Product Reviews

With Corel's 2002 version of WordPerfect Office, as ever you get a lot of program for your money. In fact, you get several programs, as apart from the eponymous word processor, there's the spreadsheet Quattro Pro, the slide-show creator Corel Presentations, and the PIM (personal information manager) CorelCENTRAL, making up the core applications of the Standard Edition. The Professional Edition, reviewed here, is also graced by the database Paradox 10 and speech-recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 5 (reviewed issue 75, p196), as well as a selection of accessory items, some of which you may already have.

There's also the DAD (Desktop Application Director). Once a proper docked button bar giving you quick and easy access to the core applications, it's now just a scattered collection of icons competing for attention in the taskbar. If desired, you can add to the core programs, but only if you don't mind the clutter.

Installation is straightforward. As in Microsoft Office, Install As You Go saves wasting valuable hard disk space by installing only those applications and utilities you need immediately. Another feature familiar to Microsoft stalwarts is Corel's AutoScroll tool that lets you scroll through a document by mouse only, without using the arrow keys or the scroll bars. This is one up on Microsoft's new OfficeXP, which needs an IntelliMouse for this feature.

Again, as with Microsoft Office 2000 and above, Corel offers you the chance to recover documents from many otherwise fatal application failures, allowing you to save your work. This is called the CARM (Corel Application Recovery Manager) and saves a great deal of time restarting the computer, salvaging lost information, or recreating your work all over again. Inconsistently, the feature isn't available in Paradox 10, as this has its own built-in application-recovery features.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the speech-recognition software provided this time round. This works more happily now, although it prefers the silvery tinkle of the female pitch, rejecting your reviewer's more manly timbre for its 'unacceptable quality'. It didn't stop it being usable, even if it did sometimes read like Korean assembly instructions. You can dictate straight into WordPerfect 10 and other suitable applications as well as to the dedicated DragonPad window. The new Office

One feature we couldn't find, not even as a mention in the Help files, is the advertised ClipBook or multiple-clipboard facility that appears automatically in Office XP. That said, there's an extensive collection of fonts, images and photos on the second CD accompanied by the ClipArt Reference Guide that indexes Corel's complete collection. It's unfortunate that Corel still can't synchronise the index and the actual file names on the disc. Scrapbook is a separate application activated by the Insert command, and will locate and insert clip-art, photo, sound and movie files into a WordPerfect 10, Corel Presentations 10 or Quattro Pro 10 document, provided that it's in your Scrapbook to start with. You can import all the clip-art from the second CD into your Scrapbook folders, organised by category, individually or all together. Font installation is assisted by Font Navigator, which searches for, installs, organises, views and prints fonts, although it overlooked several fonts already installed on the review machine.

An interesting little utility is TrueDoc technology, which lets you view or print WordPerfect 10 and Corel Presentations 10 documents from any computer or printer, even if the devices don't have the fonts used to create the document installed. Quick View Plus lets you view, copy and print the output of more than 200 file formats.

Another integrated extra is the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, listing the meaning, pronunciation and history of over 30,000 words, which is available in all the core programs. If you're sufficiently impressed, you can upgrade to a larger version of the dictionary at extra cost.

In common with almost every other software publisher, Corel provides access to its own Web-based information. The Corel Connector, a thin Web client integrated into WordPerfect Office 2002, searches for structured information on the Internet, although the preset options are only useful if you happen to be in North America. The various Corel news groups, some monitored by Corel staff, are interesting for their user claims that various bits of the suite don't work, particularly under Windows 2000 or with existing versions of the Borland Database Engine.

There are individual components that offer exciting alternatives to Microsoft's offerings - with WordPerfect as versatile a word processor as Office XP's Word, even if it lacks some of the latter's convenience. And while other items, such as Quattro Pro, Presentations and Paradox prove equal to their competitors - it falls to CorelCENTRAL to disappoint. Not because it's a flawed concept but because it's a defective implementation. Add to this Corel's lack of the Microsoft advantage to seamlessly integrate functionality with its own operating system and other apps, and the sum of the parts is a slightly lacking contribution to the office productivity suite arena.