3. Simplicity of vocabulary and sentence structure. A manual shouldn’t

impress; it should _teach_. USEFULNESS TO OLD PROS AND BEGINNERS ALIKE WordStar adjusts to different levels of skill. You have some =menus= to guide you, to help you decide, say, whether you want to print or see material you’ve already written. But most of the time you won’t need menus during composition. Not after you’re experienced, anyway. Some rival word-processing programs have menus that bog everyone down, beginners and old pros. But not WordStar. It has four “Help” levels, including one that keeps messages constantly on the screen to guide you. But you can zap all this once you’re a WordStar pro. WordStar is only as “friendly” to you as you want it to be. It isn’t like a puppy leaping up on you and licking your face at the wrong time. SPEED WordStar lets you do your job in a hurry. Well, basically. If you’re _just_ turning out short business letters, for instance, and don’t want to store them on your disk, try something else. WordStar makes you electronically save your words there before you can print anything. And that takes time. For swapping words around, however, for additions or deletions, few programs could surpass this one. Were I writing long sales pamphlets or annual reports, WordStar would be my choice. Now, I’ll qualify my “speedy” verdict. WordStar will slow you down when your computer has to reach instructions that the program hasn’t already sent on to the RAM—the temporary memory. That means a time-consuming electronic trip to your floppy disk. Also, if you type in a certain amount of material, WordStar will automatically lock some of it on a disk if the RAM is running out of room. WordStar is a =disk-based= rather than a =RAM-based= word processor. That has its virtues, however, since, by farming out the runover to a floppy, WordStar lets you work with longer files. Some RAM-based programs may limit each document to only 15 or 20 pages in many computers unless you electronically splice them together. Altogether, I’d say that WordStar, evaluated as a disk-based, fully featured word processor, is fast. And new wrinkles like hard disks will make it run still faster, even without the speed improvements that very likely will come. MicroPro, in fact, recommends hard disks for users of WordStar 2000, even if it will run with two floppies. Very soon most office micros will contain hard disks. POWER WordStar is powerful. You can, for instance, type “@” instead of a long name used commonly in your work. Then, when you’re ready, you can plug the name in where the “@” appears. This =search-and-replace= feature is common to every advanced word-processing program; but WordStar implements it better than many rivals. You can also use it with an accessory program, MailMerge, so you can type a list of names and addresses just once, then automatically plug them into the right spaces in a form letter. Only, it’s individually typed, so people needn’t know they’re getting a form letter. Of course, “power” isn’t a virtue just in word processing. The best electronic filing cabinets, for instance, boast clever wrinkles to make it easier for you to enter new categories of information or to change individual records. Consider this story, which is true, about a reporter whom an editor was on the verge of firing. The severance pay was ready. The editor changed his mind at the last minute, however, and the final check stayed in his desk. Then, not long after, the paper’s auditor stormed into the city room. “Why didn’t you fire the son of a bitch?” he asked. “Now we’ll have to spend all this time straightening out the records.” Had the paper had a good, powerful electronic filing system, the nonfiring would have been a little less traumatic to the auditor. FEWER CHANCES FOR BOTCH-UPS WordStar limits the chances for careless errors in the first place. While you’re working on a file, for instance, you can use the =Control-KJ= command to delete everything _but_ the document you’re in the middle of. Granted, WordStar isn’t perfect. Arthur Clarke, for instance, complains mildly of the underlining procedure. If he turns on the underlining, he’ll occasionally forget to turn it off, meaning that, unwittingly, he’ll underline everything that follows. WordStar 2000 corrects this problem by showing you true underlines on the screen, not just symbols at the beginning and ends of the underlining. In record-keeping programs, especially, the anti-botch-up features can be real lifesavers. One technique is to limit the range of numbers entered. An elementary school, for example, might guard against typing errors in new files showing pupils’ birth dates. The computer might then flash its skepticism if a clerk said a first grader was born more than six years ago. THE JEWISH-UNCLE EFFECT Without bogging you down, WordStar lets you reconsider some drastic actions. Suppose you’re about to erase an entire =file=; that is, a whole document that you’ve worked on: say, a letter or a sales report. If you press the control key and the letters “K” and “J,” WordStar won’t act immediately. Instead, it will ask, “Name of File to Delete?” You can even get out of most commands before they’re executed. It’s simple. Just hit the “Control” and “U” buttons, then the “Escape” one. WordStar, in short, is good for the hotheaded. You feel as if Seymour Rubinstein—the MicroPro founder—is watching over you like some kindly, protective Jewish uncle. A good record-keeping program would react similarly if you were about to erase 8 million names. A payroll program might inquire more than once if you wanted to register the firing of five hundred people. A