Microsoft Word 5.1: The Apex of Word Processing

angkor writes "'Word 5.1 is 13 years old in 2004. Many people still swear by it. Powerful features, stable application, without bloat. Nirvana by Microsoft. It's been all downhill from there...' I always thought WordPerfect 5.1 was pretty good as well. I still use it alongside my OfficeXP."

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Re:5.1 for Mac

[iocat]

Word 5.1 was ok for a Microsoft product, but serious Mac word processors always used the blisteringly fast WriteNow [macease.com] (originally by T/Maker, later published by TLC). It was done in 68000 assembly and originally started as an Apple funded project which was a hedge against the possibility that MacWrite might not get done in time for the Macintosh launch.

In addition to the fastest word count ever seen (essential if you're a journalist), it also came with really well written and funny manuals. Even emulated on the first PowerMacs, it ran circles around WORD and had great line spacing abilities (essential if you're a student trying to hit a page count).

Re:Spell check

[niko9]

Have you tried Abiword [abisource.com]?

Small, fast, light and with spellcheck. Will let you save as .doc also, which lets me print out all my papers at school wheer they only have windos and mac boxes.

Re:fact

[swillden]

Actually Netscape built a version 5, they just didn't release it.

That's not why

[bahamat]

The Netscape codebase that would have become version 5 was released under the MPL and became Mozilla. After two years of work Mozilla 1.0 was released, upon which a new Netscape product was based. Because so much change had happened from the 5.0 codebase it was proper to version it 6.

Netscape 5 did exist, but was never released as a product.

Re:fact

[reimero]

That may have played a role, but for a short time, Microsoft distinguished between Word for DOS and Word for Windows. Word for DOS was generally at around the same version as WordPerfect, while Word for Windows had seperate numbering. The jump also reconciled the differences in Microsoft's own version numbering, and taken in context with the DOS product, it was actually a "normal" progression (which, I believe, was actually at Word 6 and not Word 5.1. Winword 2 and Word 5.5 were concurrent, IIRC.)

Gramatica

[afidel]

Gramatica is THE best grammar checker I have ever used. It was written by a couple of PhD's in English who happened to get into computer science fairly early on. The triviality and incorrectness of Word's current grammar checker is appalling since Gramatica did a MUCH better job 10 years ago.

Re:Spell check

[Anonymous Coward]

For spellchecking on Windows, check out Textpad. But these days, my favorite spell-checker has to be google. Just type your word in google and if it's wrong it'll ask "Did you mean correct-spelling?" You can also search for "word definition" or "word synonyms" etc to get more info.

-hadohk

Slightly OT: MS Word bugs and their workarounds

[denis-The-menace]

How to avoid corrupt documents [mvps.org]
TipsAndGotchas [mvps.org]
In one of these links they say that cut-n-pasting from the web will break documents. I agree since I actually experienced it and switched to OpenOffice!

Word: nice -- if and when...

[Doug Merritt]

When I use Windows at work, Word is powerful and pretty nice...if and when it works. It doesn't crash on me, but it does refuse to do what I tell it sometimes; power users get used to doing workarounds, so it's not that big of a deal if you use it every single day -- you memorize its idiosyncracies.

However, several times I've seen a whole group of Word power users (not clueless lusers) need to given up on a document and start over from scratch -- usually just on little things like the company business plan or 12 month road map (urk). The only workaround each time was to copy/paste the original document text into a new Word file, because Word was hopelessly confused by whatever little magic cookies it had left in the original document.

I.e. I know it's not just me being confused, I see this happen to everyone who uses Word heavily on big documents, sooner or later.

To be charitable, this may be the eventual fate of any huge app that grows by accretion from a small program to a hugely enormous giganto app, without being redesigned and recoded and refactored along the way.

So yeah, Word -- nice when it works, I guess, but it can be quite frustrating other times.

I'm going to lay down a challenge...

[BRSQUIRRL]

...an abandonware challenge for the ever-resourceful Slashdot crowd. I'm sure that major mod-points await someone who can post a link to a download of Word 5.1 (preferably one that runs on Windows). :)

Re:Strange...

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

(Just to be fair)

I compile OOo on this machine from source when there's a new version (instead of using the binaries). The last update's compile time was 335 minutes.

$ uname -a Linux aragorn 2.4.25-gentoo-r2 #2 Mon May 31 12:54:31 EDT 2004 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Re:I was always a big fan of Word 4.0 for DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

But 4DOS does. Although, at that point, I think I was using the Norton branded version of 4DOS called... NDOS.

