Corel WordPerfect Office 12 Think Outside the Suite Eric Grevstad
Once you start using WordPerfect Office 12, you won't miss Microsoft Office. That's not to say that Microsoft's dominant productivity suite isn't great software, or for that matter that Corel Corp.'s blows it away; both are first-class, formidably powerful word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation combos, though extra conveniences ranging from friendlier formatting help to built-in Adobe Acrobat PDF output make WordPerfect Office an at least arguably preferable alternative.
The huge challenge for Corel is to get people to consider its alternative, period — to dare to try WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Presentations in a market ruled by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Toward that goal, the WordPerfect Office 12 package that premieres tomorrow is priced at $300 versus $399 for Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition, with an upgrade price — offered to users of Microsoft's humble Works 7.0, let alone Office 2000 or XP — of $150 versus $239.
(Teachers and students, who can get the educational edition of Microsoft Office for $150, can get the corresponding WordPerfect Office box for $100; the just-as-daunting-as-Microsoft-Access database Paradox continues to be part of Corel's OEM-oriented Professional edition.)
That's not enough to make Corel's the cheapest suite in town; the company believes most consumers won't take the trouble to seek out Sun's $80 StarOffice 7 or download the latter's free sibling OpenOffice.org 1.1. But it should attract some attention, even considering that WordPerfect Office doesn't include an e-mail and calendar program to match Microsoft Outlook (it can tap Outlook's address book for mail merge or document routing).
And once they install the Corel trio, users will get all the migrate-from-Microsoft hand-holding they could want. A new Workspace Manager lets you change settings, toolbars, and menus from WordPerfect Office's own interface to one that mimics the Microsoft Office programs', including saving documents in Brand M file formats by default. You can also choose a Lotus 1-2-3 mode for Quattro Pro, or WordPerfect modes that hark back to the white-text-on-a- blue-background version 5.1 for DOS or emphasize the word processor's popularity for pleadings and other law-office work.
The imposture isn't 100 percent (Word's word-deleting Ctrl-Del and Ctrl-Bksp work a bit differently in WordPerfect), but the Microsoft modes — along with a handy toolbar for importing and exporting documents in different formats, including XML, HTML, and PDF for WordPerfect and Presentations, Macromedia Flash SWF for Presentations, and XML for Quattro Pro, plus thorough documentation of compatibility details — go a long way toward easing the transition.
WordPerfect Office 12 is also noticeably more successful at reading Microsoft Office files — ranging from PowerPoint gradients to Word tables and text wrap around graphics — than version 11 was; most users should have no problems with most everyday documents. That said, it's still easy to play gotcha games and find Office files that don't import perfectly, whether fancy PowerPoint slide transitions (all converted to simple left-to-right wipes in Presentations) or Word AutoShapes and elaborately formatted, footnoted reports; one or two of our Microsoft documents still fared better in OpenOffice.org than WordPerfect Office. Quattro Pro ignores a couple of dozen esoteric Excel functions and, not so esoterically, macros, although the Corel suite includes Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications as well as its own PerfectScript language.