spreadsheet program could ask if you really wanted to wipe out dozens of numbers that you’d entered. A graphics package, ideally, would do likewise if you were about to erase an electronic equivalent of the Mona Lisa. Some programs, in addition to saying you’re messing up, will offer you alternative courses of action. The older WordStar isn’t as advanced as some other programs in this respect. But normally the error messages are self-explanatory and the corrections obvious. DAMAGE LIMITATION WordStar limits the damage if you or your machine goofs in a big way. It rarely sends you back to the operating system of your computer. What’s more frustrating than getting, say, an A> prompt—the computer equivalent of, “Buddy, you’re back at square one”? Then you’ll have to reenter your work. WordStar 2000 corrects one feature missing from the original program. Plain old WordStar doesn’t let you delete a paragraph, then restore it without zapping other changes you made since you last saved your work on your disk. That is, there’s no =yank-back= feature to undo erasures or other recent modifications. But even the older WordStar makes an electronic equivalent of a carbon copy, a backup file—meaning that you’re probably still in business if a glitch destroys the original. Uncle Seymour makes you think twice, literally, before you erase whole files. The old saw of the computer trade, however, will always apply, no matter what the program: “Garbage in, garbage out”—“GIGO.” Berenice Hoffman, my literary agent, really rubbed that in. I’m the type whose letters and checks take a little time to adjust to a new year. “For your records, if you keep carbons,” Berenice replied to one note, “you might want to change the date to 1983—didn’t the computer tell you?” The best programs in the world can’t detect such mistakes. But wait; I just remembered. The fancier computers have electronic clocks that potentially could warn you if the wrong date appeared when you were working with a correspondence format. AFTER-THE-GOOF FEEDBACK WordStar also provides another service—offering error messages telling you what _went_ wrong. It isn’t perfect. Sometimes you may see combinations of letters and numbers, meaningless to someone without a manual. But normally WordStar is helpful. Say you want to use two markers—one at the start and one at the end—to designate material to be moved to another part of the document. WordStar will tell you if you forget to type out either one. Ideally, programs not only will offer you a diagnosis after the goof but also a solution. Although WordStar isn’t as advanced as some programs in this respect, it’s very adequate for the experienced user. ABILITY TO CUSTOMIZE I adapted my WordStar to the requirements of a writer. Editors normally don’t like hyphenated copy, so now WordStar’s “hyphen help,” which suggests possible hyphen breaks, is an optional feature instead of a normal one. No longer need I turn it off with special commands. WordStar provides a menu in the installation program that makes it easy for you to change normal =defaults=—the settings that your software will have before you tinker with it. The menu doesn’t cover every possibility. But you can vary margins and many other important details, and once you’re experienced, you can do a =patch=—a modification in the program—to change other things. If you’re a novice buying from a full-service computer store, ask it to set up your WordStar. Better still, try to dope it out yourself so you make your own changes in the future. You might get guidance from a users’ group. Likewise, you might tinker with a communications program to make it work better with the computers you plan to use and talk to. Or you might set up a record-keeping program to check automatically the accuracy of information fed into it. ACCESSORY PROGRAMS WordStar will work with a variety of accessory programs intended especially for it—everything ranging from electronic thesauruses to spelling checkers, word counters, footnoters, and a communications program. Some word processors, accounting packages, other software, include all the functions you’d need. Others require you to buy the accessory programs. That’s not always bad. Why bother to pay for a dictionary if you’re a perfect speller? Just make sure—before you buy—that the original software either includes good accessory programs or will work with them. Some outside companies’ accessory programs, by the way, may be superior to those from the main software’s manufacturer. SUPPORT FROM THE MANUFACTURER There is one plus that I wish I could have included in my praise of WordStar—good support from the manufacturer. Don’t count on it. In the area of guidance and troubleshooting from the manufacturer, WordStar on occasion hasn’t even been adequate. Calling as a prospective customer, I couldn’t find out if WordStar in a Xerox 820 format would run smoothly on my Kaypro. The company took down my message, then mailed me literature that didn’t answer my question. A California man phoned MicroPro with a problem involving DataStar, a sister program of WordStar that eases record keeping. “We do not have time to correct the programming that results in this quirk,” he heard. He complained to _InfoWorld_ that MicroPro “has some really elegant program tools but no inkling as to the meaning of customer support.” Likewise, the head of a MicroPro users group in New York told the magazine that “fully half of the people who called me to join immediately presented me with a problem they were having.” For a while—I don’t know what it’ll be like when you’re reading this book—MicroPro wasn’t even replying to most customers’ questions on the phone; this supposedly was the dealers’ job. And while Rubinstein’s company indeed sells a Mercedes of a program, some computer stores aren’t up to fixing the windshield wipers. Ideally, software manufacturers like MicroPro will not only offer technical support but also 800 numbers so you won’t be on hold for twenty minutes, racking up a formidable long-distance bill. BACKUP IV ❑ On the Evolution of Software (And a “Perfecter and Perfecter” Program) Mary Matthews, a gifted writer-editor in Chevy Chase, Maryland, favors a WordStar rival called Perfect Writer. “What a conceited program,” I say. “WordStar’s a dinosaur,” she shoots back. In late 1984 we both tried new versions of our pet software (actually WordStar 2000 is more of a successor), and while defending them, we harbor reservations. First the basics. I myself prefer a program like WordStar Version 3.3, which is in the “get-what-you-see” tradition and shows your copy on screen almost exactly as it will be printed. But Mary makes a good argument for a rival with a different philosophy. WordStar 2000 in fact helps her case. It now has many of the features that her dear Perfect Writer came out with first, including split screens. Interestingly, however, the new Perfect is more useful to the “get-what-you-see” crowd than is the older version, while WordStar 2000 is _less_ get what you see in an important way than 3.3 is. At least that’s true of the WordStar 2000 previewed to dealers. During a demo, anyhow, a MicroPro employee couldn’t coax 2000 into displaying double-spacing conveniently on screen even though we could have double-spaced on paper. Where does the increasing resemblance between Perfect Writer and the WordStar family fit in the cosmic scheme? I’ll recklessly generalize: The word processors of the world are becoming like refrigerators; all the deluxe models will have the equivalents of automatic defrosters and ice makers and butter warmers and lettuce crispers. More of the new wrinkles will be marginal. And the surviving companies will be the ones that can explain and exploit the differences and support their customers the best. Not everyone likes butter warmers. As noted before, WordStar 2000 isn’t an unalloyed improvement for me, and the “perfecter” Perfect in some ways disappoints Mary. The older WordStar lets you move to the left of a line with the combination of the Control key and the letters Q and S or =Control-QS=. A touch typist could do this almost instantly. WordStar 2000, on the other hand, uses =Control-CL=. =CL= stands for “cursor left,” =CR= for “cursor right,” and mnemonic commands like those are indeed easier to keep in your head, especially if you use a program only occasionally. On the other hand, the new strokes are harder for a touch typist—this one, anyway. Likewise, Mary wishes that Perfect Writer’s new commands were a bit more logical, especially to old Perfect Writer hands. Concluding, Mary says Perfect Writer users with 64K machines shouldn’t junk them to buy more powerful computers just to run the new version. My thinking is basically the same about WordStar 2000 versus WordStar 3.3. The older program isn’t as good as 2000 in some cases; for instance, when you could use built-in memo format to make temporary employees more productive. But 3.3 is still terrific for people _without such needs_, and I’ll think long and hard before I myself change. Mary’s impressions and mine are typical of many veteran users of software who can’t stomach features added for novices. She’s 100 percent right except when we disagree. As “host,” I won’t rebut her in the places below where we do. Here’s what she sent over the phone via her Kaypro II: Somehow, I’m not sure how, I’ve gotten to be enough of an authority on Perfect Writer—the “old” Perfect Writer, that is, the one released in June 1983—that strangers call me up and say that a computer salesman somewhere told them I was the Sibyl who could answer their questions with a local instead of a long-distance phone call. Luckily, the questions usually run in the “How the heck do you do X?” vein, or I might have to reveal that I’m only a good-hearted writer. Now the Perfect Writer people have released a brand-new version of their already powerful program, and I think I’m in trouble. The new, revised version of Perfect incorporates some radical changes—sweeping enough to demand 128K of RAM (and IBM PC DOS) to operate. (Actually, after claiming that the new Perfect can edit documents of up to 100 pages, the manual states that “with 64K of RAM you will be able to edit documents about 5 pages long,” so I assume that the new Perfect takes up about 56K of RAM—not being familiar with the PC’s way of juggling numbers, I can’t tell exactly.) I’m in trouble because I won’t be the reigning Sibyl anymore unless I can figure out how to buy a PC-compatible computer with a decent keyboard (most PC keyboards are horrid) and still do things like pay bills and buy the occasional loaf of bread and jug of wine. The most radical of the changes is that the new Perfect Writer now uses what it calls “pop-up command menus” during editing. When you hit the Escape key, a small (about one-twelfth of the screen) “top menu” will superimpose itself over your text, as close to your cursor as possible, three characters away to the left or right. It lists your choices for subsidiary menus, which eventually lead you to the command you want. Nearly every command has been changed, so that those of us who are used to the old Perfect Writer must learn the editing commands all over again. The new manual (haters of the old one will be glad to learn that the index is now at the