Re:Not Just Word

[LurkerXXX]

Have you actually ever even installed Powerpoint???

There is an option you can install called pack-and-go. It makes a little executable file which will show your presentation. No Powerpoint installation needed on the machine used for the presentation. It's been in every version of powerpoint I can remember using.

Left + Right Align on same line

[Chris Pimlott]

You can do this with most word processors, by using tabs. What you do is set a tab on the right side of the page, then modify it to be a right-aligned tab. When you tab over to it, your text will be right-aligned to the tab line. This works both in OpenOffice and Microsoft Word.

Re:I was always a big fan of Word 4.0 for DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he was using XTree? That was a great program for DOS and probably did support aliases.

Re:Word: nice -- if and when...

[XeRXeS-TCN]

At the risk of sounding like a spokesman, if you think OpenOffice takes a while to load up (it *can* be kinda slow at times) or you don't like the various releases of Word, you can always use Abiword [abisource.com].

It is quite lightweight (only needs a 486 and 16mb of RAM to run) despite looking very similar in style and operation to the latest versions of both OOo and MS Word. It's also compatible with both Word and OOo, and supports many other formats both internally and via plugins, such as WordPerfect etc.

Personally, I have OOo and Abiword installed, so that I can use Abiword for word processing, and OOo for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations whenever I need to. I also run Abiword on my old 300MHz laptop, and it runs with no lag whatsoever, unlike when I tried running OOo on it.

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[fons]

A lot of accounting and file-management software in this profession is heavily integrated with Wordperfect 5.1 (and Novell). This software is also VERY expensive. So why buy the new version if the old one works great.

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[tigersha]

My dad still uses Dbase IV with an app he wrote on Xenix on a 286. It still runs every day without a hitch

Re:Best Features of WordPerfect

[NecroPuppy]

Yes, but in Word Perfect, it took maybe 2 clicks. Not the 6 or so it takes in Word, if you remember what it is you need to do.

Word Perfect also handles balanced columns, multiple column sections on the same page, and any number of other features much smoother than Office.

And yeah, reveal codes, rocks.

For those who don't know, it's a little box which shows all the escape codes, inserted symbols, formatting codes, etc. To change something, say column settings, all you had to do was click on the right thing, and it opened that up.

No worries about messing up the formatting in some subtle way, which has happened all too often in Word.

Re:Best Features of WordPerfect

[Anonymous Coward]

No, tabstops don't quite work right for what the poster wants to do.

Tabstops work ok if you don't later change the page margins. But, if you change the paper size or page margins, then the tabstop at the right margin is in the wrong place.

A true left/right justify (as in the TeX \fill command) is missing from WORD.

WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

I sometimes use WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac when I get tired of Word. It is free for public download, so you don't have to worry about breaking the law. http://acmfiles.csusb.edu/corel/wpmac.html

Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number?

[bmwm3nut]

adding more speakers really only increases the size of the "sweet spot" where everything sounds great. really all you need is 2.1 (i still think you need to have the extra low frequency speaker because you get better responce if the speakers are set up for a narrow range of frequencies) because you only have two ears and your brain uses volume and phase information to tell you where the sound came from. however, with a 2.1 system you only have one spot where this works perfectly. that's why 5.1 usually sounds better, the sound is projected from more than one place, so the probability of being in the sweet spot is larger, likewise with 7.1.

my bose lifestyle came with head mounted microphones that i wore while setting up the speakers. the system played sounds and adjusted volume and phase of the speakers so that where i was sitting was a sweet spot. with 5 speakers, there are 5 degrees of freedom and i can choose up to 5 spots. with 7 speakers, i imagine that you could have 7 spots. the cool thing is that you can really tell when you're in a sweet spot or not. my gf and i were watching T3 yesterday and i comented that the sound was actually better than the (crappy) theater that i originally saw it in. she wasn't impressed. so we switched listening positions (on the same couch) and the sound was definatley worse where she was sitting. that was because when i originally set up the speakers the couch was in a different place. i've since reconfigured the system, and is sounds great again.

Re:Word: nice -- if and when...

[Anonymous Coward]

The standard workaround is to save to RTF. This format stores all the most common features like pictures, graphics, tables, etc... and is the only way to recover from Word's many situations where you can't even save your work anymore....

Re:Word: nice -- if and when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Abiword doesn't even handle simple RTF docs very well, unfortunately.

Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number?

[tekunokurato]

Um, I thought the matrix dvd only had 5.1 and back...

