One word of advice rings particularly true for the new millennium: "E-mail."

If you've discovered the convenience of electronic messaging, then now it's time to bring it home to the place where you're used to doing your typing — WordPerfect for Windows.

It's easy to copy and paste text from WordPerfect into other programs. The keystrokes Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste work in every Windows program. Highlight text from a WordPerfect screen, use Ctrl+C to copy it, then switch to your e-mail software, click into the message text area, then use Ctrl+V to paste it. (Unfortunately, using cut and paste like this to transfer text into an e-mail message conveys only plain text, stripping out all formatting and attributes; tabs, symbols, fonts, bold/italics/underline, headers/footers, etc. are all lost.)

It's also simple to send WordPerfect documents as attachments. This preserves the formatting and attributes, but your recipient will need WordPerfect (or a recent version of MS Word, for instance) to use the document. (If you're unsure about the software available to your recipient(s), save your attachment first in "Rich Text Format", a more universal format readable by almost all Windows software.)

In WordPerfect version 7/8/9, open the document you wish to send as an e-mail attachment. (If it's already on screen, make sure you save it first). Now choose from the menu bar atop your screen File, Send To, click with your mouse to select "Mail Recipient". After a moment's delay, this will bring up your e-mail software, ready to address a new message with your document already attached.

If you prefer, you may initiate an e-mail by first choosing the file(s) to attach. At the WordPerfect FileOpen screen (or from Windows Explorer), click on a file to select it (or Ctrl+click to select a group of files). Now right click on a selected file, choose "Send To" and then select "Mail Recipient".

It will simplify things for your recipients if the files you send as attachments have the ".WPD" filename extension. Attached documents can then be directly opened into WordPerfect from the e-mail software, instead of having to save them first, then locate and open them using WordPerfect. (See my June 1999 column, Naming Files — Filename Extensions and .WPD, for more details.)

Using a keyboard-oriented approach, a typical session of preparing a document to e-mail might go like this:

Let's say you're looking at a document (the attachment) in WordPerfect and wish to write a message describing it in another WordPerfect document window. Use Ctrl+N (or File, New) to open a new document window for the message. (To switch between open document windows, use Ctrl+F6, or the Window command, or click the document buttons at the bottom of your screen.)

After typing the text of your message, Ctrl+A is the easiest way to highlight the entire text ("Select All"). Then use Ctrl+C to copy the selected text. Now close your message document (Ctrl+F4 or File, Close) or switch with Ctrl+F6 back to your attachment document. To initiate the e-mail and attach the document on-screen, use File, Send To. Wait a moment for the new message box to come up, address the message, position the cursor to type the message (with Tab key or mouse click), then use Ctrl+V to paste the message text.

If you'll spend just a little time to learn the techniques and shortcuts described above, you'll find that WordPerfect makes a great place to compose e-mail messages. By using WordPerfect instead of your e-mail text editor, you can take advantage of its powerful features, including search/replace, spelling/grammar checker, abbreviations, and file storage/retrieval. WordPerfect offers both convenience and power.