WordPerfect Office 11
 Creating a document in WordPerfect. |
WordPerfect Office (WPO) suite includes three main applications WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Presentation; there are also some small but useful utilities such as XML Project Designer but no PIM, e-mail, or database applications.
The supplied documentation includes Quickstart card that covers installation, a keyboard overlay for the function keys, and a large 386-page user's guide.
We attempted to load our large MS Word format test file into WordPerfect, it informed us that it was converting the Word format--this was late on a Friday afternoon. I was quite surprised to find that it was still "converting" the file on Sunday morning. We tried another clean install of the suite but again had the same problem so we downloaded the latest service pack, which upgraded the suite from version 11.0.0.233 to 11.0.0.300. At least this time WordPerfect did not go into limbo for a couple of days, within 15 seconds a non-specific conversion error was reported. We then step-by-step pruned from the document what we thought may be the cause of Wordperfect's failure to load the file such as the table of contents, all the charts, and finally all the tables leaving just the text, headers, footers, page numbers, and JPEG images. This did not alleviate the problem. We also tried one of the supplied utilities, the File Converter, which allows the user to select a swag of say, MS Office files, and covert them as a batch run in the background. This also choked on our document.
Finally in desperation we attempted to import a document that was simply text with various style headings, to our relief the document was imported without a hitch. However, we are concerned that WordPerfect failed to import an MS Word document that the other three Suites found quite acceptable.
As a consequence we have no definitive load times, although WordPerfect seemed at least average when compared to the other suites when loading moderately complex documents. And, while the application memory footprint is quite small at 14.7MB, only Lotus SmartSuite is more frugal.
We did manage to load our Excel and PowerPoint files into Quattro Pro and Presentations respectively. The conversion of the Excel file was performed quite well with the formula substitutions appearing to be spot on but, in common with the other packages tested, the charts often had the fonts and legends misconverted.
Unfortunately when the PowerPoint presentation was loading into Presentations, the conversion lost all our complex animations, which StarOffice and OpenOffice managed to bring across. Some of the simple slide-to-slide transitions did not turn out as we had expected and some fonts became quite large and upset the formatting, but these problems were quite simple to address.
In addition to its own native file formats, as well as supporting quite a few other vendors' file formats, every application in WPO can also publish in XML.
Anyone familiar with MS Office should have few problems when presented with the WPO user interface. At a casual glance you would be forgiven for thinking WordPerfect was MS Word as menu and button locations as well as icons are close enough to MS Office applications that navigation is very easy indeed. Although we could not help but chuckle when we found under Tools/Settings and the display settings dialog box the option to run in "Classic Mode WP 5.1" and were presented with the old blue-and-white DOS screen format and lo and behold the old keyboard shortcuts. WPO does help ease the learning curve by including a feature called PerfectExpert, essentially a context sensitive wizard that resides in a small window at the left of the display and provides how-to advice.
In WordPerfect a useful tool is the Document Map. This provides a tree structure of the document down the left side of the screen and to jump to a particular point in a documents, say a heading or chapter, you simply click on the relevant point in the tree and the selected portion appears.
Like StarOffice and OpenOffice, WPO allows the user to publish to a PDF file in addition to XML and HTML.
Anyone familiar with Excel should find Quattro Pro pretty easy to drive, particularly for basic functions such as building a spreadsheet and creating a few charts. There are some handy features that can potentially save some time such as the QuickFormat button that copies and pastes formats only without overwriting the contents of the relevant cells.
While exploring Presentation we soon discovered why our animated text slides in the PowerPoint test file did not function as expected, quite simply WPO does not support general text animation. It does however support "bullet list" animations and general object animation, both of which are very easy to implement. What was a tad annoying was that in the slide sorter view some of objects in the slide miniatures were not rendered, even though they were quite large. The package is in general very easy to use and includes enough features to keep the average user very happy.
WordPerfect Office version 12 is due out next month.
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| Product | WordPerfect Office 11 |
| Price | Single user $229, volume pricing not provided |
| Vendor | Corel |
| Phone | 02 9006 1100 |
| Web | www.corel.com |
| Interoperability |  ½ |
| Runs on Windows only. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| Astonishingly wide support for other file standards, admittedly many old legacy standards, but impressive nevertheless. | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| A solid suite of office applications and utilities at a very reasonable price although we did experience some compatibility issues with MS Word files. | |
| Service |  ½ |
| Phone support is available during business hours for 30 days after registration. | |
| Rating |  |
Database access http://dba.openoffice.org/