Product Reviews

WordPerfect Suite 8 has given birth to WordPerfect Office 2000. The millennium is too good a marketing opportunity to leave unexploited, and only the least cynical observer could fail to see the positioning statement such a name makes alongside Microsoft's revamped Office 2000.

However, that's where the marketing hype ends for Corel's latest suite. Gone are the lofty promises of yesteryear. 'Java is the future' died before version 8, and now a sense of almost desperate realism seems to have set in.

Every suite is launched with a set of unique selling points, but even Corel's own marketing message seems a little insipid: 'ƒa high level of speed, usability, accessibility, integration, graphics capabilities and Internet features'. There's none of the Lotus bullishness when SmartSuite was upgraded to leapfrog Microsoft's Internet and intranet capabilities, or before that its team-working functionality. Corel can't claim a trailblazing lead in any area, so it has retreated behind a 'much better than the last version' message - not necessarily guaranteed to convince IT managers to switch sides.

But let's not forget the suite's key strengths. As ever, it's less than two-thirds the price of Office 2000 standard and packed with goodies, including over 1,000 fonts and 12,000 clip-art images. And it will run on a 486, unlike Microsoft Office 2000.

It ships in three editions in the UK: Standard includes WordPerfect 9 (word processor), Quattro Pro 9 (spreadsheet), Presentations 9 (presentations), CorelCENTRAL 9 (PIM), Trellix 2 (Web site creation), the suite's own Software Development Kit and, amazingly, a Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications-based dev environment. The not yet released Voice-Powered Edition adds Philips FreeSpeech 2000 voice-recognition software, while Enterprise Edition, only available in the UK as a licence option, adds Paradox 9 (database) and NetPerfect (automated HTML publishing system). We don't get the US Academic Edition, but it's virtually identical to Standard.

Although it's one of the new features of WordPerfect Office that's barely promoted, Corel has developed its own version of the Install-On-Demand feature from Microsoft's Office 2000. Install-As-You-Go is entirely invisible to the user at installation. You have your usual range of install options (Typical, Minimal, Custom) and you select and deselect application features as normal. However, if during application you invoke an option or menu item that wasn't selected during installation, the application queries whether you'd like it installed.

There are irritating exceptions to this rule. For example, VBA wasn't installed by default and was greyed out within WordPerfect, with no way to click it and invoke Install-As-You-Go - instead, you have to run the setup file from the CD and install it manually.

Install-As-You-Go contrasts with Microsoft's approach, which allows you to select whether uninstalled features can be installed when invoked or just ignored completely. Although Corel's solution isn't as configurable as Microsoft's, it's easier for end users to understand. But, it shares the same drawbacks as Microsoft's technology. If you try an option and have no CD to hand, you can't install the feature. For managers requiring remote network installation, Corel Distribute serves this function, although there are fewer deployment and application operation models than with Microsoft Office 2000.

Performance and usability

Corel claims its made radical improvements to overall performance. WordPerfect Suite was never famed for speed, and the same goes for WordPerfect Office 2000. It's noticeably slower than Microsoft Office 2000 or 97 in use, although you won't spend much time tapping your fingers on a decent Pentium II or above. There's one notable exception: closing several WordPerfect Office applications that have been open for some time takes a long time.

With Microsoft so clearly in control of Windows core functionality, it's not surprising that Office 2000 is faster, and Corel hasn't taken the 'pre-load as much as possible into memory' approach. Yet, resource testing also shows that Microsoft's shared code is far more efficient than Corel's, with multiple Microsoft applications having two-thirds the resource footprint of their WordPerfect equivalents.

There are usability tweaks throughout the suite, and some shared resources have also been improved. It's a common interface for accessing the huge Clipart library, stored on the second CD, and claims to aid users in locating images using a keyword-based search engine. It doesn't. Imagine that in front of you in the dialog box is a selection of arrow graphics. Imagine how delighted you'd be if you instructed the Find function to look for 'arrow' and it reports it can't find any.

However, some enhancements are genuinely useful, with more standard line-art shapes throughout the suite and improved print and print preview options. As in Microsoft Office 2000, you can scale print to fit any page size - great for spooling American page-sized documents to an A4 printer. Corel has also incorporated RealTime Preview into certain formatting dialogs - change options and you'll see the effect on the fly.

Integration

Historically, Corel has been lumbered with the burden of integrating a diverse set of applications from various original developers. Novell attempted the task with PerfectOffice many years ago, then on acquiring the suite Corel took it over. Happily,

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WordPerfect Office 2000 passes the test with flying colours, albeit only at a basic level. The interface is more standardised than WordPerfect Suite 8, which actually felt less integrated than WordPerfect Suite 7.

