Product Reviews

It's a long time since WordPerfect Office ruled the office suite roost, but it remains Microsoft's most serious competitor. However, if it's going to compete these days, it needs to be able to emulate, and in some ways improve upon, the market leader.

For the most part, this has been done very well. To start, the word processor is equally happy in its native mode as it is using the menus and shortcuts of WordPerfect 5.1 or Microsoft Word. In a similar vein, the spreadsheet, Quattro Pro, can emulate Excel or Lotus 1-2-3, while the Presentations program can ape PowerPoint.

If you're switching from Word, a batch conversion tool can translate all of your documents into native WordPerfect format, but as the program can handle 165 file types unaided - double what Word understands - we'd recommend leaving them as they are. Export types include HTML and PDF, even if you don't have Acrobat installed, although for both of these file types the results are fairly basic. Publishing this review as a WordPerfect PDF produced a 26KB file. Sending it through Acrobat 6 trimmed it to just 11KB, so it's worth spending money on the real thing if you plan on putting documents online in this way.

WordPerfect

WordPerfect has always appealed to the legal profession, and version 12 sees its legal tools boosted, with a Pleading Wizard for producing properly formatted statements. There's also a range of numbering and strikeout tools that prevent valuable verbal evidence being lost for good if witnesses change their stories.

It has a wealth of features for regular writers too, including a passive thesaurus that displays alternatives to your current word on the formatting toolbar, and a 30,000-entry edition of the Oxford Pocket Dictionary. Spelling errors are highlighted in red, grammar in blue. This is an important distinction, as the most common form of colour blindness is red/green, which makes Word's error checking colour scheme a problem for some.

On the down side, though, we found WordPerfect had some problems handling large images. For example, it refused to insert a 5-megapixel photo because it 'exceeded 27cm'; Word took it without complaint. However, when we switched to a smaller PNG image WordPerfect embedded it at the correct size, while Word's first instinct was to enlarge it and leave the resizing up to us. WordPerfect also correctly flowed the text around it, while Word set the bottom of the picture as the text baseline, then wrapped the rest of it onto the following line.

Its HTML tools are hit and miss. When exporting the same file from Word and WordPerfect, Corel's code was only 9KB, in comparison to Microsoft's 16KB, but while we may have gained on space, we lost on features. Text no longer wrapped around our embedded image, and the black-line borders of our table cells disappeared. Word scored top marks on both of these points, but neither application passed W3C validation, and so may not be compatible with all web browsers.

WordPerfect's unique feature remains Reveal Codes, which has been an application stalwart since the very early days. Switching it on splits the editing window to show precisely which formatting tags have been applied to each letter or block of text. It's the word-processing equivalent of HTML, but is less relevant with each release, especially if you use a stylesheet rather than ad-hoc formatting.

Novices, meanwhile, will benefit from the Perfect Expert, which gets as close as any suite ever has to providing a wizard for formatting documents, while the OfficeReady browser, which is highly reminiscent of the Gallery in StarOffice, lets you organise your templates - and download new ones from Corel.

Finally, WordPerfect's proofing tools have been beefed up, providing facilities for group working where a document is emailed around a team of editors in a specified order - each participant is able to see the proofing decisions of those who went before them. Strangely, this only works if you have Outlook set as your default address book; it's incompatible with the suite's own contact-management tools.

Quattro Pro

Quattro Pro is the suite's spreadsheet application. Superficially it looks like any other spreadsheet, and it includes common but less-used features such as cell naming and conditional formatting. Unless you set it to emulate Excel, though, you'll find it uses slightly different formulas. Many of these are written more or less in plain English, so switching won't be difficult, but even so it won't take long to work out what @mean(a1..c8) will do if you have C-grade Maths.

Cell content types are defined on a drop-down menu, which saves trawling an Excel-style second-level dialog, while a quick- formatting tool applies colours and cell styles from a range of 24 presets. Each of these can be customised so that their fonts, tones and weights match your house style, or at least look less garish than most of the defaults. Likewise, common formatting options, such as word wrapping or switching between constrained or free edges on centralised text, is a two-click toolbar task rather than a menu dig.

Indeed, a fundamental difference between Quattro Pro and Excel is the way that Corel has brought all of the formatting tools to the fore, recognising that half the work in producing a good spreadsheet is smartening up your results -

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just as it is for a written document. In our testing we barely touched the menus, instead producing complex spreadsheets quickly through the toolbars. This alone is reason enough not to switch to Excel emulation, and instead teach yourself Quattro's formula conventions.