back where it belongs and those frustrating Roman numerals are gone) explains with a straight face that the pop-up menus exist so that you “don’t have to memorize command sequences.” Of course, if you plan to use Perfect Writer more than once a year or so, you’re going to memorize the commands, anyway; and so, as the manual airily says, the Control key does everything the Escape key does, identically; the only difference is that you “bypass” the top menu—because, it says, you aren’t always going to want to see it. Mind you, if you use the Control key, you’ll see every menu but the top menu, anyway. Is this enough reason to change all the commands but one—to bypass _one_ menu? To me, this is not an improvement over the old Perfect Writer—not unless you actually _like_ added keystrokes. All the old two- and three-keystroke commands are now three-keystroke commands at least, and often four or five. This is progress? The new Perfect Writer has indeed taken pity on us and assigned to the PC’s function keys twenty frequently used commands, so that if, for example, you don’t feel like keystroking =Escape-DS-Carriage-Return= to save your document and continue working on it (=Control-X-Control-S= in the old PW), you can keystroke =SHIFT-Function Key 9-Carriage Return=. Whoopee. Let us not carp too much about what strikes me as suspiciously similar to kludge, since the new Perfect Writer is as fast or faster than the old Perfect Writer. We’re probably only talking about a few microseconds, mind you, but it still seems to me that the execution of Perfect’s new commands is usually close to instantaneous. This is a thing to marvel at when you compare Perfect Writer to WordStar 3.3, where unless you have a specially speeded-up version with specially reassigned command keys and fingers with a lightning-fast touch, it takes forever to execute certain commands (well, ten or twenty seconds) and perceptible time (say, one or two seconds) even if you do have the speed. But I still say the 50, 100, or 200 percent additional keystrokes are a pain in the you know where. The program may be faster, but the human being is now 50, 100, or 200 percent slower. One improvement in particular is one to run through the streets singing about: Perfect Formatter has been incorporated into Perfect Printer in the main menu (inexplicably renamed “PSI”), and the two of them together are approximately a million times faster than they used to be. Thank you, Perfect Writer! For a couple of years now, I have been using Perfect for the long, complicated projects, like books, that demand powerful editing capabilities and Perfect’s special strengths—such as split-screen editing, automatic footnoting, automatic construction of a table of contents, etc. For shorter things, like personal letters, I’ve been using WordStar, for its what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen. The main failing of the old Perfect was whether or not you were using the document design capabilities, you had very little idea of what the final product was going to look like. (The main failing of WordStar, which as far as I’m concerned has been a dinosaur for several years now, is that it can’t do half of what Perfect can—and it does it slowly, too.) Shout “hallelujah,” brothers and sisters! The new MS-DOS PW allows you to choose between using its old “@@ commands” and having what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Or you can mix the two of them (not that I know why anyone would want to, since with the PC I’m using, you can’t tell when a word’s been underlined). You can now get on-screen justification if you want it; and if you want to underline a sentence, you don’t have to worry about your on-screen justification being thrown off 4 or 5 characters—you just position the cursor in front of the material you want to underline, go to the end of it, and tell the machine to underline it. The exact command sequence for underlining a sentence is =Escape-T-B= (begin marking), =Escape-F-S= (go to the end of the sentence), =Escape-A-M-U= (underline the marked area). This looks like a lot of work, especially compared with the old PW’s @@ux{}, until you stop and consider what the same thing would be in WordStar. Suppose it’s a ten-word sentence you want to underline: you’d go to the start of the sentence and keystroke something like this: =Control-P-S=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Backspace=, =Backspace=, =Control-P-S=. I’ll break discipline and object to Mary’s description of the WordStar underlining procedure. You could underline a sentence just by starting with one =Control-P-S= and ending it with another. What’s the big deal, Mary? Your described procedure would apply only to material that you underlined _after_ you wrote it. All those =Control-F=s do is make the cursor jump a word ahead. _Grrr!