My laptop that I just purchased has wordperct office are (comparible
to word, excel, and powerpoint). What is the difference? Is Wordpefect
compatible to MS word? I am curiouse whether I should purchace MS word
(I am a college student). Thanks.

Have you considered Open Office?  This is an excellent FREE office
suite that, in my opinion, is equal to (if not better) to both of the
named products.  It also handles Word Perfect and Microsoft Office
formats making it an excellent choice for a student.

http://www.openoffice.org

Word Perfect and MS word are NOT compatible for I spent hours trying
to open a Word Perfect document with Microsoft word and it came out in
all caps and !@$#$^. I am not sure what the main differance but I am
sure microsoft word has more features and is more widely used. Also
almost every school uses microsft suite of word excel and powerpoint
so you may want to get the microsft suite of word excel and powerpoint
so you can work on school computers.

And here's a third opinion!

I've read reviews of Open Office that suggest a lot of potential, but
not as much polish or integration as either Microsoft Office or
WordPerfect Suite. However, I haven't tried it. Some people are real
fans--like palitoy--and since it's free, you certainly could try it.

Second, the WordPerfect Suite has some good products in it. I grew up
using WordPerfect (well...actually...I learned on EasyWriter II back
in the mid-80s, but that's another story) and it was, and still is, an
excellent program. If you want industry-standard, sure, go with
Microsoft, but at least (since your computer came with it) give
WordPerfect a chance.

I haven't run into the compatibility problem that niles mentions. You
certainly are likely to run into problems if you try to convert
complicated documents (lots of tables, macros, etc.). But I receive
documents fairly frequently in WordPerfect (I'm an editor) and they
convert just fine.

Third, if you do decide to go with Microsoft, they offer some terrific
discounts for students. Don't buy the regular edition of Office; buy
the student version. It's the same thing, just much cheaper.

So, in brief, I'd suggest: (1) Try WordPerfect and see if it works for
you. (2) If it doesn't and you have no money, or like the open
software concept, try Open Office. (3) If the first two options don't
work, then buy the student edition of Office.

Nice comments, wordsmith. And I highly agree. And I wrote a book on
Microsoft Word. :)

I don't think they are comparible to each other.

In my opinion, OpenOffice.org is better then MS Office, because it's
free (Free as freedom and Free of cost). Basically, they are same in
daily operation/daily use and OO.o can even open and edit files made
by MS Office. If you save files in OO.o's format, the file size is
even smaller than which saved by MS Office.

MS Word may be "industry standard" but it isn't even standard between
versions. Depending on what your'e studying, it may be worth learning
a *proper* text production system, such as LaTex.

One thing you should definately take into account before deciding on
the "Teachers and Students" edition of MS Office is that, while the
discount is valuable, you cannot buy an upgrade edition in the future
to update your current version. You would have to buy a full version,
which can sometimes (at initial release) cost over $250.

I agree with many that WordPerfect has always been easier to use and
more full featured than Word.  The best product doesn't always win. If
you aren't a Word expert, using any version of WordPerfect is easier
than Word, even Word 2003.  There is a free MS add-in to Word that
reads WordPerfect files, but it is better to set WordPerfect to save
in the format most likely to be needed by readers. Typically, that
would be MS Word .DOC. I prefer an open standard like .RTF but some
fancy table features might not be saved.  Note, Microsoft will abandon
it's own Word 6 file format in the next version of Office leaving
business users with no clear default file format.  However, they have
opened the old Word format as a free standard so it can be added to
other word processing tools in the future.  Open Office (.org) has a
very good, free but large download workalike for MS Office which
supports all MS Office file formats. Sadly, it's own default
compressed XML formats are not readable by other apps however so be
sure to Save As some other format if you use Open Ofc.
I'm sure you will find WordPerfect does everything you need unless you
just have to free-hand draw tables in which case you must use Word
2000 or later.