When Microsoft itself was far from being the giant it is today, and Microsoft Word was a dream yet to come true, Corel Wordperfect Office was the leader of word processing software. But when MS Word came alive, it brought features that took the industry's crown. 

Even though the good old days are already gone, and Wordperfect failed to keep the star status, it still exists as a decent alternative to Microsoft Word. This word processing program has a specific niche and has many users among legal professionals and law firms.  

So if many lawyers still are WordPerfect users, why does Microsoft Office, from which MS Word is a huge part, have such a lead over its competitors? Thinking about that, we brought you a brief explanatory article.

So if we plan to determine why WordPerfect isn’t the biggest word processing software anymore but still has the vast majority of the legal profession niche, we need to take a good look over its advantages and disadvantages when compared to the MS Office suite and MS Word itself.

Wordperfect Advantages Over Microsoft Word

Even though the great majority of users, apart from the legal industry, prefer MS Word, Wordperfect includes some compelling advantages. Here’s their quick rundown.

Advantages

Formatting Fixes: Wordperfect features reveal codes, which allows specific document formatting of Wordperfect files. After you learn this entire programming language behind the reveal codes feature, you gain a huge control over the document you are working on. This is great for collaborative editing with users who are not good with such software. 

Specialization: This is the reason why lawyers prefer Wordperfect over MS Office. Corel understood that only a small portion of their former public remained loyal. That way, they “abandoned” the rest of the market and focused on guaranteeing support, integration, and security to layers and everything related to legal work. They also brought specific tools to help a lawyer, such as options for pleading numbering, redaction, and a pleading editor. 

Document Formatting: Page numbers are independent of page footers. Besides that, page headers and footers are extremely easy to manipulate and adequate for your work. This is great for pleading papers, for instance.

Disadvantages

Support Costs: It’s common, inside several companies, that a support team is created to help work colleagues to deal with software problems. But a good support team is not simple to create and demands time, practice, and money. After all, IT personnel must be familiar with the program they are working with. So, besides being prepared to deal with the traditional MS Office programs, such as Word and Excel, they need to know about other applications, such as WordPerfect. 

Technology Complications: When compared to MS Office, WordPerfect is far more complicated. The reveal Codes are designed for those who know code language, which keeps many people away. Working with Word documents is far easier.

File Corruption Risk: File conversion is a problem. If you constantly convert WordPerfect files to another format, the chances of corruption increase. 

Why Everybody Prefers Microsoft Word

As a word processing software, Word is, by far, the best you can ask for. Word works better, is far simpler and easy to understand, and is constantly updated by Microsoft. Not even the latest version of WordPerfect, released in 2021, is capable of being a threat to MS Office and Word itself.

To begin, not even the latest version of WordPerfect is available for all devices. While Word is compatible with Windows computers, macOS, and mobile devices, WordPerfect is not even available for Mac. Since Word is universal, it is obvious the Office program will reach far more users. 

The fact that Word, at least as a test version, can be acquired for a better price and come installed on a new Windows device you buy is an important factor. Considering it is extremely intuitive, people won’t need to look for an alternative. Some lawyers may hate Word and prefer to write their documents on WordPerfect as the software already has many features and macros they can use. 

To complete, another great feature of Word that not many other competitors in the market share are compatibility with add-ins and other formats of documents. You can easily convert Word text to practically everything you want such as a PDF. It's only a matter of a few steps and “voilà.” 

Word and Wordperfect Costs

Even though we have already mentioned why Word is a better system for your personal computer or business, you may still consider WordPerfect. Another crucial factor may be the prices you will need to spend on both software for your business.

Wordperfect doesn’t offer a monthly subscription, so any plan you choose will be a one-time purchase. The plans and their correspondent values are:

• Standard Plan for $249.99
• Professional Plan for $399.99
• Home and Student plan for $99.99
• To upgrade from one version to another, you will have to pay a stable fee of $159.99.

On the other hand, you may struggle to find any software package with such good value over price as MS Office. For small fees, you get access to a whole ecosystem designed for different businesses and companies. Some of the best plans you will find are:

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic (For Business) at $5.00 per user per month.
• Microsoft 365 Personal (For Home) at $5.83 per month.
• Microsoft 365 Apps for business at $8.25 per user per month.
• Microsoft 365 Family (For Home) at $8.33 per month.
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard (For Business) at $12.50 per user per month.
• Office Home & Student 2021 (For Home) at $249.99.

In case you want to go for Word and MS Office, you can visit third-party vendors as they offer to the best prices on the market. At RoyalCDkeys - one of the most trusted CD key sellers on the market, you will find perfectly safe and working keys for the latest two versions of the Office package, including Word, Excel, and all the programs that make this suite unique.

You already know some of the differences between Wordperfect and Word and can understand why the MS Program is so popular in comparison to the direct competitor. Even though Wordperfect has some good features, MS Word takes the lead by far, so that’s the program we recommend you to go for.

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