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WordPerfect Office X3
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A Rip Van Winkle character going to sleep in the 80s and waking up today would immediately notice a big difference with the leading Office applications. Actually lots of other differences would also be evident but for the purpose of this review lets concentrate on the main Office software. Back in the 80s, when DOS was still the preferred option, the dominant Office applications were WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and Dbase IV from Ashton Tate. The intervening years have seen Ashton Tate swallowed up and then disgorged by Borland. Lotus was bought by IBM and WordPerfect becoming part of Corel via a brief Novell stop-over. These various changes of ownership were more a symptom rather than the cause of Microsoft dominating the market with its Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access) software.
Corel, however, has not given up the contest and has recently upgraded its WordPerfect Office Suite to version X3. This product is available in Home, Standard, Professional and Educational flavours. This review is based on the Standard product which consists of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Presentations and WordPerfect Mail. You also get WordPerfect OfficeReady which provides browser facilities to organise, preview and access templates and solution packs available for this suite.
Although three CDs are included in the box, you only need Disc 1 to install WordPerfect Office X3. A 17-character serial will required as some point during the installation. The other two discs contain clipart, fonts, photos and training videos.
When the market is dominated to the degree that Microsoft Office has built up, it makes sense to ensure that compatibility is not an issue. Corel has not skimped on this aspect. With the WordPerfect application you are given the choice of staying with its native mode or using Microsoft Word mode. WordPerfect is by far the major element of the suite and still retains the Reveal Code option so beloved by many users from the old DOS days.
PDF capabilities have been enhanced. You can now import and edit PDF documents although this aspect falls short of what a power-user would expect. The Word Count feature has been enhanced with more user-selectable choices and those working in group environments will appreciate the ability to remove metadata when saving files so avoiding the situation of others viewing private content. WordPerfect definitely has the power and functionality to make sure that Microsoft Word does not let its standards slip. It just lacks general acceptance in the office marketplace.
Quattro Pro is the suite's spreadsheet application. As with the word processor, Quattro Pro gives you the option of selecting the work mode from a choice of native, Excel or Lotus 1-2-3. Quattro Pro has always been a package that packs more power and functionality than your average users would ever dream of using. This latest X3 version continues this trend. Included among the new and enhanced features are PDF publishing, enhanced charting tools and cross-tab reports.
As somebody who has sat and suffered through numerous slide show presentations, I try hard to avoid this type of software. Presentations has a long pedigree and should provide users with the tools to product their own slide shows (just don't invite me). Again PDF functionality has been enhanced along with an improved Master Gallery (another name for templates) and some improvement with anti-aliasing. This application can be run in native or Microsoft PowerPoint modes.
Making up the fourth element of this suite is WordPerfect Mail. This application acts as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook with an option during installation to make it the default email client. This product has calendar functions and powerful anti-spam tools. When first run it will offer to import data from Outlook however this can be rather time consuming.
While this is a reasonably impressive package, I still have the feeling that this office suite lacks the killer punch to encourage users to migrate from the Microsoft offering. One method to achieve this could be price. This Standard version costs £235 while the Home version, admittedly not as feature rich, is available for a very competitive £59. But of course everything could change when Microsoft release the next version of its Office software which could move the goal posts.
To run this software you will need a Pentium 466MHz with 128MB RAM and 575MB of free hard disk space running Windows 98SE or later.
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