If I Wrote the Program

I regularly work with both Microsoft Word and Corel’s WordPerfect (but more often with Word). Both are fine programs, but neither is perfect. I often dream of having the perfect word-processing program—one that incorporates all of my favorite features and eliminates annoying quirks.

My perfect program would include:

• Word 2007’s track-changes feature, which I find so much easier to use than the somewhat cumbersome WordPerfect version. Comments are also easier to manage in Word.
• WordPerfect’s excellent reveal-codes feature, which lets me know about the weird little formatting issues hiding within a document. There’s always something, and Word often doesn’t tell me what or where the issues are.
• WordPerfect’s basic formatting capabilities, which I think are more intuitive than those in Word. No inserting section breaks to remove the page number, header, or footer from a single page; just suppress the number, header or footer for that page—easy as pie. Others prefer the section breaks, but I’ve always found them (the breaks) irritating.
• The ability in Word to bring up the “Go To” box and punch in a page number without first clicking in the box. WordPerfect makes you manually place your cursor in the box, a small issue, but one that annoys me.
• Word’s obedience. Another annoying thing about WordPerfect: Many, many times I have made a correction, clicked on the next sentence, and watched my last correction revert to the original. I don’t think I’ve ever had this happen in Word. A few colleagues have reported the same issue, and our collective response is “What the #@$%?!” This quirk needs to be eliminated.
• The ability to easily edit footnotes and endnotes. Yet another beef I have with WordPerfect: Sometimes it seems to have a mind of its own when I’m working with notes. Just let me click wherever I want to click, please.
• The old Word Office Assistant (which is not included in Word 2007). Silly, I know, but sometimes I would turn on the Office Assistant (usually the cat) and click “animate” to amuse myself when I was bored or needed to give my eyes a break from editing. He never actually helped me with anything, but he sure was cute.

I could think of more, but those are the basics, the features I use or wish for most often. I think it’s a pretty short list. Surely I’m not asking for too much?