_ Then again, maybe I’m simply a more decisive underliner. I _know_ what I want! If nothing else, this little disagreement shows how work habits influence choices in word processors. Not only does the new Perfect Writer have the old Perfect’s strengths—split-screen editing of up to seven documents at a time, a zillion powerful editing commands, still another zillion powerful document structuring options—but it’s added a few more just for fun. For example: ◾ The old Perfect allowed you to delete from wherever the cursor is to the end of whatever sentence you’re in; the new one lets you do that, of course, and also lets you cut to the end of whatever paragraph you’re in—or an entire paragraph, if you’re at its beginning. ◾ Now you can delete not only the next word ahead of your cursor but also the word behind it—a small thing but amazingly handy. ◾ You don’t have to delete text before you copy it. (However, the process is more complicated than it used to be.) ◾ You can flush right material on screen—useful for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get feature. ◾ You can more or less paginate on screen—although this instruction is only good for the what-you-see-etc. editing; it’s useless for the document-design mode (@@ commands). ◾ You can use the “Search” function to search not only the document you’re working in now but any and all other document files on your diskette. This strikes me as amazingly handy for editing multiple documents when you can’t remember what the name of the other document is or where the reference is you’re thinking of. For example, suppose you’re writing to Joyce Davenport and you want to add a paragraph from a letter you wrote to James T. Kirk but you can’t remember more than that it was about artichokes. You would invoke “search document”; the prompter then asks you what you’re searching for, and you say, “Artichokes.” Pretty soon you have a list of the documents the word “artichokes” appears in, and you can then call up the one you want for multiple-document editing. ◾ Similar to this is something new the main menu offers: you can compare two files, and Perfect Writer will show you their differences—useful for comparing edited and unedited versions of a report. ◾ If you have a color monitor, you can “paint” the letters and backgrounds of the up-to-seven files you’re working on different colors (eight background and sixteen letter colors), so as to tell them apart. For me, this falls into the “who cares?” category, but some may like it; and I have to admit, you can get some very pretty (though not always easy on the eye) combinations. ◾ Perfect Writer now has the printing option “End at page X.” Shout hallelujah, brothers and sisters!—the new Perfect at long last has caught up with the dinosaurs like WordStar. ◾ Some of our old favorite document-design commands have been renamed, usually for the better. And we have one absolutely dandy new command: =@@need=. =@@need= makes sure that there’s enough room left on the page for a chart or similar material. If you’ve just written a 15-line poem that can’t be broken between pages, immediately after the last line of your poem, type in =@@need{15 lines}=; if there isn’t going to be enough room on the page, your poem will automatically be “forced” to the following page. Hot diggety! All is not completely rosy in Perfect land. The new Perfect has lost some of the old Perfect’s advantages. For example, the old Perfect had an automatic feature that told you where in your document you were—35 percent of the way through, or whatever. Moreover, the old Perfect had a command that let you know how long the document was in terms of both number of lines and number of characters, and where your cursor was in all this. I’ve searched the new Perfect manual and haven’t been able to find any equivalent new command. The closest I’ve been able to come is a command that lets you know only how many characters there are in the file, not where you are, or anything else; and the command isn’t listed in the index, nor is there any equivalent command that I can find. Great work, guys. This is what I call a major frustration. It’s maybe bad programming, and it’s certainly bad documentation. The new manual is slightly better organized than the old one, but that’s not saying a lot. I’ve rarely been able to divine the new name for the old command in the new manual, and when I’ve found it, it’s usually been by accident. It would have been an enormous service if the Perfect people had put in some sort of comparison chart for us old-Perfect old pros. Like the old Perfect, the new Perfect is very cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves after a period or colon; sometimes it’s the two you typed in, and sometimes it magically gets transformed into one. The new Perfect goes the old Perfect three better and is randomly cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves behind a period, colon, quotation mark, question mark, and parenthesis—not only deleting spaces where you do want them but also inserting them where you don’t want them. Instead of mildly annoying, this quirk is now big-league annoying. May whoever thought it up and liked it so much he/she expanded it spend eternity brushing gnats out of his/her face! You still can’t tell the Search feature to search for something X number of times. For example, if three times you use the word “pishtosh” and want to change it to “nuts,” you can’t tell the search-and-replace feature to “do this three times”—as with the old Perfect, you have to do it twice with the “Ask me” and then “Cancel” the third time and do it by hand, or do it three times and then have Perfect search wastefully through the rest of the document for something you know is not there. The new Perfect’s printing menu is better than the one the old Perfect came with but not nearly as good as the menu that David Hite developed in 1983 for the old Perfect Writer. The only improvements are the “compare” feature mentioned earlier and the ability to step outside Perfect for a while into Perfect Calc, Perfect Filer, or a telecommunications program—nothing I’d write home about. We’ve lost the “one word” command—a serious blow for those of us who used it to get around Perfect Writer’s cavalier treatment of periods and colons. This command caused the characters placed within it to be considered one word, so that Perfect Filer wouldn’t split certain words between lines. Perfect Speller, which is now on