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Although the faster speed may have become irrelevant with faster CPU's, it is the reason that it is faster that is still relevant, and always will be. Xy isn't cluttered with redundant commands as are Word Perfect and MS Word. Long ago I did a comparison between XYIII Plus and Word Perfect and found that the same text when save in Word Perfect was 100 KB in size, but only 60 KB in Xy. When I printed both versions to paper, there was no difference in how they looked on paper.
When my agency left Word Perfect in favor of MS Word (circa 1997), there was a short time frame when both programs were available to us, so I performed a similar comparison. I no longer recall the exact file sizes, but the MS Word version was considerably larger that the WordPerfect version. Within days, the computer support staff complained that they were having a hard time meeting everyone's demand for more drive space.
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My favorite XY feature is the ability to select a column of text and move the whole column to a new location. Now I have to export my document to Excel, make the alterations, and then re-import it into Word, and hope that none of the data was lost or altered in the process. Another good feature was the ability of the Spellchecker to not crash when encountering a word with a foreign (to English) character from the Latin extended character set. MS Word can handle them today, but not back in the 1990's.
Richard Henderson, Archivist
Still Picture Processing Team Special Media Archives Services Division National Archives and Records Administration 8601 Adelphi Rd, MS NWCS-SPPT, Rm 5350 College Park, MD 20740-6001 (301) 837-1802 |