It's only when you get to conditional formatting that Excel excels when it comes to layout. Quattro's equivalent is called numeric formatting, and invoking it calls up a bewildering dialog box full of empty fields and drop-down menus. It's comprehensive, if nothing else, but daunting when you first see it.

Columns and rows can be grouped to suppress data and improve clarity. Whereas Excel puts the expansion button above the next displayed column and suppresses everything but the first column of the section, Quattro more correctly suppresses all but the final column. This subtle difference means not only that the answer is positioned at the end of your workings - where it should be - but you also know immediately which expansion button will reveal the grouped columns. Having several grouped columns beside one another in Excel, with only single headers between them, means the most logical button opens up the wrong group.

Excel wins back some ground when it comes to charts, as Quattro Pro exhibited some serious usability issues during our tests. While the quick-chart tool lets you select a data set and then drag out a container within your spreadsheet, things start to get more complicated if you try to plot two data sources against each other. The default for a chart of sales by year is vertical bipolar, but even if we changed this to a regular 2D chart it couldn't reference one with the other, preferring instead to position the year bars beside those for sales.

Presentations

The final member of the suite is Presentations. Built inside a tabbed interface, it's clear that a lot of thought has gone into navigation here. The tabs to the right match the mode buttons on the bottom of the PowerPoint window, while those at the bottom navigate the slides in your presentation.

There are 53 transition types, each of which can run at three speeds and, often, move in up to four directions, ensuring that if you use them all your audience will be thoroughly distracted by the end of the presentation.

These transitions, along with all behind-the-scenes slide attributes, have been centralised on a single tabbed dialog, allowing you to cycle through speaker notes, appearance and sounds in a single unified interface. From an ease-of-use perspective, this is a real timesaver.

It's surprising, then, that Corel has chosen to make the menu bars context-sensitive. Placing an image will remove all text-related tools; working with a graph will restrict them to only those that manipulate charts or numbers. Whether or not you get on with this will be a personal matter, but it strikes us as unnecessarily confusing as it means you're always navigating a different set of buttons.

The integrated charting tools are surprisingly powerful and, as they understand formulas, they'll save you importing from Excel or Quattro Pro on all but the most demanding of occasions. Once in place, charts remain fully editable, and rolling the mouse over colour swatches gives a real-time preview of the difference each will make to the look of your slide. Unfortunately, it's not clever enough to spot that changing the colour of the legend should adjust the colour of a bar, although in reverse it works without a problem. Each data series remains independent of the rest of the chart, allowing you to make complex adjustments such as formatting sales for an eastern region as an area graph but plotting the southern region returns as bars.

Slides can be exported to WordPerfect to make it easier to edit your speaker notes, but once there it's seemingly impossible to get them back, forcing you to either present with a sheaf of pages in your hand or copy and paste the text back into the speaker notes dialog box.

It stumbled on our 5-megapixel photo, just as WordPerfect did, but while WordPerfect diagnosed the problem, Presentations went through the full import routine then refused to place the image. Switching to a smaller PNG file sorted out the problem, but this shouldn't be necessary on a powerful PC.

There's no doubting that a lot of work has gone into Presentations. It feels like a slick presentation tool, and the ability to add hotkey commands that allow you to press a button and invoke an action, such as a movement or noise, is a useful touch. Unfortunately, it has a few too many rough edges for our liking. If you earn your living from making presentations then you'd do better to stick with PowerPoint.

Suite-wide

Sadly, the suite spurns the XP save dialog's location bar, opting instead for ugly icons and, if you want it, a Windows 98-style folders pane. It redeems itself slightly in allowing you to map a network drive directly from the file windows.

It supports Microsoft VBA, PerfectScript and ObjectPAL, which integrates with Corel's database tool, Paradox. This isn't included in the suite's standard or family editions, but is bundled with the Professional and education packs. This is in line with Access appearing only in the Professional edition of Microsoft Office. The bundled Wireless Office Suite, meanwhile, lets you access your address book and diary from a mobile phone.

If you're a wordsmith, stick with Microsoft Office. If numbers are your thing, though, then Quattro Pro is a more compelling option. If you take the time to learn its formula structure - and it's really not all that different from what you'll be using in Excel - then it will repay you several times over. Presentations swings things back in favour of Microsoft.

Overall, then, we can't see this suite stealing top spot for productivity, but if you can't afford the industry standard then it's a very worthy second choice.