Word Perfect Support

[twoofus at execpc.com]

Edward M Dumanis said:

>I do not think we should believe WordPerfect's promises.  Unfortunately,
>after being bought by Nowell, they no longer provide friendly support to
>the users, the one we used to enjoy.  Before they were bought, when I
>had called them reporting the bugs, they always tried to correct them,
>and they would sent me a free copy of a new version when they could not
>correct the problem with the existing one.  Not anymore!  Now they simply
>suggest that you buy a new release, possibly one with new bugs.  Their
>support service used to be a very important advantage for desk-top
>publishing.  Nowadays, I would recommend other software packages.


 Your absolutely correct that with 5.1 WP had no problems sending out free
copies to fix the bugs and whether they continue that policy for 6.1 remains
to be seen.  The thing to remember though, is that what they sent out was a
new release of the same version (5.1) and not a new version.  Of course,
whenever a software company moves on to a completely new version (as WP did
with 6.0 and now 6.1), the previous versions are no longer completely
supported in the sense that the company no longer attempts to fix the bugs.
Instead, they suggest you buy the upgrade.  This is standard industry practice
and it does make sense, as much as we may hate to admit it.   I think that the
support problems you describe probably reflect an unfortunate coincidence
between the purchase by Novell and the move from a Dos-based software to
Windows-based software and the release of new versions of each.

I'm not sure what bugs or problems in which versions you called them about,
but in my personal experience the support people have always been very nice
and very helpful.  I sometimes work as a temp, so I've had plenty of occasions
to call them about 5.1, 6.0 and 6.1 with problems ranging anywhere from
trivial questions to document-threatening crises.  Again, the problem I ran
into with my Russian module for 6.0 wasn't so much due to a change in the
customer support policy as it was to the fact that the company had moved so
quickly into 6.1 that there wasn't time to produce a de-bugged release of 6.0.
 Instead the solutions were incorporated into 6.1.  Consequently, the only
thing they could say was for me to buy the new version.

I'd be interested in knowing which software packages you prefer.  I've looked
at some and none of them seemed to have the flexibility of WP.  I'm thinking
specifically things like the Speller and Hyphenation Dictionaries, as well as
font/size manipulation, the use of other slavic languages like Serbian and
Czech, and the ability to print on a machine that does not have the Russian
module.

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*****
Rachel Kilbourn                 There's no limit to how complicated things can
get,
twoofus at execpc.com              on account of one thing always leading to
another.
Slavic Department
Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison                    -- E.B. White