WordPerfect Office 12: A Very Viable Office Alternative WordPerfect Mail, Paint Shop Pro, Norton IS, and More Wayne Kawamoto
WordPerfect Mail, Paint Shop Pro, Norton IS, and More
WordPerfect further sweetens the deal by adding WordPerfect Mail, Corel's new e-mail client. When you invoke the program for the first time, it immediately offers options for importing data from Outlook Express, Outlook, and other e-mail applications.
Like the other Corel applications, WordPerfect Mail acknowledges Microsoft's ubiquity. While its interface doesn't imitate that of Outlook, it closely resembles it in structure. The interface offers a main window that lists incoming e-mail, a preview window to view e-mail contents in the lower-right corner, and a list of folders in a left-hand column. It also serves familiar naming conventions that include Inbox, Drafts, Outbox, and Deleted Messages.
The program offers solid contact management, and its visual scheduling is easy to use. The thorough search capabilities let you look for keywords in the body and subject lines, and you can fine tune the search to look for "any of," "all of," and more. There are options for searching "to" and "from" fields, as well as specific folders and date ranges. In short, long-time Outlook customers should have little problem adapting to WordPerfect Mail.
The inclusion of Corel Paint Shop Pro 9 brings image-editing capabilities to the suite, but an image editor of this caliber is probably beyond the needs of most small business owners. Almost anyone with a digital camera already has access to a program to perform basic image editing.
A competent, user-friendly desktop publishing program that's on par with Microsoft Publisher, which is included in Office Small Business Edition, would be far more useful for creating attractive business documents such as fliers and brochures. While you can create such documents using WordPerfect 12, the word processor is no replacement for Publisher's intuitive desktop publishing features.
The package also includes Norton Internet Security 2005, which at first sounds like icing on the suite cake. After all, anyone who uses a computer these days has to watch for out viruses, hackers, Trojans, worms, and things that go bump in the night. And beyond protecting against viruses and hackers, Norton Internet Security effectively filters spam and helps protect a user's privacy.
On the downside, however, Norton Internet Security comes with only three months of updates to its signature files (the standard off-the-shelf program offers a year's updates). As a result, the addition of Norton Internet Security feels more like a benefit to Symantec, the program's developer, than to small businesses.
Some Things Old, Some Things New
The venerable WordPerfect remains much the same as ever. As in the past, the program offers precise, code-based formatting controls, and, unlike MS Word, it supports specialty legal formats such as pleading.
Something else that WordPerfect does and Word doesn't: publish PDF files without resorting to Adobe Acrobat. Of Corel's three main applications, WordPerfect offers the strongest competition to its Microsoft counterpart, providing a reasonable alternative.
Secondary to the Microsoft Excel veneer, Quattro Pro 12 remains mostly unchanged from the previous version. If you look hard enough, you can find specific functions that are available in Excel but not in Quattro Pro — formulas that include co-linearity detection and continuous probability distribution functions, for example. As a result, die-hard accounting and scientific types may have good reason to stay with Excel. But for most spreadsheet users, Quattro Pro should be more than adequate.
Corel's Presentations 12, which builds business slide show presentations and graphics, doesn't even come close to PowerPoint's capability. While you can create presentations, it lacks thorough support for video. This multimedia gaffe is a glaring omission in our book.
