page_title: WordPerfect
section_title: Key characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: WordPerfect / WordPerfect for DOS / Key characteristics
caption_attribution_description: English: The former headquarters building of WordPerfect in Orem, Utah, as seen in 2008.
context_page_description: WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel, with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the dominant player in the word-processor market, displacing the prior market leader WordStar.
  It was originally developed under contract at Brigham Young University for use on a Data General minicomputer in the late 1970s. The authors retained the rights to the program, forming Utah-based Satellite Software International in 1979 to sell it; it first came to market under the name SSI*WP in March 1980. It moved to the operating system MS-DOS in 1982, by which time the name WordPerfect was in use, and several greatly updated versions quickly followed. The application's feature list was considerably more advanced than its main competition WordStar, an established program based on the operating system CP/M that failed to transition successfully onto MS-DOS, which replaced CP/M. Satellite Software International changed its name to the WordPerfect Corporation in 1985.
  WordPerfect gained praise for its "look of sparseness" and clean display.
context_section_description: WordPerfect's distinguishing features include:
  extensive use of key combinations, especially on the MS-DOS platform, enabling quick access to features, once the meaning of the key combinations (like Ctrl–Shift–F6) had been memorized;
  its "streaming code" file format;
  its Reveal Codes feature; and
  its numbering of lines as the legal profession requires
  its macro/scripting capability, now provided through PerfectScript.
  The ease of use of tools like Mail Merge (combine form documents with data from any data source), "Print as booklet", and tables (with spreadsheet capabilities and possibility to generate graphs) are also notable.
  The WordPerfect document format allows continuous extending of functionality without jeopardizing backward and forward compatibility. Despite the fact that the newer version is extremely rich in functionality, WordPerfect X5 documents are fully compatible with WordPerfect 6.0a documents in both directions. The older program simply ignores the "unknown" codes while rendering the known features of the document. WordPerfect users were never forced to upgrade for compatibility reasons for more than two decades.
caption: The WordPerfect headquarters building, seen years later
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