Corel WordPerfect Office 12 review

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.