Product Reviews

Corel is the last of the big three software houses to upgrade its office suite and name it after the upcoming Millennium. Lotus started the trend with its SmartSuite Millennium Edition, and we reviewed it in our December 1998 issue. Next up was Microsoft with Office 2000, which featured in our July 1999 edition. As you'd expect, each company has made a song and dance of its latest offering.

So where does WordPerfect Office 2000 fit into the equation? Rather than leapfrogging anyone, Corel has done little except catch up with the competition in some areas, and tidy up its act in others. However, it would be unwise to dismiss it out of hand. It's vastly cheaper than the opposition - between half and two-thirds the price, depending on where you shop. It's also packs plenty of goodies and useful features.

Like Lotus, Corel has licensed voice recognition software to allow dictation to its office suite. Lotus uses a limited version of IBM's ViaVoice, which only works within the SmartSuite package. Corel has plumped for Philips' FreeSpeech 2000 and, commendably, it works with other firms' applications too.

WordPerfect Office 2000's installation system has been reworked in the aftermath of Microsoft's Install On Demand system, first seen in Office 2000. Corel's Install-As-You-Go works in a similar way - any features not installed when you first set up Corel will be pulled from the CD the first time you try to use them. Unlike Office 2000, there is no way of completely turning off features so they are never installed on demand. This does make the system a lot easier to understand, but unfortunately it's not universal - for example, omitted Visual Basic menu items will be greyed out in apps and cannot be installed 'as you go'. They can only be added manually, using the setup function.

WordPerfect 9

The most important - because most-used - application of any office suite remains the word processor. Each WP has its own personality, and WordPerfect is perhaps more visual than its rivals. While Word is the text-crunching workhorse par excellence and WordPro the tool of choice for long and complex documents, WordPerfect shines as a basic desktop publishing package. For example, click anywhere on a page, and you can start entering words exactly where the cursor is blinking.

This feature was actually in older versions of WordPerfect, but it's been refined for Version 9. Microsoft has also taken it on board and built a very similar facility into Word 2000.

In line with its DTP approach, WordPerfect 9 makes documents simple to set up and structure. Critical settings like text wraps and paragraph formats were all very easy to find in the menu system, and straightforward to tweak. WordPerfect 9 also allows you to insert and edit objects on the page in a number of different ways. A 'PerfectExpert' help bar further enhances this flexibility (it's present in all the main applications and sits to the left of the main program window). Depending on the object you select, it gives a list of suggestions that are informative, practical and easy to follow. (Microsoft offers much the same with its excruciatingly cutesy Office Assistants - friendly little cartoon characters which offer the wisdom of a big dull book in Happy Language.)

The old WordPerfect 8 'HotSpots' have been replaced by context-sensitive toolbars. Click on an object, for example an inserted graphic, and the relevant toolbar will appear. Marrying this with context-sensitive right clicking, WordPerfect offers users more ways of actually carrying out a given task than any other suite. This may seem a little chaotic, but allows each user to find their own editing style - of which there are plenty to choose from.

The deeper you delve into WordPerfect, however, the more cracks it reveals. One is that it doesn't support kerning, the fine adjustment of space between letters. Kerning is essential for any layout work that involves large headlines - you simply can't rely on the default character spacing. Office 2000 does offer this feature, along with a raft of more powerful proofing tools.

Those interested in creating and managing web sites will be sad to learn that Corel's HTML tools are severely compromised too. They lag well behind those of both Microsoft and Lotus. For example, you can't open or save documents across the Net, whether to an external web site or a location on an Intranet. Files can only be opened locally, or on a conventional network. Also, the level of formatting preserved when rich HTML documents are opened is poor in comparison with Office 2000. Microsoft's word processor, by contrast, can cope with complex structures such as frames.

While Corel has taken a step in the right direction by enhancing the web design tools, they are not powerful enough for WordPerfect to be seriously considered as a HTML editor.

It's not all bad news. If there's one facility in WordPerfect that should be applauded, it's the built-in option to save files in Adobe's Acrobat PDF format. PDF is a great way of sharing good-looking documents consisting of formatted text and pictures. What's more it can be read equally well by Apple Mac and PC owners. So, if you're interested in circulating a newsletter or a flash brochure over the web, WordPerfect is well worth considering. No other suite can create PDFs without you purchasing Adobe's own Acrobat product.

Quattro Pro 9

Like WordPerfect, Quattro Pro is as old as the computing hills. Gruff old PC users with an enduring love affair with DOS will probably remember its early incarnations, and because of its long-matured development, it's a product with some real strengths. But in the final analysis, it's comprehensively outgunned by Excel, and to a lesser extent by Lotus 1-2-3.

