Labs

One-time king of the office suites, WordPerfect has had a troubled few years. Hawked around by various owners, it has settled, finally, with Corel. Serious investment since then has seen it win significant improvements almost as quickly as it has lost market share.

The suite comprises WordPerfect, Quattro Pro and Presentations for writing documents, creating spreadsheets and designing slides respectively. All can be set to mimic Microsoft Office shortcuts and menus but, as we'll explain later, you'd do better to stick with the defaults. Like every other suite, there's the option to save your work as a web page, but the results are good rather than perfect. You can also output as a PDF without installing Acrobat, but we found the file sizes to be about twice what you'd get if you used the Adobe alternative.

WordPerfect has tools for solicitors and lawyers and, of more general appeal, a passive thesaurus that sits in the formatting toolbar, suggesting alternatives to your current word. Desktop publishers should note that the program balked at 5-megapixel JPEGs, which were refused unless we converted them to PNGs. Smaller files were handled easily.

It also had problems opening our Word 2000 training manual. It shrunk the screen grab to just 2cm, ignored overlapping graphics and placed sidebars on top of our body text, in spite of the fact we'd set it to Word rather than WordPerfect mode. It went on to straighten rotated images and strip out the Word Art from another document; so it wins no prizes for compatibility.

Quattro Pro has always been a serious contender for Excel's crown, and in version 12 it comes closer than ever. Sticking with its default shortcuts means you'll have to learn new ways of writing formulas, but it does give you the benefit of better menus and shortcuts.

For example, cell content types can be set in a drop-down on the toolbar, rather than through a formatting dialog. Likewise, the quick-formatting tool gives immediate access to 24 style presets for cell borders and colours. There are some garish options, but all can be tweaked and toned down.

Quattro Pro's outline tools are better implemented than those in Excel: grouping a range of columns or rows puts the expansion point at the start of the final entry in the range, rather than the first one that follows. This means that your results,

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rather than the first entry of the group, are always visible, which is far more sensible. It's also less confusing, as it means the expansion point is associated with the group rather than the totally unrelated column that would otherwise start the following group.

However, grouped cells imported from Excel didn't appear as grouped but as hidden. They were easy to recover, but this shouldn't be necessary. Quattro Pro also ignored conditional formatting in our planning document, and its interpretation of cell shading was patchy at best.

Where Quattro Pro really falls down is in charting: it's simply not as good as Excel. There's a quick Chart tool that lets you create a graph just by dragging out a container box, but when we plotted two series against one another it insisted on placing both data sets side by side. With some fiddling you can sort it out, but charting is so fundamental to working with spreadsheets that it should be far more intuitive.

Presentations, the purpose of which we probably don't need to explain, isn't quite as close to PowerPoint as its creators would like. It includes a raft of innovative features, and a massive 53 transition types that can run at three speeds in up to four directions, but the slick interface snags on a few rough corners.

For example, it has a built-in spreadsheet, which understands formulas, so you can create graphs without switching to Quattro Pro. Changing the colour of a dataset on the legend doesn't do the same on the bars themselves, though, so you're left to make the change a second time. Then there's the JPEG problem discussed above, and the fact that once you've exported your speaker notes to WordPerfect for editing you can't get them back, which points to poor integration across the suite. This is also evident in the WordPerfect group proofing tools, which are blind to the Corel address book. Instead, they rely on Outlook, which you might not have.

Its ability to import a PowerPoint presentation was fair at best. Each of our transitions was converted to a simple left-to-right wipe, a rotated image was straightened and another had its resolution reduced.

The Presentations interface is similarly hit and miss. Transitions, sounds and speaker notes have all been centralised on a unified dialog, which is good, but the menu bars are context-sensitive. Working with images makes the text tools disappear; switching to a graph trims your options to just chart-related features. For the novice, or the switcher, this means that your first few hours with Presentations will be spent learning an ever-changing interface, rather than working on your project.

On the whole, WordPerfect Suite is well put together, but its suitability will depend on which element you'd use most often. If you're into words and slides you'd be better off with OpenOffice or the Microsoft original. If numbers are more your thing, Quattro Pro may well get your work done faster.