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[kalidasa]

Having worked with redlining myself (not for an attorney, but for a publications department that needed it), I can confirm that. To this day, it's much easier to mark the margins of a highlighted paragraph with asterisks and the like in WordPerfect (just a format attributed) than Word (text box).

There are other things in WordPerfect that are helpful to attorneys, too. It's a shame that every version of WordPerfect since 8.0 has s*&^ed.

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[dosius]

You can set it up to look mostly like 5.1 (use text mode; for a 5.0 appearance turn off the drop-down menus), and use the 5.1 keybindings. I find 6's use of F1 for Help more intuitive (it's F3 in 5.x; but in 5.1 it can be configured to use F1), ditto Esc=Cancel vs. F1=Cancel.

Re:Word: nice -- if and when...

[the chao goes mu]

Had a lot of good experiences using abi word, when Starofccie/open office had issues running on BSD. The only problem was rendering MS specific extensions to the Latin-1 character set. OO/SO renders them fairly well (with a very few glitches), abiword renders everything using the standard Latin-1 set, which makes a few documents a bit hard to read.

(For a while, I skipped even abi word and just used a script [deoffice? deword? can't recall] which changed .doc files into ascii text...)

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[Anonymous Coward]

WordPerfect became standard because it provided needed features that Word didn't (and in some cases still doesn't). It wasn't just a matter of "lawyers did this for some kooky reason".

Such as: Decent SGML support. Legally correct document word counts! Complete control over document coding via reveal codes. Onscreen document actually matches printed document (Word 2003 sometimes even screws up here--WYSIWYG my ass), and built-in PDF creation support. Yes, it's a little flaky from time to time, but if there's no other word processor offering the features you need, you hardly have a choice, do you?

Re:5.1 for Mac

[hawkfish]

WriteNow was written by Heidi Rozen's company. IIRC, the company was made up of all the female Macintosh engineers of the time who were both competent and attractive. The reason was supposedly that Heidi (quite a looker herself) had created an environment where they could just be engineers without having to worry about being constantly hit upon at work.

A void filled by shareware

[mblase]

I don't word-process very much, but for Mac users there is one great option available for "I just want to write" types: Mellel [redlers.com]. It's got tables, styles, footnotes/endnotes, and multilingual support -- all the power features "normal people" use in Word and none of the chrome. All for under thirty bucks, which is a darned good value and (I'm sure) an improvement on Word 5.1 by any measure.

Re:Not Just Word

[rune.w]

Power Point 2003 has a feature now that allows you to pack a presentation and burn it directly into a CD (or copy it to a floppy, if it's small enough) so that you don't have to carry around your laptop with you to all places.

For instance, in my school classes were several people are giving a presentation/seminar on the same day occur quite often. It's always a pain to wait for people to carry down their laptops and plug them to the beamer, specially when it decides to stop working. This usually irritates professors, who see how class time goes down the drain, as well as bored students who want to get out of the place as quickly as possible. I 'm always quite amused to see the relief on their faces when I just plug my USB keyholder into the last person's laptop and start my presentation within 3 minutes. It makes everybody happy and I think it has had a minimal positive effect on my presentation grades as well ;)

Quite handy if you ask me.

R.

Re:Eh...

[uncitizen]

I would like to disagree with you there.

While not so old that I can remember much before Word 5.1, I do remember it quite well. For example:

On a PowerMac 6100 w/ 8megs of RAM running system 7.5 (on a side note, 5.1 would also run an SE with only 4megs of RAM)

Word 5.1 had a memory footprint of not more than 1 meg. It could be installed from 6 floppies and lanched in a few seconds.

Compare to Word 6.0, which had a memory footprint of not LESS than 4 megs, took 60 seconds! to launch. Also, they "improved" the indexing feature. This part I don't remember the specifics, but I believe that 5.1's feature was like 1000 entries, while 6.0's "super great new thing" was only 100 entries.

Mac people from them really do remember. Microsoft almost lost dominace in the Mac word processor department back then. 6.0 was a punchline to quite a few jokes, much like Windows ME is/was.

Re:Two words - Task Pane

[Cromac]

I have spent more time with Office XP hacking the registry and customizing toolbar buttons to avoid their suppossed intelligent features.

Did you script the changes you made so the next time, because there's always a next time especially with Windows, you don't have to do it all by hand?

A simle WSH script to automate those registry changes might save you a bunch of time and headachs next time around.

