Product Reviews

Corel's WordPerfect Office suite has been long overdue a revamp, but X3 has finally arrived, just ahead of Microsoft's Office upgrade. We've tested the Standard version, which includes WordPerfect X3, the Quattro Pro X3 spreadsheet and Presentations X3. It's almost £100 cheaper than Microsoft's Office, too.

Corel also sells a Professional Edition, which adds Paradox X3, a relational database, and Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications. The Home edition costs just £70 but lacks the Presentation application. Finally, for those who qualify, there's the Student and Teacher edition.

As this update has been such a long time coming, the list of enhanced features alone would fill this page. Many are minor alterations, such as a toolbar word count button, but the list of genuinely new stuff is a bit shorter.

PDF handling is a significant step forward. Corel introduced PDF export several versions back, but X3 now imports PDFs and lets you edit them, too. In practice, it's not that good. While you can copy text and objects from PDFs, the format's limitations mean the process isn't always effective. It works well enough with imported presentations, for example, but try to work on more complex documents, such as spreadsheets, and you'll end up with gibberish.

The individual applications in this suite are effective alternatives to their Microsoft rivals. WordPerfect X3 retains its neat Shadow Cursor, which enables

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you to click and type anywhere on the page. The page display, complete with fine margin guides, gives you a much better sense of writing on sheets of paper than Word's. There's an option to remove metadata when saving files, which prevents colleagues and contacts seeing potentially embarrassing content embedded during the authoring and reviewing process.

However, while WordPerfect offers outline lists, these are not the same as Word's extremely powerful Outline document view. WordPerfect is excellent for shorter, WYSIWYG documents, but authors of longer works are likely to prefer Word's solid content-structuring approach.

There's less to say about Quattro Pro X3. Few people use the full power of their spreadsheet applications anyway and Quattro Pro, like Excel, offers more functions and analytical tools than you are ever likely to need. It offers CrossTab data analysis to match Excel's PivotTables, and also includes Excel file compatibility.

Presentations X3 isn't as appealing as PowerPoint. According to the manual, the anti-aliasing has been enhanced in this version. In our tests, though, graphics drawn directly on slides or those from existing templates remained resolutely jagged.

WordPerfect Office X3 also comes with a new WordPerfect Mail program, but who needs another email application? This one has powerful anti-spam tools (from SAproxy Pro) and calendar functions, but it's not in the same league as Outlook. Some might find its more basic, and hence simpler, features appealing, though.

Finally, there's an OfficeReady template browser, and Presentations Graphics X3, which provides the suite's core drawing tools, is now available as a standalone application that you can access through the Start menu.

We were left with the feeling that everything is better but not much is actually new, which is rather a disappointment. WordPerfect Office X3 is cheaper than Microsoft Office but not really any better. It does the job, but it looks dated and crude by comparison.