers, footnotes and endnotes.

Intelligent Features Help Users Work Smarter

WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows includes several enhancements to help users work smarter. QuickFormat lets users easily extract formatting from one section of text and "paint" it to other locations. QuickFormat has been enhanced in version 6.1 so if users make formatting changes in one location, all other "painted" text is automatically updated.

According to user research, one of the most common tasks people perform is to open and reuse existing documents, but they do so with the concern that they might accidentally overwrite the existing file. The File Open dialog now includes an Open As Copy option so users can open an existing document as an unnamed file, and then edit as needed without worrying about losing the original document.

Because selecting text is one of the most common word processing tasks, QuickSelect gives users easy ways to select text to copy, move or format. Users can automatically select text word-by-word, or easily select a sentence, paragraph, page or the entire document by clicking in the left margin.