Re:one man's bloat is another man's feature

[DrVomact]

Write tech documents with Word? One of my current job responsibilities is to maintain a 2,500 page document. Would you use Word for this? I'd prefer to use an application that does one thing well--in this case, FrameMaker--than one that keeps track of my boss' calendar.

I haven't checked lately, but Word used to crash regularly on manuals that exceeded 200 pages, never did a good index, and couldn't handle multiple chapters in separate files. You'd think they'd fix this stuff before they added frills. (I'd be surprised, but maybe they did...I never do real work with Word anymore.)

For me, the most loathsome feature of Word is style inheritance. Unless you are really good at designing Word styles (and who is?), you wind up with a bunch of styles that are mutually related in some mysterious way so that when you make a little change to one style, another style suddenly morphs into Greek, or all your numbered lists turn to bullets. I hear people mention this phenomenon frequently, but they usually think that word processors are supposed to act like this.

Re:Strange...

[ignorant_newbie]

you may not have any MSOffice _windows_ running, but I'll bet you a copy of Office XP that if you check your 'startup items' folder, you'll find that office is preloading it'self at boot.

This isn't a bad thing, Just be aware of it when making comparisions. OOo is taking longer because it's not already there.

Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number?

[The_K4]

Yeah, but if you have a reciever with a good DSP it can "fill in" and you can hear Trinity run from the FR speaker to the F to the FL to the L to the RL. It's also amazing how even w/ 2 channel input (radio) a good DSP can move the singer to 70% the center/F speakers and 30% everywhere else and do the inverse on the "music" and give you a very emersive enviroment from 2 channel. That's why many of the 7.1 recievers are $$ more then the 5.1, they have DSPs to do cool things and acutally use all 7 of the speakers.

Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number?

[The_K4]

That's only 1/2 the story. The sound is also diectional, meaning that a sound from the FL can "immitate" a sound from the RL, but not as well as if you have a RL speaker, and while it's doing the job of 2 speakers (a RL and a FL) it has some intereaction of those signals (which can lead to destructive interference). If you want to see want I mean get rid of 3 of you speakers and let your bose system "reset" using the mic. Then watch T3. You will see that the rear sounds arn't as good as with the 5 speaker set up. Adding 7 gives you that much more distinction between the side and rear signals.

Re:5.1 for Mac

[innocent_white_lamb]

Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5a is available for free download from Microsoft here. [microsoft.com]

To install run "wd55_ben -d" after downloading, then run setup.exe

No, I have no idea why it's available for free download, but there it is,
free for all comers apparently.

NASA uses Word 5.1 on Mac OS X

[wax66]

I was part of a certain center's major OS 9 to OS 10 upgrade, and Word 5.1 is still used by many people at the center (most of them have been here since dirt was first invented). Turns out that it has (according to them) the best mathematical formula display and editor. I personally did some testing with Word 5.1 for one of them on OS X in classic mode, and with the exception of a couple of font display problems that were fixed, it worked perfectly STILL. Sick, but nice that this person we upgraded doesn't have to rewrite millions of pages of documentation on flight characteristics and such of various aircraft/spacecraft and whatever else she had. Just sad that something as simple as that equation editor isn't in current releases.

Real designers use Vector apps

[xactuary]

I once worked with a graphic designer and whenever he needed to create a letter or invoice he opened Free Hand and used the programs type features. For him, it probably was faster... and I must say, every letter out of his dye-sub printer looked perfect.

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[Reziac]

WP5.2 for DOS doesn't actually exist in the real market (I'm told there was something that was internally called WP5.2 DOS, but I've never seen it, and I sorta collect WP versions). While there was a WP5.1+ in 1994, it's not significantly changed in any subversion since the 3/91 release, which was about the point where all the bugs got cleaned out; WP5.1 is the most bug-free program I know of. And I still use WP5.1 every day. :)

If you need an updated copy, it's most easily come by via abandonware sites, or abwi.old :)

The macro language (always much more powerful than mere keystroke recording) was changed to fullblown compiled executables as of 6.0. The default screen for WPDOS6.x kinda looked like a wannabe GUI, but it could run in naked DOS-screen mode too. The major command keystrokes didn't change, tho -- IF you were using the *letter* keystrokes. The NUMBERS changed when new features were added. So if you were used to F for Font, it was still F, but if you'd been using 4, well, now it was 5 or 6. The manual warns you about this way back as of WP5.0. :)

What I really want is a WPWin8 version of the WPDOS6.1 calendar macro. The current macros just don't have the features I need. I've tried importing it but can't get it to run, and I don't know the macro language well enough to fix it. :(

Re:fact

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU ARE DENSE.