Corel Wordperfect Office 12

The latest version of Corel's Office suite comprises Wordperfect word processor, Quattro Pro spreadsheet and Presentations multimedia slideshow creator. There is also an address book, the Officeready template manager and the Zim Wireless Office Suite.

As in previous versions, in addition to the native scripting language, there's Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications and the usual largesse of 25 proofing languages, the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, over 700 fonts and a 280MB collection of clipart and graphics. The Paradox database manager is available in the Pro edition or under a separate licence.

Start Wordperfect itself and the Workspace Manager offers the choice of four interface modes: Wordperfect, Microsoft Word, Wordperfect 5.1 Classic or Legal. This provides a way of customising the toolbars and menus 'wholesale'. The Microsoft Word mode gives a roughly similar toolbar layout to Word and an extra toolbar containing commands, such as saving in Word format and help for Word users.

The 5.1 Classic mode provides the terminally nostalgic with (almost) the blue-screen Dos experience. The legal mode provides specific tools for Wordperfect's niche market in the legal professions. Apart from that, there is little change from version 11, which we reviewed in PCW's May group test. It scores over Microsoft with built-in pdf creation, so you can create documents that can be viewed on any platform using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The Perfectexpert, in our opinion, is better at providing relevant aid than the Microsoft Office Assistant. The much-loved 'Reveal Codes' feature, that shows all the formatting codes in situ, is still available. Seven years after Microsoft managed it, Corel still hasn't implemented the Unicode standard. So, if you want to use characters outside the Ansi range, you'll need to use the proprietary language and symbol fonts. We did, however, note that Wordperfect made a better job of importing and converting Unicode characters in a Word file. There are also suite-wide facilities for publishing both HTML and XML documents.

Quattro Pro also has a Workspace Manager, this time offering Quattro Pro, Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 modes. Apart from that, there is little that is new, but its strong points are huge worksheets (18,000 columns by a million rows) and over 500 functions. There's also the flagging of cells with comments attached and cells containing formulae.

Presentations also starts with the optional Workspace Manager screen, this time offering a choice between Presentations and Powerpoint modes. However, apart from the toolbars, the latter doesn't look much like Powerpoint, as you don't get the useful combined slide sorter, slide design and notes view.

The Officeready module is brand new and provides a way of previewing templates for Wordperfect, Quattro and Presentations, as well as links to purchase more templates. Unlike the Perfectexpert 'New Project' module, it isn't integrated into the rest of the suite: you have to run it as a separate application. The Zim Wireless Office Suite, though not new, is rather more interesting as it provides mobile phones with 'Microsoft Outlook email and calendar functionality, instant messaging and more', which brings us to the strangest aspect of the suite.

Corel has abandoned its own Personal Information Manager and mail client, and has instead concentrated on being 'Outlook compatible'. So, if you want a Pim/email client and you want to use the full capabilities of the Wordperfect suite, such as routing documents and using the Zim mobile phone features, you'll need to buy a copy of Microsoft Outlook.

All in all, it is hard to see what Corel is trying to achieve here and how it justifies the 11 to 12 version number change. The lack of new features offers little incentive to existing Wordperfect users to upgrade, and even the copywriters on the Corel website seem hard-pressed to find much to enthuse about. The 'cheaper than Microsoft' label becomes less attractive when you add the cost of a standalone copy of Outlook, so we'd suggest going with Star Office or Ability.

Contact: Corel 01628 589 800
www.corel.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows 98SE or above
• Pentium 166MHz
• 64MB of Ram (128MB recommended)
• 400MB disk space with an additional 196MB for Paradox

For more office suites see our office suites group test

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See also:

Group Test - Office Suites

If you need an all-in-one package offering word processing, spreadsheets, databases and more, for Windows, Mac or Linux, read on.  06 May 2004

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