the same diskette with Perfect Writer, Perfect Formatter, and Perfect Printer, is much faster than it used to be. Alas, it is just as stupid. Unlike better spelling checkers, Perfect Speller works on the system of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. In other words, if the word “check” is an acceptable root, then “checker” and “recheck” are acceptable. So are “checkment” and “checkation.” And like the old Perfect Speller, the new Perfect Speller doesn’t recognize its own vocabulary—it queried words like “blankline” and “ux,” which are Perfect Writer commands and ought rightly to be ignored. My recommendation is to get The WORD Plus, which can be renamed to be accessed as if it were Perfect Speller and which is far superior. An interesting—I don’t say terrific—addition to the Perfect family is Perfect Thesaurus. You substitute the Perfect Thesaurus diskette for your document diskette in drive B, position the cursor on the word you want to look up, type =Escape-S-T=, and Perfect Thesaurus checks its dictionary. If the word is there, you may substitute any of the synonyms for your original word, type in your own replacement, or say “forget it” and go on to look for another synonym. The hype says that Perfect Thesaurus “holds nearly 50,000 words (entries plus synonyms).” The parenthetical remark is the key one to home in on. I asked Perfect Thesaurus to look up “transform,” and it did; one of the synonyms it offered was “metamorphose.” When I asked it to look up “metamorphose,” it told me, “Word not found.” (Perfect Thesaurus has also never heard of “fanatic,” “asinine,” “pop,” “airy,” “bypass,” “instantaneous,” or “shrug,” among about fifteen others of the forty-five words I tried.) I’d estimate that the average number of synonyms offered for each word is between five and ten—if we compromise and say seven, that’s only 6,000 or so words that Perfect Thesaurus can recognize. Moreover, Perfect Thesaurus can only look up fifteen words before it starts yelling, “No more marks,” and refuses to cooperate any further. In other words, Perfect Thesaurus is a nice toy, but I question its usefulness for serious writers. Having a copy of _The Synonym Finder_ by your desk offers you about a million words that you can recognize, and is about as fast to use. The new Perfect Writer itself still has many of the annoyances of the old Perfect Writer: ◾ The automatic swapping feature still cuts in at inopportune moments and makes you wait before you can continue typing or execute a command. It’s now only one second or so instead of five seconds or so, but it’s still annoying. ◾ There is still no automatic indicator showing where you are in your document or how long it is, a feature of every other word-processing program known to humankind. ◾ You still can’t customize the document-design commands (although it’s usually possible to get the look you want if you’ve used Perfect Writer for many years and know some tricks they don’t mention in either the old or the new manuals)—if you want some _real_ customization, tough noogies. ◾ You can still start printing by referencing page and section numbers, but if you want to start with footnote 125, you’re in for a major pain. The new Perfect is more powerful than the old one, but not by as much as its creators fondly think. After spending two days evaluating the new Perfect for this article, I went home and spent several happy hours with the old Perfect. Oh, I admit I thought now and then, I wish I could cut to the end of the paragraph, or, I wish I could delete the word behind the cursor instead of only the word in front of it—and the old Perfect Writer is indeed slower than the new one (by maybe 5 percent?)—but on the whole I found I preferred two keystrokes to five and three keystrokes to six. Many of the improvements of the new Perfect Writer fall into the category of kludge: lots of flashing lights and ringing bells and chrome and racing stripes and wow, look at that dashboard! Perfect Writer is still the best word-processing program I’ve ever run across, but for those of you who don’t want to give up your 64K non-IBM PCs, don’t worry: you’re not missing enough to make spending all that money worthwhile. BACKUP V ❑ “3-D” Versus Mail-Order Software—and How to Shop How to pick the right disk? People like Dusty Park know how to improve the odds. Park was at the top of his class at a computer school, worked as a customer support man at MicroPro, then joined a mail-order house called 800 Software in a similar job.[102] I phoned him there when my mail-order copy of WordStar didn’t work on my machine. It was a common industry problem, this incompatibility. _Theoretically_—which doesn’t mean that much—my Kaypro could read disks in the electronic format of the Xerox 820. Yet my machine in this respect seemed functionally illiterate. Footnote 102: Since writing this section, I’ve learned that Park has left 800 Software for another company. Park told me on the phone that many other Kaypro owners were suffering similar difficulties, that if need be he’d send me another disk set up for my computer. Step by step he went over the WordStar installation procedure with me. As it happened, I succeeded without him—by having WordStar electronically piped over to the Kaypro from another machine when my micro wouldn’t reach the disk. Park had been ready with patience and empathy. I took it for granted that he would suggest buying by mail in many instances; but what advice, based on his MicroPro days and other experiences, did he offer about buying “3-D,” as he called it—buying in the flesh from a store, in other words? “The best place to go if you’re