Corel Wordperfect Office 11

This office suite includes Corel's famous clipart collection.

We review here the standard version, which consists of the Wordperfect word processor, Quattro Pro spreadsheet and Presentations.

The professional version adds the Paradox relational database manager. Both versions come with a host of extras, including Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, over 1,000 Truetype fonts, and nearly 10,000 clipart and photo images. Finally, there's Zim: a tool to add SMS functions to Quattro Pro and Microsoft Outlook.

When installing the suite, it's worth taking the time to look at the options. By default, the Desktop Application Director is not installed, but if you like loads of tiny icons in the system tray you can include it. You also have a choice of 26 proofing languages, taking a round-the-world trip from Afrikaans to Zulu.

In the days of Dos-based word processing, Wordperfect was the market leader, but its fortunes declined sharply after a poor Windows debut. It took two changes of ownership and three new versions to catch up with the feature lists from Microsoft and Lotus.

When you start up Wordperfect and click on the little blue flower button, you'll summon the Perfect Expert. This is a pane that slots in beside the document, much in the manner of the Microsoft Task Pane. However, it has been around longer and is more flexible.

The Start button leads you to a large selection of templates and ready-made projects: you can cross applications here and launch a new presentation or spreadsheet.

If you stick with word processing, then the Perfect Expert will change to suit, offering buttons to change the font or layout, add footnotes and so on. The Perfect Expert doubles as a help source, offering tips on the current task and advice on writing the relevant sections of a document.

There's also a set of tutorials, but these appear to be limited to changing fonts, using drop caps and adding footnotes and endnotes. The Perfect Expert is also available in a freestanding capacity, where it gives access to a huge range of project templates for home, business and school use.

Wordperfect still hasn't taken Unicode to heart, although this has been available since the days of Windows 95.

This means that, although the standard Windows Truetype and Opentype fonts contain symbols and alternative character sets such as Greek and Arabic, Wordperfect can't access these or display them in imported Word documents.

If you want to add Greek letters or esoteric symbols to a document, you have to use the WP custom fonts, which have two disadvantages. First, they are only available in one typeface and second, if you send your document as a file, it may be unintelligible to other users unless you embed any special fonts used.

Wordperfect fares better with Extended Mark-up Language with facilities for importing and creating XML documents. It also beats Microsoft with built-in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) creation.

It at last catches up with the document map, introduced with Microsoft Word 97, to give users a way of navigating a document by headings and subheadings. The Wordperfect version goes further as it encompasses index and table of contents markers. Another new feature is that you can access an Outlook (but not Outlook Express) address book from Wordperfect.

We won't dwell too long on Wordperfect's formatting, page layout and graphic facilities: suffice it to say this is a mature product and has all you could want in terms of columns, picture placement, text-wrap, dropped caps and so on.

You have an equation editor, drawing tools and Text Art - a tool for creating decorative 2D and 3D text effects, similar to Microsoft's Word Art. There's also all you could want in terms of automation with both the Perfectscript and Microsoft VBA supported as development platforms.

Wordperfect's proofing has long been a cut above and you also get a proper definition dictionary (the Pocket Oxford) and a thesaurus that easily beats Microsoft's bowdlerised version.

Spreadsheet
Quattro Pro is another Dos veteran, originally developed by Borland.

The theoretical capacity is enormous: you can have a million rows and 18,278 columns to each worksheet, and 18,278 sheets to a workbook.

It's doubtful that anyone could fill this, even with nearly 500 functions available. There are over 80 ways of displaying a chart, including the exotic scatter, bubble and spectral, all in a range of colour schemes and backgrounds.

Fortunately there's a Chart Advisor, which analyses the selected data and suggests the best ways to display it.

One welcome touch is that, as well as cells with comments flagged with a red triangle, cells with formulae are marked with a blue one. This means you can tell at a glance if a cell contains raw data or the result of a calculation.

As in Wordperfect, Quattro Pro now lets you open and save files in XML format. There are a few other new features in this release, such as smarter cut and paste that adjusts the destination range to suit, and easier sub-totalling of ranges.

The Perfect Expert again takes a major role in Presentations, prompting you to choose a subject such as Budget Report or Product Launch. It will then populate your presentation with a set of prefabricated slides themed to a master design.

You can stick with this, choose a new master or design a look from scratch using your own images and graphics. Although you don't get the same combination of views that characterises Powerpoint, Corel has made things very easy.

There's a huge selection of transitions and special effects and you can add sounds in wav, mp3 and wma formats, animated gifs, and avi, mpeg or Quicktime movies.

As with Wordperfect and Quattro Pro, you can output to XML or pdf, and you can also create a 'Show on the go' - an executable file that will run the show on a PC that doesn't have Presentations installed.

There are various extra utilities supplied, including an XML project designer, a batch file conversion utility and a Quick Finder for searching files. There's also a multiple clipboard utility that can store 36 items and if you've installed the Zim add-on, you'll get the Zim toolbar.

Corel has dumped Central, the contact, time management and mail tool, and instead the developers have made efforts to integrate with Microsoft Outlook. That means that anyone wanting to take advantage of this will need to buy a standalone copy of Outlook, which will set them back around £80.

Corel has improved Office 11 but it's still missing a few features we'd like to see.

Contact: Corel 01628 589 800
www.wordperfect.com

System requirements:

• Windows 98SE, ME, NT4 SP6a, 2000 SP3, XP SP1
• Pentium 166
• 64MB Ram
• 330MB disk space

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