Lightning is supposed to make it simple to take notes on the fly and save clippings from the web. In our tests, however, we found it confusing.
Lightning
Lightning is supposed to bridge WordPerfect with the web. That concept sounds good, and the Start Panel has improved from what we remember of our beta tests. However, for a tool built to manage so-called 'Web 2.0' tasks, Lightning has a decidedly old-school flavour. There's a navigator for finding files, a viewer, a light word processor and online services with a nice 200MB of storage. Online tools include a calendar as well as contact and email managers.
Unfortunately, we didn't find Lightning as intuitive as we hoped. From the Start Panel you can easily grab a screenshot to save to notes. From there, however, we began to feel lost. With its grey page background, we didn't understand that Notes was ready for us to type. We clicked the icon to create a new note, which opened yet another window and created another instance of 'note.htm' in the navigator window. Nor did it help that when we began typing in Notes, the font was too tiny to read, even with a loupe. Even 8-point type was too small to see.
Call us dense, but although we tried following Corel's instructions for handling the trio of tools, execution was clunky, and we couldn't easily track which of the four windows handled which task. On top of that, some of the windows remained in the foreground when we switched to other applications.
Mail was straightforward to set up, although features aren't as extensive as in Microsoft Outlook.
When we opened WordPerfect Mail at work, we had to tell Windows Firewall to unblock the program. With that out of the way, however, Mail was relatively painless to set up. An import Wizard immediately guided us through importing Netscape, Outlook, Outlook Express (but not the newer Windows Live Mail), Eudora, Vcard, Mbox, iCal and CSV data. We would have liked to see options for the popular web-based services, such as Yahoo Mail or Google Mail.
The calendar and contacts manager are decent, although not nearly as extensive or well designed as those in Outlook.
Service and support
Service and support for Corel WordPerfect Office X4 is a bargain compared with that of Microsoft Office 2007, and it is more comprehensive than that offered by free tools. Help via email is free, and telephone technical support only costs £10 per incident. In addition, Corel offers a thorough online knowledgebase.
Conclusion
Longtime users of Corel WordPerfect -- particularly professionals -- will appreciate the company's attempts to play well with multiple document formats, its PDF capabilities and its intelligent data analysis tools.
Corel is playing it safe by adding useful features without changing the interfaces to an extent that might alienate its loyal customer base. Users who frown at the radical changes to Microsoft Office 2007 are most likely to take to WordPerfect X4. However, we feel that if Corel wants Microsoft Office users to defect to WordPerfect, it should rethink its pricing strategy. Costs are lower, particularly for business-friendly packages, but users who don't need to pay for extensive features may opt instead for free options such as OpenOffice. We must admit that we prefer the more seamless -- yet also imperfect -- Microsoft Office 2007 for included advantages such as image editing, document previews in Outlook, and more obvious document security options. However, users who prefer a more traditional, menu-based application layout with the majority of serious productivity features offered by Microsoft's pricier package may find what they need in Corel WordPerfect X4.
10%
8%
WordPerfect and QuattroPro are far superior to Word and Excel. The little bit of time it takes to get used to them will be repaid many times over by saving time wasted trying to get Word and Excel to do what you want.
The good: WP's reveal codes is a brilliant time saver and problem solver. You can even search and replace codes, e.g., change tab to indent. It's amazing that Word still doesn't have this feature. WordPerfect tables also leave Word for dead. PDF compatibility is remarkable. Overall WP is far more intuitive and easier to use than the competition.
The bad: Not used by enough people, so unfortunately you will still have to use Word or Excel when sharing files. One good thing about this, however, it's a constant reminder of WP's and QP's superiority.