[OT] Wordperfect and other older progs

[News]

Talking about old files and compatibility in another thread reminded me that I have a folder (directory!) of WP 5.1 files that I have never been able to access successfully, without WP. I know I have the original WP installation floppies somewhere, but where? Pity I don't have a suitable drive now.

Anyway, a quick search found

and there was WP5.1 which I downloaded and installed, and it works! Amazing. TBH, there is nothing there that I particularly need, but quite fun to browse through old correspondence.

Point is, if you have old inaccessible files, that site is a good place to find a matching program.

[spuorgelgoog]

Almost tempted to try Adobe Acrobat Reader v.1 for DOS.

Owain

[Weatherlawyer]

There are online conversion website. If you can get the files open with Wordpro or Notepad you can export them to Outlook of google docs. I used to find that just changing the file extension on old text files would get them opened in Word or Note ~pad.

Office Libre should just open them with no query, I'm not absolutely sure but that never bothers to ask about my ancient Microsoft stuff. If Word is being an arse, migrate.

[Steve Walker]

That reminds me of when the company I was working at switched from Wordperfect to Word in the mid nineties. We had a large number of S20 data sheets (instrument specifications) in WP format. As they were a standard ISA (Instrument Society of America) sheet, the automatic page numbering was 1/3 of the way down the sheet, not in the header or footer. We discovered that WP docs imported into Word worked perfectly, but we couldn't create new sheets in this long established format, as Microsoft never considered that you'd want a page number anywhere but in the header or footer and didn't give an option to place one elsewhere!

[spuorgelgoog]

There were so many things that Word couldn't do that WordPerfect can ... proper labels for example. Word does full-page tables, which sounds fine until you want to do tables on lables.

Owain

[polygonum]

Odd - certainly I can put a page number anywhere using Word 2016. If you had asked, I'd have been pretty sure I could place a page number field anywhere, right back to an early Word for the Mac.

Word 2016 also seems to allow opening of WP 5.1 files directly - at least, it offers the choice in the file open dialogue! But I haven't got any WP5.1 documents to try.

[Tim Watts]

And when WP buggered it up, you did a reveal-codes at which point it was usually apparent what had happened.

I remember in around 1988 being in awe of a reasonably decent page preview with block graphics on a Wyse-85 terminal! (VT220 style).

[Steve Walker]

You certainly couldn't then. We had a number of long discussions with support at Microsoft, as these were standardised documents used internationally that we did not want to change the format of. In the end we gave up and continued to create them in WP and import them into Word to get around the problem.

[Dave W]

In a Word footer a field code {page} gets displayed as the page number. You can actually add a text box anywhere on the page, containing {page}, as part of the footer but outside the footer area instead of inside. The page number will be displayed where you put it.

[Tim Streater]

Can I get the page number of *another* page displayed on a page? So that I can say (f'rinstance) "See Page 27 for more details" and the 27 updates automatically if it changes?

[polygonum]

You certainly could. Seems to come under Cross Reference on the Insert ribbon in Word 2016. You can choose what sort of reference which includes the option of page number.

[Bruce]

That is effectively what the contents list function does so I am sure it is possible with a bit of research.

[John Rumm]

A cross reference? Yes you can... like most things Word, its a bit feeble compared to the WP version, but that much at least works.

The things I had difficulty with[1] in Word were where you wanted cross references to multiple versions of the same target. For example on one documentation standard I worked on, they wanted a list of affected pages in the front of each technical manual that indicated which design change requests affected which page. In WP it was quite easy to go through updating a document in accordance with a software or design change request document, and just dropping a target of the SCR or DCR number in as a reference along side each change. So you would include say "SCR1234" as a target. Then in the "affected pages" page just enter SCR1234 as a page number cross reference that to that target, and it would automatically spit out a list of page numbers. Combine that with the WP compare versions capability to sidebar changes and you were nicely sorted. IIRC it even worked when the cross reference targets were in sub documents rather than the one with the cross ref list in it.

[1] It was a while ago - and I have not had a need to do deep technical docs in word recently, so have not investigated if it has got any better.

[Tim Streater]

I'm still on Office 2008, which although frustrating in the usual ways for a number of reasons, still works well enough. I'm also reluctant to ante up £120 to get Office 2016 Mac. Perhaps I should explore 2008 to see if any reference stuff shows up.

[polygonum]

Because I need to use Office 2016 for work reasons, that is all I have installed. Otherwise I would have checked it in an earlier version. Mind, there are not that many significant differences between 2013 and 2016.

[John Rumm]

I would imagine that the 2008 Mac version is not dissimilar to the windows 2007 or 2010 versions...

In which case, from the Insert tab, use the bookmark feature to insert a named bookmark on the page you want to reference. Now in the place you want to link to it, use the cross reference item, and set the reference type to "bookmark" and set the "Insert reference to" option to Page number. Then just select the relevant bookmark from the list and click insert.

[spuorgelgoog]

That of course assumes you have already written the bit you are cross-referring to.

With WP you could put in a source or target reference without the other existing, and then match them up later. Together with Reveal Codes to see exactly what was being referred to.

Aaaah, happy days.

Owain

[Chris J Dixon]

Surely Word has been able to insert field codes, one of which is page, for a very long time?

Was the actual problem that you couldn't anchor it in the middle of the page? That might have given some difficulty.

Chris

[Tim Streater]

Possibly so. But these days the only doc is online, the books are gone AFAIK. And the online doc for my Word 2008 has been bust on my Mac for some years now.

[Tim Streater]

Thanks John. I've highlighted/dragged your comments to my desktop where they'll sit there as a textClipping for me to refer to later.