Long-time problems are still problems

This has been a disappointing experience with WordPerfect 2021, overall anyway. I started using WordPerfect in the mid 1980's in college, when it was at version 4.2 for DOS and owned by The WordPerfect Corporation, I believe in Orem, Utah. Right away I fell in love with so many aspects of WordPerfect for its thoroughness, as well as its simplicity, part of which was zero screen space taken up by a menu and only 1 line at the screen bottom with cursor location and document status info, where pressing the Help key is what displayed menu/function key info only when needed. And then the added capability I discovered in the mid-1990's by being able to use 3rd party add-in graphical fonts made by a different company, could be imported into or incorporated into WordPerfect.

Styles have always confused me in WordPerfect though, because they've seemed overly complex to work with, such as since when does it matter to look at all those System Style names and then having to choose between Heading System Styles Or All System Styles (or whatever that wording is). In semi-recent years when it's been necessary to use Styles/consistent formatting in certain places, I've ventured into the Styles world and have discovered bugs, such as setting a block of text to be a style but then that style magically gets a different font name or something else that changes on its own. And it sure doesn't help to simplify a train of thought of just writing/workng on a document, when the setting always has to be remembered for going to it to change it back, of saving new styles to the template instead of only the current document. Certain other settings are in confusing places, such as the checkboxes for saving the current cursor location in a document (i.e., QuickMark) and whether to go to it when opening a document, why aren't they in a more "overall program settings" place instead of just the Bookmark dialog?

I'd been hoping that certain long-time problems in WordPerfect would have been fixed in this most recent version of 2021 that I recently upgraded to. But alas, unfortunately no, these certain areas are still bummer problems. It's almost as though the companies that have had WordPerfect since that first purchase by Novell who bought it from The WordPerfect Corporation, have just basically ignored problem areas and also ignored areas where creative innovation would improve WordPerfect's ease of use and its once-long-ago-excellent dwarfing of Microsoft Word in quality and excellence. It's like Novell, and then Corel, just basically cared about riding the Wave Of Successful Excellence that was started by The WordPerfect Corporation, dress up the program with some minor improvements basically just to fake-justify being able to tell yourselves "well hey alright, now we have an upgraded version that we can give a next-higher version number and sell to the public."

So anyway, after this most recent round of being a bit bummed here and there after upgrading a few weeks ago to 2021, I'm writing this message in the hopes you will react positively to it to really dedicate several programmers to address these different problem areas. For the writing I'm involved with that really does need to have better consistency and reliability with these certain things that are still problematic, I decided to give LibreOffice another try since the last time I tried it was a couple years or so ago when it was version 7-something. Surprised me to see it's at 25-something now, in Feb 2025, curious about how that happened but no big deal to find out. Opening WordPerfect files works. It didn't read any bookmarks, didn't read my Table Of Contents definition or create any workable links of my cross-references, didn't read the 2 styles I created in a document, although did nail perfectly all paragraph formatting details I use (indentation, numbered lists) and page breaks and page headers, and Styles are much simpler to work with in LibreOffice than in WordPerfect. So I'll be quitting WordPerfect now and switching to LibreOffice although keeping my previous version of WordPerfect for the occasions in the future as they happen of needing to make notes of where the bookmarks are and cross ref's and certain other things, for when yet another of my WordPerfect documents is newly imported in LibreOffice.

Something else that's very worthwhile to mention, is that the WordPerfect Help has been less helpful after those glorious days of DOS when WordPerfect really did singggggg and I s'pose the first couple of Windows versions when it was still Windows 3.1 and then maybe the very beginning of Windows 95. THe WordPerfect Help was actually helpfu, especially because the program came with an actual printed book a couple inches or so thick. But in these after-DOS versions when it was first Novell and then Corel that owned WordPerfect, it's less helpful, and actually in certain topics it's not helpful at all. There's just these short dinky little instructions of "select this, select that, select this, select that," where there's no helpful explanation of what the this's and that's are for, and no explanation of why a particular "this" or "that" should be selected in comparison to another one. Now then, you head on over to the LibreOffice site and you go first to Get Help at the top and then the Documentation area, and it's like WHOAA omigosh holy crap, a bunch of these multi-hundreds pages PDF's for *each* *separate* component of LibreOffice. I mean, like seriously, wow, it's like there's a group of people involved with writing the documentation and refining/proofreading the wording, who all take that part just as seriously and importantly as the group of people doing the programming of the source code. And reading what's in those PDF's, the "Getting Started" PDF and the "Writer Guide" PDF are the two I've done some reading in, it's like wow hey this really is prettty awesome that this stuff really is thorough and informative, very very helpful.

I sincerely hope that some dedication will be given to the WordPerfect program to take it past what is still very largely the same menu options and dialogs and functionality as when The WordPerfect Corporation first sold it to Novell and then that sameness continued to Corel, and the sameness has kept on continuing since then. If I'd have had several many years of very longggg and involved writing projects, as opposed to only simple writing projects until recently but where the complexities in these recent projects aren't so in-depth or massive that manual fixing isn't infeasible, I'd be frustratingly forced to stay with WordPerfect. As it is, I have no choice but to keep my X9 version from prior to my 2021 upgrade, for the one reason of reading through a document I'm converting to LibreOffice for when LibreOffice misses bookmarks and cross ref's and whatever else.