Product Reviews

Our current Best Buy home office suite is Microsoft Works Suite 2005. For only seventy pounds you get a full suite of productivity programs, including a full version of Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet and a database. Corel's WordPerfect Office 12 Home Edition is a direct competitor to Works Suite. It costs only fifty pounds, has some features that Works Suite doesn't have, and does most of the things that Works Suite can do. The important question is - can it do them as well as Works Suite can?

One of the main reasons people are put off the idea of buying a non-Microsoft office suite is that they're familiar with Microsoft programs from work, and don't want to have to learn a completely new way of doing things. In the new version of WordPerfect Office, Corel has addressed this problem with something called the Workspace Manager. This is just a fancy way of saying that, when you first open the word processor or spreadsheet, you can choose a Microsoft mode. This arranges all the buttons and toolbars just as they would be in the program's Microsoft equivalent. Of course, things aren't exactly the same, but it's still much easier to find what you want. The programs also work in much the same way as their Microsoft equivalents.

For instance, formatting

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is applied in WordPerfect to highlighted characters in much the same way as it is in Word, while the spreadsheet Quattro coped well with all the Excel formulas we used on it. It also opened a complicated Excel spreadsheet without losing any formatting, though it did have trouble with linked cells.

As well as the standard office productivity programs, WordPerfect Home Office comes with a number of applications that Corel thinks a home user will need. Corel Photobook is a simple, easy-to-use image editing program. Compared with standalone editors such as Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel's own, recently-acquired Paintshop Pro, it's basic. It does, however, have a good selection of automatic fixes for things like contrast and brightness or colour tone.

Where Microsoft's Works Suite has its Encarta Encyclopedia, Corel has Britannica. Britannica is an excellent encyclopedia, as you'd expect. It doesn't use the multimedia capabilities of the PC as seamlessly as Encarta, but on the upside, its articles tend to be longer and more detailed.

Another useful program is Symantec's Norton Internet Security. In fact, this is five programs: AntiVirus, FireWall, Privacy Control, AntiSpam and Parental Control - everything you need to keep your PC and your family safe. We reviewed the 2005 version of Norton AntiVirus in our December 2004 issue. The program stopped all the viruses we threw at it, but was slightly fiddly to use and, at £36, cost more than our winner. But then, cost isn't an issue in this case.

If that wasn't enough, you also get the decent CD and DVD burning program Pinnacle Instant CD+DVD.

Even with its new Workspace Manager there's no getting around the fact: anyone who's used to working on Microsoft products will have to spend some time learning Corel WordPerfect. But at this incredible price, it's worth it.