Icons are more consistent, although the basic toolbar layouts aren't as standardised as those in Microsoft Office 2000. The menu structures are also improved; switch quickly between applications and the basic File-Edit-View-Insert-Format-Tools-Window-Help backbone is rigidly in place. Structure within menus is also logical, with app settings always controlled from the Tools menu and so on. However, in terms of some of the newest functionality upgrades, many that would have relevance in multiple applications are limited to one. For example, WordPerfect's new document navigation controls could well be applied to Quattro Pro - but they're not. The seamless modularity of Microsoft's application functionality can't be seen, while Internet functionality is all over the place, particularly in light of Office 2000 and SmartSuite's advances.

Internet or Internot?

True deep-level Internet or intranet integration in WordPerfect Office 2000 could be better. Lotus and Microsoft have both started from the ground up in terms of conceptualising a user's interaction with all things Net related, whether material is on a corporate intranet or external Web sites. By contrast, Corel is stuck with the 'make the process by which documents can be published to the Web simple and effective' model, which is all very admirable but, in mid-1999, way off pace. Can you directly open or save documents from their respective dialog boxes to or from an intranet or the Internet? No.

There's no question that you have a set of tools available in WordPerfect Office 2000 that will allow you to create reasonably rich Web-browsable documents, especially from within WordPerfect or Presentations; and the Trellix Web site authoring tool allows the construction of Web sites from within the suite, with no additional third-party tools necessary. However, you can't pop up to your personnel page on the intranet, open a company handbook, edit it in WordPerfect and then save the changes straight back. And while you can get network-based access to HTML content, if it's anything other than basic, predominantly text-oriented, frameless pages, even WordPerfect will spit out pages to the screen with the formatting all over the shop. Corporations currently disinterested in the Net concept will find that WordPerfect Office 2000 effectively shuts the door firmly on that approach. If Net integration is anywhere on your agenda WordPerfect Office doesn't fair well.

Compatibility

No matter what cynics may feel about Corel's emphasis on compatibility, it's vital. Wisely, Corel has admitted the ascendancy of other apps and their file formats, and spent a time ensuring that you can open, edit and save documents from a host of applications within WordPerfect Office 2000. In fact, in some cases you can set up the GUI to ape the Microsoft Office or Lotus counterpart.

Unfortunately, while the transparency of operation is excellent, the results are mixed. Claimed compatibility with Microsoft Office is limited to Office 97 and below, and with a range of documents created and saved from Office 97 applications, the results are passable. Complex documents with embedded graphics tend to be more problematic than simple formatted text, and corporations wanting to investigate these formatting problems might like to read the White Paper, which explains in detail how features present in Word will appear in WordPerfect, Excel in Quattro Pro and so on.

However, despite the fact that Microsoft Office 2000 has kept many elements of its proprietary binary file format consistent with Office 97, Office 2000 documents seem to flummox the translation routines. A simple three-page Word 2000 document with linked graphics, using no special Office 2000 features, arrived in WordPerfect as an 86-page document with headers and footers and no body text. The same document imported in an Office 95 format translated successfully with only a few layout glitches.

Similar problems became apparent with Excel to Quattro Pro formulae translation, where Direct QP equivalents were spat out as incompatible. To be honest, writing such translation routines must be a nightmare, and shooting down WordPerfect Office for these issues is perhaps a little unfair. But when Corel makes compatibility a selling point, you can't exactly ignore the problems.

In terms of open, non-proprietary document standards, WordPerfect Office 2000 builds on the strength of its predecessor. The list of open technologies supported is long and distinguished - enterprise resource planning systems such as SAP and PeopleSoft HRMS are supported, as are open document architectures like ODMA and SGML, not to mention HTML and XML. Esoteric options like EDGAR and SEDAR are more relevant to corporations doing business with US and Canadian government institutions.

Perhaps the most shocking new feature of WordPerfect Office 2000 is the inclusion of a complete Visual Basic for Applications development environment alongside the proprietary PerfectScript language. The latter has been its native dev environment for a while, but is little more than a macro scripting language. VBA is far more powerful and allows greater inter-application integration, including with non-Corel applications.

The VBA editor is a version 6-based rapid application development environment that works in the same way as its Microsoft Office equivalent.

WordPerfect Office 2000 is undeniably an improvement on WordPerfect Suite 8, but it isn't enough. Individual applications have strengths and weaknesses, but all trail behind their Microsoft counterparts. Comparisons with SmartSuite are more favourable, but Lotus maintains the lead in its overall concept and positioning. Corel's offering is good value for money, but in many areas, particularly Internet integration, WordPerfect Office 2000 would have been more comfortable back in 97.