COMPUTERS : OC HIGH / STUDENT NEWS & VIEWS : WordPerfect 6.0 Can Help Students With Look, Content of Homework

“What you see is what you get” proves to be true when using WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows, a new offering that lives up to its name from WordPerfect Corp.

With the aid of today’s computer technology, impressing the teacher with a professional looking paper is no longer a dream.

You’ve probably had the opportunity to use WordPerfect or another word processor sometime during high school. You may have used it to edit an essay, revise a report or put dazzle in a document.

With WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows, a wide variety of features allows you to enhance your documents. For example, a teacher allowed our class to bring a 3-by-5 card with information for a test. Using computer-aided word processing, I was able to squeeze pages of text into really fine print and put it on the card, giving me an advantage.

If you haven’t experienced the WordPerfect wave, you’re really missing out.

The ability to multitask is seamlessly integrated into this version. If you prefer DOS, there’s a DOS version that also lets you open more than one document simultaneously.

The upgrade (either version) costs $99; the full version is $299 at most software vendors.

Because I only have the Windows version, I’ll tell you about it. If you’ve used WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows, the look will be completely different. There are more buttons on the top, and it’s very configurable. The added features are worth the upgrade, if you are really into intensifying your documents. WordPerfect 6.0 also allows you to convert previous versions of an old WordPerfect document in a single step.

Some of the most useful features in WordPerfect are great for improving your writing skills. A grammar checker (Grammatik) is integrated into WordPerfect and is perfect for revising essays and fixing syntactical errors. I use that feature a lot.

A second vital feature to the college-bound student is the spell checker. With the aid of the computer dictionary, you can see alternatives to the word you misspelled. A thesaurus is handy when you want to find synonyms and antonyms. For example, I get 16 synonyms for the word handy, including beneficial, convenient and helpful, and three antonyms.

If you’re really into snazzing up your docs, the Text Art feature allows you to do things that you wouldn’t have dreamed possible. For example, you can take a phrase, shape it into a pennant and rotate it. Other functions are gradient text, gradient backgrounds, watermarks (which are light figures in the background), borders, templates and envelopes. An interesting feature is smart quotes, which turns quotation marks toward the text instead of just running up and down.

You need a computer capable of running Windows in 386 enhanced mode. You should also have about 25 megabytes of hard disk space.

If you meet these qualifications, go ahead and upgrade. If you have previous versions or don’t have WordPerfect, go and get it because of all the things you’re missing.

That way you won’t get writer’s cramp.