Corel's revamped office suite, due in late April, will deliver plenty of new features. But can it take market share from Microsoft's Office? Here are our first impressions.The latest version of Corel's productivity suite, WordPerfect Office 12, includes its staple word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications -- WordPerfect, Quattro Pro and Presentations, respectively -- but adds features aimed at better compatibility with competing products such as Microsoft Office. The company says the product will be available in late April 2004, with prices starting at US$299.99 (~AU$390) for the full Standard edition and US$149.99 (~AU$196) for the upgrade in the US. Specific Australian pricing was not available at the time of writing.
There's no shortage of new tools to play with in WordPerfect 12. The new Workspace Manager allows you to choose between working in legacy WordPerfect or Microsoft Office formats, and even simulates the interface and keyboard shortcuts of its Microsoft equivalent. Another addition, the Compatibility Toolbar, lets you publish to PDF, HTML, XML, Word, Excel or PowerPoint with one click. Finally, the new OfficeReady Browser gives you quick access to all WordPerfect Office templates (including more than 40 new ones), whether you need to create a company's annual report or just a garage sale sign.
As in the previous version, Corel doesn't offer its own email client, which leaves you to rely on Microsoft Outlook or other alternatives. And although much improved, importing images into Presentations still results in some lost formatting and distortion, especially with patterns and gradients. There is no Linux version of WordPerfect Office 12.
Corel WordPerfect Office 12's Workspace Manager and Compatibility Toolbar, in particular, will make it easier to work across platforms with both WordPerfect and Microsoft Office. It remains to be seen whether WordPerfect 12 has what it takes to take some of Microsoft's strong market share, but its new compatibility tools make Corel's latest suite a strong contender. Check back soon for a full review.
i have been using WP 10 for some years while tryin to write a thesis. It has let me down on a couple of occassions in that it does not seem to handle long documents - 20,000 words including footnotes. For unknown reason, a supplementary document is generated behind the original, randomly and introduces random page numbers. Has 12 addressed the problems of long documents or is it still just a letter writing program? A further glitch was that a document of about 15,000 words, about 170kB would suddenly explode to 2 or 3 MB. I could not find any reason in the reveal codes. I passed a CDROM containing the document to the then Australian distributor but no help was offered. So, I need a little bit of pursuading to give Corel any more money!!!