Quattro Pro scores highly on ease of use, being similar in certain ways to Lotus 1-2-3, which many users find familiar and friendly. You get a useful Formula Composer function that simplifies the construction of complex expressions. Several other neat features include the way formulae pop up as you move the cursor over a cell, and all cells based on formulae are flagged by a small blue triangle in the corner. Select a range of cells, and a set of useful working sums or averages pops up in the application bar. Excel has a similar feature.

Several dialog boxes have previews built in, which works especially well in the charting module. A Page Break view, similar to Excel's, has also been introduced. This feature helps you avoid the notorious problem with spreadsheets wherein page breaks appear in the wrong place.

Sadly, there are quite a few omissions that detract from Quattro Pro's air of simple usability. You can't undo a series of recent edits - only the most recent. This vital feature is unique to Excel, and its absence is a major drawback if you want to make a few changes, see the difference they make, then quickly revert.

Neither is Corel's spreadsheet on the money when it comes to web integration, suffering drawbacks similar to those that hamper WordPerfect 9. Spreadsheets can be saved as HTML, but not directly to a web address, and only the simplest sheets will survive with formatting intact. Dragging cells from web-based tables viewed using Netscape into Quattro Pro is meant to be possible, but appears not to work at all.

Updating spreadsheets from web sites by tying cells to particular pages is also difficult. To make the function work successfully, you need to write scripts that direct Quattro Pro where to look, but it's not immediately obvious how or where to write the instructions. Instead, you are provided with a list of predefined scripts that allow you to tie your spreadsheet to sites like Nasdaq, for example.

Presentations 9

Presentations 9 is the high point of WordPerfect Office 2000. Of all the applications, it has consistently kept up with its competitors, while holding a few aces up its own sleeve. In operation, it's very similar to Microsoft PowerPoint, particularly as text boxes now behave more conventionally than they used to in earlier versions. Having said that, they still have a strange tendency to resize when you want to reflow and vice-versa, as well as a peculiar lack of reshaping handles where you'd sometimes expect them. Still, this is all bearable

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when you get used to it.

PerfectExperts are document creation guides similar to Microsoft's Wizards. These are generally excellent throughout the suite, nowhere more so than in Presentations. As well as offering customised layouts for each type of presentation, there are extensive and well-written structural notes in the Outline view. Anyone responsible for putting together such material will learn a great deal from the suggested content.

Jazzing up a live presentation is particularly simple. A huge variety of slide transitions are available, and they animate fluidly even on low-spec machines. Individual objects, whether graphics or text, can also animate their way onto the screen. Sounds can be triggered by a slide's arrival, or by clicking on individual objects, though if you choose to loop audio clips there's an annoying hiccup as they 'rewind' to the beginning. You can also assign keystrokes to trigger slide events, so you don't have to rely on mouse clicks during a presentation. All pretty useful.

Philips FreeSpeech 2000

It was with a great deal of cynicism that I loaded up Philips FreeSpeech 2000. Previously, I'd spent a couple of tedious hours training IBM ViaVoice to recognise my dulcet tones within SmartSuite, only to be greeted with spectacularly poor results. Only one in four sentences remained unscathed, the rest emerging as unusably surreal creations that took longer to edit than it would have done to just type the whole shebang.

FreeSpeech 2000 proved simple to install and use. It selects the correct combination of settings for the supplied microphone and your sound card, while a battery-powered in-line box ensures the microphone is compatible with a wide range of inputs. Though my sound card was not in the list of supported hardware, it worked well once levels were set.

Once installed, the software makes you read through a set of texts about voice recognition to set the basic pattern for your voice, then gives a choice of further texts for training. Once the first of these has been completed, you can opt out or train further. When you've finished the training, the software sits there and crunches numbers for a while, after which it's ready to 'receive dictation'. There is also a command mode that lets you verbally request application functions, such as 'Left Align' or 'Move Forward Six Words'.

After completing the minimum training requirements of FreeSpeech 2000, which took just under half an hour, the recognition system was making a half-decent attempt at recreating my dictated sentences. This was amazing, given that a heavy night had given my voice that inimitable 'Miles Davis' growl. Further training would definitely benefit the process of recognition further. Considering the amount of time invested, I'd say FreeSpeech 2000 beats ViaVoice hands down.

The application takes rather a long time to load - over a minute on my 333MHz Pentium II with 64Mb RAM. No wonder there's an option to launch on start-up.

