Corel WordPerfect Office 12

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.