Can Corel's home office suite take on Microsoft's Works Suite and win? Maybe it doesn't have to. Read our Australian review.
Corel's WordPerfect Family Pack 4 takes on the current home heavyweight champ, Microsoft's Works Suite in an interesting way. While it directly competes on some fronts -- wordprocessing and spreadsheets -- it ducks to the side and attempts a knockout punch with antivirus and voice recognition applications.
The core application in the pack is Corel's WordPerfect 10. At one time WordPerfect was the Word of its time; if you were wordprocessing, your files had to be WordPerfect compatible. That's no longer the case, although WordPerfect 10 does (naturally) manage a good job with older WordPerfect formats. Of more importance to home users is whether WordPerfect 10 can handle complex Word documents.
In our tests most Word documents survived the translation process relatively painlessly, although image placement was sometimes a touch off. For home use, though, everything came through legibly and in good context. Moving files between WordPerfect 10 and Word was the other challenge, and here we hit a few more perplexing problems.
Our test system used Word 2000, which had problems with WordPerfect 10's proprieatary saving format. WordPerfect 10 does offer an awful lot of saving choices, including many for packages we hadn't even thought of for years. Switching to saving in Word's DOC format fixed most of our issues, although tables ended up a little larger in Word format for some reason.
On the spreadsheet side, WordPefect Family Pack 4 has Microsoft's similar Works Suite cleanly beaten. Microsoft offers a cut-down spreadsheet application (the unimaginatively named Works Spreadsheet) whereas Family Pack 4 has the full version of Quattro Pro 10. Microsoft is of course protecting its Excel revenue stream; Corel has its similar WordPerfect Office Suite but doesn't seem fazed by this kind of cross-pollination. For home use Quatro Pro 10 is probably overkill, although the helpful Tutor Window will aid new users through setting up budgets, calculations and the creation of charts.
Although WordPerfect and Quattro Pro aren't slouches, the real appeal in Family Pack 4 is in the third party software that Corel's bundled in the pack. McAfee VirusScan is the best example of this bundling. While many virus threats can be overstated, and we still seem to get around one virus hoax a week, it's still worthwhile having inbuilt virus protection for any Net connected machine.
Our one concern with the version of VirusScan included with Family Pack 4 was that the Virus definition files were seriously out of date -- by over 100 days. It's relatively painless to connect to McAfee, and after registration, which asks for many details but only seemed to require an email address from us, download the critical updates to keep our test system virus free. VirusScan will remind users to update frequently, but we'd be happier with a home package like this making it something of a mandatory step. The only thing worse than having no virus protection is having poor virus protection; you think you're safe, but you're just wasting processing cycles against aging virus profiles.
Family Pack 4 also includes a version of Dragon's Naturally Speaking Essentials and a headset microphone to go with it. The headset is extremely small; even after bending it considerably we were only just able to wear it. It also comes with an intermediate amp/noice cancellation device, the VXI Parrot Translator, which claims to improve voice quality once it's powered up by two AA batteries. We noticed a slight improvement in Dragon's own microphone tests with it enabled, but virtually none in a real testing situation. Voice recognition in a home product strikes us as somewhat gimmicky, and we suspect few home users will have the patience required to train the system to an acceptable level. If you do, though, and your head can stand the tiny headset, then it's a worthwhile inclusion.
Continuing the bundled third party applications are a pair of image editors and organisers from Micrografx; PhotoAlbum and Picture Publisher 10 respectively. Windows XP users could skip PhotoAlbum entirely; the inbuilt picture preview will do the same thing for no additional money. You're also not getting Photoshop out of Picture Publisher 10, but then what home user needs Photoshop?
Family Pack 4 also features a very cut down version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, labelled as the Britannica Ready Reference. This is extremely basic; anyone wanting a CD-ROM encyclopedia would be better served with the full version of Britannica (which the Ready Reference version incessantly advertises) or Microsoft's Encarta product.
Also bundled is Avery Design Pro, which allows designs for Avery Labels and cards to be quickly created. We're not sure how many home users will have a bunch of Avery labels just lying around, but there's nothing stopping you from just using the designs onto plain paper if that's to your taste.
WordPerfect Family Pack 4 has an interesting bundle of applications. It's unlikely to unseat Works as the top selling home productivity bundle -- Microsoft's own OEM agreements will see to that, if nothing else -- but at the rock bottom price it's offered at, it'd be worth picking up just for the Virus protection and spreadsheet utilities it offers. If anything else in the pack appeals to you, that's just icing on the cake.
Corel WordPerfect Family Pack 4
Company: Corel
Price: AU$199.95
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1800 658 850
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