buying software retail,” he said, “is to someone who’s doing a training seminar in the same program you’re buying. That way you’ve got it aced, because the person who’s doing the class is going to know the program well. “You don’t have to take the class, but at least you know that there’s somebody there who could be asked a question.” Not that a dealer has to know _every_ wrinkle of a program to teach it. But you’ve still got a head start if you do choose a store with classes. Just be sure that the instructor isn’t a circuit rider, so to speak—that he isn’t flying out of town to another store as soon as he completes a series of classes. You want him around to answer your questions later on. This principle would especially hold true when buying software from franchised stores. Some stores may be excellent. Others, however, as Park pointed out, “may be a bunch of small businessmen who used to sell shoes and bought into a franchise at an exorbitant price.” Offering, obviously, a mail-order perspective, Park said that the computer-store managers he knew didn’t always know their software lines because there were so many products to keep track of. “It takes too much time,” he said. “There’s too many things to do in a 3-D store to handle that. Mostly you’re showing people hardware.” His opinions rang true. Trying out WordStar with Osbornes, I’d run across sales reps who couldn’t show me how to make printouts of the letters on the tiny black-and-white screen. Some sales reps were “terminally” dumb. Others were bright and helpful but too busy selling too many machines to pick up the basics of WordStar and other heavy-duty programs. WordStar wasn’t _that_ hard to master, however. I wondered how stores could counsel customers if they couldn’t even train sales reps. I asked Park about mail-order software. croPro,” he said, “I told people, ‘Don’t buy by mail. The dealers are the ones who can answer your questions. You have a real, live, 3-D person.’” MicroPro had instructed Park and five colleagues to try to duck the time-consuming questions from businessmen and others using computers and to refer them back to their dealers. And yet Park and the others had actually ended up spending half their time responding to the pleas of “end users.” And many were the customers of mail-order houses. But now, Park said, some mail-order people were competing not only with low prices but also with technical support; 800 Software had even hired a software guru from the University of California at Davis to evaluate programs it was going to sell and support. I myself had paid $250 for WordStar, or about half the $495 list price; however, after talking to Park, I felt I was in better hands than I would have been at the typical computer stores I’d visited. I got everything I paid for; 800 didn’t pull any cheap tricks like sending the software without a manual, which, in fact, some mail-order houses may do. This isn’t an endorsement of 800 Software. It shows, though, that at times you can successfully bypass the wretched support and high prices that many stores inflict on software shoppers. “Save by ordering some software by mail,” advises _CPA Micro Report_, “but only if the package is easy to install and easy to use. If you’ll need training before you can use it or if the package must be configured for a hard disk, buy through your local dealer. Word processors and spreadsheets are examples of software you can safely buy through the mail. General accounting, client write-up systems and communications software should be purchased through a dealer.” It’s good advice, basically. Park says few people call him about spreadsheets, that they’re easier to unravel than many programs. So what’s the most trouble? Data bases, sometimes. “But word processors definitely take the cake. “You’ve got to deal a lot with special features on printers, like boldfacing and underlining and whether the software will let them work right,” Park says. He suggests the obvious—that before buying new software, you find out how it will run with your printer and computer. Of course, as stated earlier, you’ll ideally select your hardware _after_ you’ve chosen your general range of software. Park says most people don’t fully “realize the implications” of the software they’re ordering “because they haven’t thought of it yet.” There’s the old problem, of course. How do you know you’ll like the software until you’ve tried it at leisure? And then you normally can’t get your money back. Before you order by mail, give serious thought to asking someone locally for a “3-D” demonstration. A very leisurely tryout, in fact, is a good idea no matter how you’re buying, mail or “3-D,” and ideally you’ll have someone with you—a clerk, a secretary, anyone who’ll actually be using the system. You might even want to bring along your accountant or somebody else working with the information that comes out of your computer system. At the very least, show him the software manual before you buy the program. Don’t take the software seller’s word that the software will keep the IRS or the SEC happy. Instead, trust the accountant or lawyer you use in your business. If he’s uncomfortable with computers, ask him to recommend someone in his profession whom he could work with. You don’t have to fire him. Just get him the backup he’ll need. A computerwise accountant, for instance, can tell you if a general ledger package has a good =audit trail=—a way to keep track of what was done on the computer system to make the records come out the way they did. A computer-literate lawyer or accountant can also make certain that the software is reasonably crook-proof. Follow the