The biggest problem with voice recognition, though, is actually learning to dictate. It sounds daft, but if, like me, you're more used to typing, and continually editing as you type, your brain is not very good at spitting out complete sentences in one go. It's worth bearing this in mind: though I enjoyed playing with FreeSpeech for the purposes of this review, I can only imagine using it again to store existing documents read aloud.

CorelCENTRAL 9

Sadly, the PIM (personal information manager) supplied with this suite, CorelCENTRAL 9, is not a great piece of software (though, to be fair it has been completely reworked from the considerably more horrific version 8).

The basic diary function, the Day Planner, is configured by default to load automatically on start-up. It is then ever-present as a pull-out bar on the right hand side of the screen. This can be resized, but not maximised.

Rather than being a single integrated application, CorelCENTRAL uses a set of function-specific, linked applications to provide other functions. So aside from the Day Planner and the Calendar (another way of looking at the same data in the Day Planner), you get an Address Book, Card File and Memo pad.

The collection has some nice touches. For example, many items, such as appointments, can have 'sub-trees' of associated information connected to them (a meeting reminder could have the meeting agenda set up as an expandable tree that you can click open). Items such as files and hyperlinks can also be linked to other items. For example, a file can be linked to a task telling you to e-mail the file to a particular contact. Another useful feature is that reminder alarms can be handled by a tiny applet, even when the main scheduling applications are all closed.

CorelCENTRAL can open MAPI address books for easier integration within Windows. However, it's not a full-blown e-mail client like Outlook. Neither is it as easy to use as Lotus Organizer, and it therefore trails both its rivals.

Odd man out

Trellix 2 is a new addition to Corel's office suite. It's a user-friendly - if rather esoteric - application for creating web pages, and requires no knowledge of HTML. In fact, there seems to be no way to edit raw HTML with Trellix, which is both a boon (you can't screw up) and a drawback (you can't learn to use HTML, which in the long run will make programming more versatile).

I found the underlying concepts of the program difficult to grasp, basically because it produces web pages with a specific, and highly unusual structure. At the top is a 'map' header section that allows the user to navigate through the individual pages, which appear in the section below. Pages are displayed in the map as small squares, and you see the page name if you hold the cursor over them. You can insert links just about anywhere, and even call up an external web site within the lower frame.

I'm not an HTML programmer, so Trellix is squarely aimed at users like myself. But it's a steep learning curve, and you have to browse the supplied samples for quite some time before you can come up with anything decent. The templates themselves are so simple they're practically useless, so the samples are the best starting point. For more complex sites, a proper HTML editor is essential, but for HTML virgins it's not a bad tool.

And the rest

As usual, Corel has packed as many goodies into the suite as possible. Besides a vast ClipArt library (over 12,000 images), there's also 1000 fonts to play with, complete with the excellent Bitstream Font Navigator to organise them. Corel Versions is useful for team-working, allowing documents to be tracked through an editing process, and for corporate users there are distribution and policy editors for roll-out through a larger organisation. Laudably, Corel has chosen to incorporate VisualBasic for Applications such as the scripting language for the suite, though it's still mixed in with elements of the old proprietary PerfectScript.

Corel has made a virtue of the wide variety of import and export filters included (file support for Office 97 is present in spades). Unfortunately, while Microsoft Office 2000's file formats are supposed to be backwards compatible in some cases (such as Word), WordPerfect Office 2000 has trouble reading them.

Summary

If you want the best office suite money can buy, then WordPerfect Office 2000 isn't it. Microsoft Office 2000 comprehensively outguns it on all fronts, only lacking speech recognition. Consequently, if you're buying a new PC with a bundled suite, Microsoft is the more attractive option (though bear in mind the vendor will have had to pay more to include it).

However, if you're buying a suite for your existing system, you're bound to balk at paying over £300 for Microsoft - especially as many home and small business users won't need its superior Internet integration and high-end features. At £189, WordPerfect Office even beats Lotus SmartSuite in terms of value for money.

None of WordPerfect Office's applications (except perhaps Presentations) are mind-blowing, but they could well be powerful enough for you - and all are relatively easy to use. Certainly, if voice recognition is an avenue you want to pursue, WordPerfect Office 2000 is highly recommended.

One word of warning: the general performance of this suite is below that of both Microsoft Office and SmartSuite. Application loading times are slow, and once several apps are open, system resources are gobbled away. Microsoft has the lead by a full furlong here.

As ever, you must weigh up the pros and cons of WordPerfect Office 2000 in the context of your own needs. What is more important to you: value for money and ease of use, or power features and performance? If it's mainly the first, WordPerfect Office could be right up your street.