[spolsky]

I don't know why everybody thinks Microsoft Word doesn't have Reveal Codes. They have it; it's called Reveal Formatting; it has mostly been there since version 1.0 which I remember installing from 100 floppy disks in college in 1989.

[danmg]

Word's "Reveal Formatting" just shows tabs, spaces, and carriage returns as distinct symbols iirc.

Wordperfect's "Show Codes" tells you every attribute and layout change inline.

For example, if bolded some text, Word would just bold it. Wordperfect would insert a symbol like [bold] and the text would be plain, instead of rendering it. Removing the code symbol would change the attribute from the text. This allowed you do to format documents for printing on a system that couldn't handle displaying them fully formatted interactively.

[tom_]

I remember trying this when my dad bought a Windows PC with Word 2.0 (or something), so I could use that instead of his work laptop with WordPerfect. I do remember finding it really didn't work as well, though I don't remember exactly why any more.

This isn't a great response, I know. It's just a data point for the theory that Word and WordPerfect are comparable in this respect.

(This is going back so long ago now. I was still at school! Maybe the problem was that you still had to interact with the GUI view to fix things? So you could still end up with the usual weird Word stuff, but no way to fix it, because you couldn't get right in there and just manually shuffle the codes around like you could with WP.)

[meebee]

While MS Word does have Reveal Formatting, it is really not a good replacement for Reveal Codes. It's a clunky way to see isolated formating for a short portion of text. For example, how to search for all places in the text for a font change, or margin change, or section format change. It's difficult to also show where certain formatting starts or stops. Under WP, you can instantly scan the entire document looking for those changes. Not so with MS Word. That being said, RF is better to compare 2 sections of text to immediately show their differences.