Have you tried AbiWord?............

Not sure how compatible it would be but Abiword should be in the
repositories I think, I have used it in the past as a document writer.
I expect like the MS office suite the Libre or open office suite
requires the whole suite.
I know there is a stand alone spread sheet under either Mint or Ubuntu
so there should be one for document creation too. Maybe a search under
the software center would find one.

The simple answer is no you cannot pick and choose which parts of Open
Office or Libre Office you want.

The long answer is that the difference in size between a full install
and partial one is minimal anyway so there's no advantage to be gained
from *not* having the full suite. All office sites have a large core
that is required no matter which sections of it you actually use, it's
not like selecting just 1 part out of 4 results in an installation
that's a quarter of the size - it just doesn't work that way

Ever done the 'custom install' in MS Office and checked the 'estimated
space needed' as you select/de-select options ? You'll have seen that
this doesn't change as much as you might have though.

If you are so short of space that a few tens of Mb are important to
save then you have far greater issues than which parts of an office
suite you are needing !! So just ignore the bits you don't use.

BTW - if you really delve deep into the guts of any OS you'll find a
whole mess of stuff that you probably will never use but trying to
prune out those bits is a mammoth task, and doomed to trash the OS :-(

Re: Word Perfect. If you are wanting to still use this then you might
investigate 'Play on Linux' which although is aimed at games it also
can help installing other programs under Wine too. The alterative is
running Windows in Virtual Box just to use that one program - not as
onerous as it might seem and I do this as well for the few programs I
have to use that have no Ubuntu equivalent.

PS - Libre Office opens WP files but cannot save in them. Struggling
to see why you are so set against using the Open Document formats, is
there a good argument against this or is it just the familiarity of WP
that's preventing it ?

I agree with you that WordPerfect is a better product than Microsoft Office, and
possibly better than Libre. What a joy it was to use the F7 key to
automatically line up indentions. Unfortunately, the best products don't
always dominate. Think of the Amiga computer.

I believe that you can just install the package libreoffice-writer, but
will probably have to do it from the commandline or from Synaptic. I don't
think that Software centre can do it. It will want to install dependencies,
but you should not get calc and draw etc.

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-writer

If you have the whole suite installed you can de-install the parts you do
not want or remove the whole thing and re-install just writer. If you ask
to remove a part Synaptic will say remove libreoffice, but it means the
suite and not all parts. By removing a part of the suite you no longer have
the suite, but just parts of it.

You could also consider Caligra Words. Again it is part of a suite, so just
install the one package. Abiword is okay, but not great. It has the benefit
of being lighter weight.

Word Perfect will not work in Wine or Play on Linux. My wife needs it for
work and I have tried. Older version would but since about 12 it hasn't
worked. It is little used and there seems to be no incentive to get it to
work in Wine. I don't like it and I have used it extensively.

There was a native Linux version of WordPerfect. Used older libraries and it's
a bit crippled. Had it working at one point. Also, some DOS WordPerfect users
(versions 5.1, 6, etc.) run their versions perfectly well in DOSBox. There's
even a WordPerfect web site that gives several tips on setting it up (
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/index.html ). I still prefer the DOS
version of WordPerfect to the Windows version, so it's convenient that it can
still work on Linux and Windows.

Have you thought of Abiword? It will work with Word Perfect files and easy to use. It is in the Ubuntu repository. It may do just what you would like.

I did manage Abiword, but had to install under Wine. Ubuntu was complaining
about not having a file to install it.

I'd like to get rid of Wine.

Software Center is driving me nuts. It has stuff that is supposed to run on
11.04 (abiword was in there) and if I install - something is missing and I
simply can't find out how to get the missing file without "you don't need it" or
a lot of jargon I don't understand.

I google for info, and get stuff from 2003 - 2009 which is no help.

This is similar to XDA for Android. Geeks post in Geekese from their phones and
with the shortcut spelling and Geek, you are lucky if you even get the gist of
the post.

The version of WP I have is 9. A site on Wine marked it as Silver, so possible
to do but not easy.

When will we know about the new version of GIMP being available?
I'd love to try that one.

Try Synaptic for software.................