same rule as with hardware. Find someone already using the program you want to buy. Is he happy with it? The nearer his work is to yours, the better. The best authority on accounting software, for instance, isn’t a computer guru: it’s an accountant. But beware. Some people may have chosen their programs without considering the alternatives, and they might have done better using a different system. Ideally, your fellow accountant, lawyer, doctor, whatever, did plenty of shopping before making up his mind. Also, remember how subjective software is. Even if someone is in your field, he may think differently and do his job differently. Of course you might read reviews in computer magazines, but be careful. I recall how glowingly some of them described early versions of Select; how they said it was superb for heavy-duty writing, even though, quite clearly, it was a bona fide kludge. “How could the reviewers be so wrong?” I asked a computer salesman, a good one, who had sold a number of copies of the Spellbinder program to Kaypro buyers unhappy with the early Select. He replied, “Advertising. They did a lot of advertising in the magazines. That’s probably why.” Well, maybe. More likely, however, the reviewers simply were writers unfamiliar with alternatives like WordStar or computer experts unfamiliar with the needs of most writers. Your best bet is to read the magazine reviews, and this book, knowing that the ultimate authority on your software needs is _you_. BACKUP VI ❑ “Easy” Data Bases: Another View (Mensa Member Versus InfoStar) Charlie Bowie, one of the stars in Chapter 6, “Three Software Stories,” breezed through the dBASE II program. But not everyone will find all data bases so easy. Mary Matthews didn’t. And you can’t call her stupid. She is, after all, a Perfect Writer guru/Sibyl. Also—I’m sneaking this in behind her back—her IQ is high enough for her to belong to the Mensa group for bright people. She’s a Smith College alumna, a human dictionary, now working as publications director at a prestigious prep school. I thought that InfoStar—well reviewed in a major micro magazine—would be a cinch for her to learn and use in listing the traits of a good data base. Well, back comes this essay telling me that she banged her head against InfoStar for a week and almost committed hara-kiri. You can interpret that as a failing either of Mary or of the program. I’ll blame the software and documentation. (Of course she’s full of bilge in her Perfect Writer review when she knocks my beloved WordStar.) Mary, please note, has nice things to say about InfoStar’s power; she says it might even be worth the torture. And a consultant can simplify the program for you. Still, if _Mary_ is having trouble befriending InfoStar, what about average people who must master powerful data-base software? They’ll succeed only if they have time and buckle down. They mustn’t swallow the manufacturers’ cant that the programs are “simple”—at least not if the software’s like InfoStar. Oh, well, at least they can console themselves that their business competitors may also be suffering. And once learned, programs like InfoStar (as Mary’s essay shows) can indeed make life easier. Her observations: There are a number of data-base programs on the market for personal computers, with new entries coming in daily. The MicroPro people—parents of the famous (or infamous) WordStar—have come out with a dandy of their own: InfoStar, which can sit up, roll over, and whistle Dixie. What does one look for in a data-base program? To a certain extent, of course, it depends on what one wants. Someone who wants to put a Rolodex file on to the computer is going to need a lot less by way of power and versatility than is the owner of a small business who wants to use the data base to keep track of clients, orders, and inventory. The first thing to think about is how much data the program can handle without going off its nut or slowing down so much that you could walk to Waukeegan and back while your program is processing any entry. Here are some terms and ideas to keep in mind: ◻ The =data base=, or =data file=, contains all your entries. InfoStar allows any number of data files per diskette; others allow only one. Score one for InfoStar. ◻ The =data record= covers _all_ the information you store for each entry into your data base. How big will your program allow each data record to be? How many data records will your program allow before it seizes up and refuses to accept any more? Will the program warn you that as of X moment its files are full and it won’t accept any more records? (I once spent two days trying to figure out why Perfect Filer was giving me back nothing but garbage before I thought to check and see whether my diskette was full.) InfoStar will allow you a maximum of 65,535 data records per file. By way of comparison, Perfect Filer will accept as many data records as the diskette will hold—about a thousand if your diskettes will hold 200K of memory and you’ve filled up your data entry screen with lots and lots of data fields; probably a skillion if you only have one one-character data field and a lot of disk capacity. The new program dBASE III will allow over a billion records or _two_ billion characters in a file—again, up to the limit of your disk space. ◻ The =data fields= are the building blocks to your data record. Some obvious attributes a data field may have are that it is alphabetic (letters only); numeric (numbers only); or alphanumeric (okay, you guessed it). That’s about all the simplest data base programs allow—but here’s where InfoStar is an absolute champ. Some of the attributes InfoStar will allow: