Corel ships Wordperfect Office X3

Corel released the latest version of its alternative to Microsoft Office today, Wordperfect Office X3.

New to the software is an email client, an updated user interface and online resources. There are four editions on the market, with the Standard and Home packages likely to appeal to most customers.

The Standard Edition is aimed at small businesses rather than home users and costs £276.12 (£235 ex VAT).

Software includes Wordperfect X3 for word documents; Quattro Pro X3 for spreadsheets; Presentations X3, Corel's alternative to Powerpoint; its new email application Wordperfect Mail and Presentations Graphics X3, for graphics and image editing.

The Home Edition, which costs £69.32 inc VAT, has cut-down versions of Wordperfect X3 and Quattro Pro X3, plus Corel Photo Album 6 Standard, Pinnacle Studio SE and Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD LE v8.

Also included is a 90-day subscription to Norton Internet Security 2006 and two Wordperfect Officeready Template Packs - Personal Finance and Home, and School Essentials.

A Student and Teacher Edition, aimed at education and not-for-profit markets, can be loaded onto up to three PCs. It costs from £99.87 (£85 ex VAT) and includes Wordperfect X3, Quattro Pro X3, Presentations X3 and the Paradox relational database.

The Professional Edition is designed for enterprise-seized organizations and includes the products in the Standard edition, plus Paradox, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications and network deployment-, macro- and VBA programming guides.

It also has the Corel Wordperfect Office X3 Software Development Kit (SDK), including the specifications of the Wordperfect file format. Contact Corel for pricing.

Once a market leading product, but now very much second tier, the software is not only fighting Microsoft for market share, but also free alternatives such as Openoffice 2 and low cost products such as Ability Office.