Corel WordPerfect Office 12

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 - 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.