Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 28, 1993                   TAG: 9304280210
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By LARRY BLASKO ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NEW WORDSTAR SHINES AT SIMPLE TASKS

For many personal computing wizards, it was the first word-processing program. And mastering all of WordStar's arcane control, alternate and dot commands was proof positive of wizardry - ordinary folk wouldn't naturally think to open a file with the command "D" or to close it with "Control K D."

But that was in the days when computers were puny and wizards were powerful. When central processing units grew powerful enough to run small cities and still produce documents, other word-processing programs - most notably WordPerfect and Microsoft Word - took most of the limelight (and the sales).

Last year, WordStar 7.0 was introduced. It had the pull-down menus and other features of its competitors, but it still doesn't dominate the pages of the glossy computer magazines. It is, nonetheless, a fine tool for writing, and a version is now bundled with a how-to book as "WordStar Included" (Bantam, $39.95) by Tom Rugg and Werner Feibel.

That $39.95 price brings you a version of the program that will satisfy most ordinary needs and at a fraction of even the $250-$300 discounted price of WordPerfect and Microsoft Word.

And it works very well, thank you. It has a spelling checker, pull-down menus and supports a Mouse. It also has drivers for Laserjet and PostScript printers, as well as plain vanilla dot matrix printers.

The book is well written and clearly explains what buttons to push and what happens after that. But the menu system is so thorough that most will be able to do routine tasks without a lot of book-checking. A glossary is included, and basic word-processing concepts are explained.

For aging wizards who still remember the old commands, Version 7.0 will accept them.

So what's disabled in this edition that should make you want to pay an $89 upgrade fee for the full working version? For most ordinary uses, not much.

The thesaurus, for example, is disabled. So is page preview and integrating graphics with text. You also can't send facsimiles directly from the word processor. And it doesn't have the typical printer-specific support for the dozens upon dozens of printers out there.