Whatever happened to… Wordperfect?

QWordperfect, and its companions Quattro Pro (spreadsheet) and Paradox (database), were my favourite office programs for many years, both at the start and subsequently after Corel took them over. My wife and I even used DOS Wordperfect. She used it in an office environment back in the early 90s, where it was considered to be the best word-processor available and offered some important facilities, which the emerging Word from Microsoft didn’t.

I still have the Windows version on my XP computer, and it works well. What became of the excellent Wordperfect and why did it, and its office suite companions, fail? John Hale

AThe story of Wordperfect’s eclipse mirrors that of several other programs that we’ve covered in this section. During the 90s it failed to keep up with the development and promotion of Microsoft Office. By the turn of the century, Microsoft’s suite had pretty much conquered all the big-name office suites to emerge as the commercial victor.

One crafty strategy that Microsoft employed was to make early Windows versions of Word able to recognise the most popular Wordperfect keyboard shortcuts: this made it far easier for Wordperfect users to make the shift to Microsoft’s alternative.

However, this is the first ‘Whatever happened to…?’ with the twist of a happy ending. The Wordperfect brand name and products were passed from pillar to post, and you rightly remembered that it ended up with Corel — and in fact it’s still there, alive and kicking. Indeed, the suite is being actively developed, with the most recent version — Wordperfect Office x8 — being released in April 2016.

The Home & Student Edition costs £92.99, and includes Quattro Pro. If you want Paradox then you’d need to buy the Professional version, which sells for £269.99. There’s also an Upgrade Edition of the latter that goes for £133.99: if you retain an earlier edition of Wordperfect, you’d be eligible for this deal.