Thoughts on WordPerfect vs. MS Word

Margolis Edelstein remains a WordPerfect office.  We have debated for years whether to make the switch to MS Word.  I thought I would make today's post about my thoughts on why we continue to use WP and whether MS Word might be in our future.

How we got here

Law firms tended to be early adopters of word processors back in the 1980s.  At that time, WordPerfect dominated the market.  As a result, law firms remain the largest users of WordPerfect still today.  Yet most of the world has moved to MS Word.  Wordperfect market share is only a small fraction today.  MS began to dominate the Word Processor market in the early 1990's by successfully bundling Word with other powerful programs, such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.  It aggressively marketed its products and pushed ahead.  At this same time, WordPerfect drifted.  It took forever to get out a decent Windows version of the product.  Most WP users were still using the DOS version in the late 1990's.  The product was sold to three different companies within a few years, leaving it without a coherent long term plan.  As a result, Microsoft won the war decisively.

WordPerfect still wins in a comparison of features.

What MS Word never did, in my opinion, was develop a word processor superior to WordPerfect.  Even today, WP has many features that Word does not, including oldies like "reveal codes" to newer additions like its ability to work well with PDF documents and wipe metadata from files.  By contrast I cannot think of anything MS Word can do that WP cannot, other than read and save MS Word files better.

Reasons I don't like MS Word

There are other reasons I prefer WordPerfect to Word.  For one, Microsoft had made huge changes to the user interface over the years, requiring a great deal of retraining for employees.  This means periods of lower productivity and increased training costs.  By contrast, WP makes relatively minor changes to new versions.  Users are easily able to jump several versions ahead, and pick up rather quickly to the few minor changes that exist.  That cannot be said for MS Office.

Similarly, the format of a WP document has remained the same too.  Whether you use WP 7 or 17, accessing files created by newer or later versions works seamlessly.  That cannot be said for MS Word.  As a result, upgrades of MS Office become more difficult.  You need to upgrade the entire firm or at least an entire office all at once in order to ensure documents created by one person can be accessed by others.

Microsoft is also much more heavy handed with its licensing.  It has threatened the firm several times to required the firm perform expensive and time consuming licensing audits at our own expense, something Corel has never done.  Microsoft also puts far more restrictions on transferring licenses to other computers and other limitations on use.

Microsoft remains more expensive.  MS Office Standard costs almost $400 per seat under its volume licensing program.  Perhaps you are saying to your self "that can't be right, I paid only around $150 for Office."  That would be because you bought the Home and Student version.  It is pretty much the same thing as far as the main components are concerned, but it is a violation of the license terms to use the Home and Student version "for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities."  So even if you have a version on your home computer, you are violating your license if you do anything for work on it, or anything else related to business or a money making project.  We certainly could not use it in the office.  In truth, the firm uses the "home and business" version which costs around $200, but which also requires us to jump through a series of time consuming hoops every time we install it on a computer.  By comparison, a WP Standard license is about $180, and even less when we can buy an upgrade license instead of a full one.

So why does everyone want Word?

Despite everything I've just said about WP being better than MS Word, if I was starting a new company tomorrow and needed to buy a word processor, I would without question buy MS Word.  The bottom line is that Word dominates the market.  Because all of our clients and other businesses with which we interact use Word, it makes it much easier for us to interact if we also have Word.  Further, many third party programs, such as document management systems or special document utilities are designed to work with MS Word and nothing else.  MS Word documents, as the de facto standard are easily read on just about any platform, including Google Docs, or on your favorite phone or tablet.  You cannot get that universal use with WordPerfect.

Then why hasn't the firm switched?

The biggest factor in remaining with WordPefect is the great cost of change.  And I'm not talking about the cost of licencing 200 or so copies of MS Office.  That is only the beginning.

The firm has decades of files stored in WP format.  The cost of converting all those is likely prohibitive.  More likely we would continue to use both WP and MS Word for a time so that older files could be accessed as needed.

Most of the Staff has used WP for many years as well, they would all need to be retrained on an entirely new system, which would reduce productivity for some time and incur the cost of trainers.  Even the Help Desk staff would need extensive training in order to help others with problems.

Many of the staff have extensive libraries of macros, designed to automate many of their tasks.  There would need to be great time and expense devoted to converting these macros.  WP is even built into some of our basic systems, such as the Associate Review forms used annually.  All those would need to be rewritten as well.

Because of all these hard and soft costs, the firm has been reluctant to make such a great change.  Large conversion costs are hard to justify as an expense, and staff resources are already under stress without adding such a massive project.

Can't we just use both?

Well essentially we are using both now.  We have nearly 100 MS Office licenses distributed among the firm.  Wilmington never switched to WP when it was acquired and uses Word exclusively.  Others use it as a secondary program as needed, going back and forth.

This, however, causes its own set of problems.  sharing documents internally becomes problematic if some are using WP and others Word.  Both programs purport to open those in the other's format, but there are inevitably formatting errors that creep in, as well as an alarmingly  high rate of document corruption.  It is also a drain on help desk resources to remain experts in both programs.  At a time when we are trying to reduce demands on help desk resources, we don't want to require a doubling of their expertise.

If the firm decides to switch, there would likely be a transition period, probably lasting years, where we moved one office at a time, retaining WP on existing computers to give staff time to get up to speed on the new system.  But WP would be phased out over time so we could support only one system.

So where are we going?

I recently did a Poll of attorneys and staff asking about their preferences for WordPefect or Word.  You can click on the link below to see a summary of responses

Poll Results

If you looked at the link you will see that a substantial majority favors moving to MS Word.  For me, that is an important consideration.

If we do make the decision to move everyone to MS Word, we would probably move toward using Office 365.  This is Microsoft's new subscription based plan.  One reason it is making its disk based licensing much more onerous is that it wants to drive users toward a subscription.  I suspect Microsoft may phase out disk based licenses altogether in the next few years, or at least make them so expensive that users have no choice but to accept the subscription model.

Under Office 365's current subscription model we would pay about $100 per user per year.  This would allow you to install office not just on your work computer, but also on a home computer, tablet or phone as well.  This would greatly improve mobile productivity.

Conclusion

For now, these are just my thoughts on the matter.  Approval by the management and partnership for any such change has not been made yet.  With this post, I hope to begin a discussion on how the firm should proceed with such a change.  I value your feedback and thoughts.

Word processing is fundamental to what we do as a firm.  It is probably even more central than email for many of us.  Changing the way everyone works on such a fundamental level is not something I take lightly or that should be started with out careful consideration of all the ramifications.