WordStar 7.0 Is Fast and Easy to Use
In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, WordStar was the world’s premier word processing software.
It was eclipsed, not surprisingly, by WordPerfect and other programs whose publishers understood that processing documents, not just text, was what their customers needed most.
But WordStar hung in there, became a much more comprehensive program and emerges today, in version 7.0, as a smart alternative to Windows programs that gobble up processor speed and memory.
While most of today’s PCs come with a mouse pointing device, WordStar dates from the pre-mouse era when some keyboards didn’t even have separate function keys.
In fact, you didn’t then and still don’t need cursor keys to work WordStar. A good typist can execute all the commands, including cursor movements, without having to move the hands from the “home” position on the keyboard. It is all done with combinations of the control key and alphabet keys.
Control key commands are fast and efficient, but there are dozens of them, and learning to use them well requires lots of memorization and experience. Anyone familiar with older versions of WordStar, however, should feel right at home with version 7.0 because all the old commands still work.
But new users should also feel comfortable because today’s WordStar is easily commanded with a mouse through pull-down menus.
WordStar 7.0, $495, published by WordStar International of Novato, Calif., (800) 227-5609, is a DOS program. It doesn’t need Windows, and it doesn’t need more than 640 kilobytes of regular RAM memory. (It will operate faster if expanded memory is available, however.)
As a business document processing program, WordStar has the advantages of speed, simplicity and ease of use, as long as the documents contain mostly text.
It is possible to insert graphic images into documents, but it is awkward and you wouldn’t want to do it often. I think the graphics feature is best suited to creating a letterhead and other page formats that can be continually reused.
Compared to WordPerfect version 5.1, the leading DOS word processing program, WordStar 7.0 is easier for first-time users to operate. It is also nearly as powerful. The one feature it lacks is a way to easily insert neatly formatted tables of data into documents. WordPerfect 5.1 lets you create a table merely by defining how many columns wide and rows deep you want it to be.
WordStar has always allowed you to control how much command menu information is displayed. As normally installed, the program has a row of pull-down menus across the top that comply with the “common user access” design.
The next line is a “style bar” that identifies the type style and size currently in use, and has simple “buttons” that can be clicked with a mouse to quickly bold, italicize and underline text, and make other formatting changes.
Basically, it is a text-only depiction of the same kinds of menus that you get in graphics format in Windows. Because it is all done with text characters, the program is fast on the screen.
Of course, the text mode is also the program’s weakness, because you cannot see what your pages will look like if you print them in anything other than the basic Courier 10 typewriter font.
WordStar 7.0 gets around that problem with an excellent “preview” mode that lets you see your pages exactly like they’ll come out of the printer. You cannot edit the pages in preview, but it is easy to jump back and forth.
A couple of new features are improved “macros” and easily created fax documents.
The new macro utility makes it easy to save complex sequences of keystrokes for replay at the touch of a key or two. The macros can also be edited.
WordStar is able to save a document in fax format, which is actually a graphic image. The fax then can be sent directly to any fax machine from your computer if you have a fax modem installed. The advantage is that other software is not required to do the conversion, although virtually all fax modems come with software for doing such conversions.
WordStar International also publishes a Windows version of the program for the same price. There are millions of older IBM PC-compatible computers in use that don’t have the processing power and memory capability to run Windows, however.
For users of those machines, WordStar 7.0 allows them to do documents with fancy typography (with addition of the proper font software or printer cartridges) and graphics inserts.
