Corel WordPerfect Office 11

For some time Sun and Microsoft have been battling it out in the office software stakes, with Star Office and Microsoft Office respectively.

Latterly, though, Open Office has muddied the waters somewhat and now looks like it might soon be a serious threat to Microsoft's dominance, covering four platforms - Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X.

There was a time when neither of these was a threat to the king of suites - the champion was Borland Office, since sold several times and now owned by Corel.

Comprising WordPerfect, Paradox, Quattro Pro and Corel Presentations, it's just been refreshed and re-released, and Corel will no doubt be hoping it will recapture some of its former glory, but we can't help feeling slightly less optimistic.

But before we gripe let's start with some things we like. First, WordPerfect feels sturdy and competent. A tabbed workspace lets you quickly skip between open documents using buttons at the bottom of the active window, saving space on the Windows toolbar.

It also has a very neat way of handling fonts, whereby selecting a chunk of text and then scrolling over the font size, face or style dropdown menus formats the text in that style for an immediate preview.

It's not permanent until you make your final decision, and is a real time-saver if you're trying to squeeze too much text onto a single page.

Pages can be edited side by side, as in a DTP application, which makes WordPerfect great for editing less-demanding multipage newsletters. A browse button, meanwhile, makes finding your way around long documents very easy, and is backed up by the Document Map.

Similar to the Navigate panel in Star Office, it skips back and forth between particular components - for example, all tables or headers of a certain level - in the document.

We prefer the Star Office implementation, which defines a more comprehensive tree-like structure, but this is a valuable tool nonetheless.

We were surprised that WordPerfect didn't automatically associate itself with.doc and.rtf files upon installation.

While file-type hijacking can be an irritation with less crucial applications (media players, image viewers and suchlike), it's a fairly safe bet than anyone installing an office suite intends to make it their default application for documents and spreadsheets.

As it stands, double-clicking a document on our test PC still launches our outdated pre-existing software.

You can almost forgive WordPerfect for sticking with its own keyboard shortcuts - it owned the market well before Microsoft Word, after all - but if you're switching from the competition you'll likely want to reassign the keyboard to work the same way as it does in Word.

This is a simple two-click operation from the Settings menu, and something we did right away. We found the default action of Ctrl & Del wiping out everything between the cursor and the end of the line an irritation when we only wanted to take out a single word.

Unfortunately, though, we couldn't get this to stick, and every time we started a new document it reverted to the eager line-zapping option.

A key strength of WordPerfect, and one that has been there since the switch to Windows, is the Reveal Codes function, which gives you an HTML-esque view of what's going on under the surface of your document.

It's particularly handy if you have a table where the cells continually revert to a set format no matter how many times you change it, as you can go in and manually pull out the coding once and for all.

For anyone working on technical documents where formatting is paramount, this function could well be worth the buying price on its own - even more so now that the view can be printed, too.

WordPerfect handles tabs particularly well. A button to the left of the ruler lets you select the kind of tab you want, while single clicks place as many as you need.

The cursor, meanwhile, is sensitive to these positions and, as you move it across the page, a ghost cursor lines up with the tab settings so that a single click positions it in alignment. Clicking beneath the centre-most tab sets alignment to centre. From that you can work out what clicking on the last tab of the line does.

Our main gripe was in its file handling. The package reads and writes a massive range of file types, but on several occasions we found the results of saving as, say, Unicode text or plain Ascii would introduce unexpected glyphs and line breaks when opened on another system - particularly on a Mac.

Granted, this could be down to the import process of the program used on the Mac, but it's irritating all the same.

Quattro Pro
Quattro Pro is an Excel-style spreadsheet program. Just as WordPerfect doesn't entirely follow the Word model, so Quattro Pro deviates slightly from what has become the industry norm. Totalling cells A1 to A3, for example, uses @SUM(A1..A3) - the Excel equivalent would be =sum(a1:a3).

Sadly, Quattro Pro is unable to understand and convert the Excel formula. It does, however, considerably simplify referencing data from other sheets in the workbook: @SUM(A:A1..H:B7) would add the contents of cells A1 on sheet A and B7 on sheet H.

On a more positive note, we liked the use of a small blue marker in the corner of any cell that contains a formula, giving a quick overview of which cells you need to keep an eye on when adjusting static values elsewhere.

Like WordPerfect, it employs a tabbed workspace, giving instant access to open documents via a series of buttons on the bottom of the application interface, but beyond that it very much follows Microsoft's modus operandi.

The Speedformat palette enables you to customise the look of large blocks of cells without having to tweak them each individually, while a quick selection button highlights every occupied cell in a worksheet to which global style changes can then be applied.

This is located on the bottom of the vertical scroll bar which keeps things in line with the browse button in WordPerfect, but isn't entirely logical.

For anyone who moves a lot of data about, the quick access afforded to column and row insertion, deletion and grouping found on the toolbar will be a real boon, giving two-click access to functions that move cell selections down or across several rows without affecting the contents of adjacent cells.

The auditing and outlining toolbars make short work of tracking data flows around a worksheet and producing collapsible sections, keeping unwieldy documents in check.

It is because of this excellent outlining tool that we were so surprised Quattro Pro had difficulty with one of the spreadsheets we use on a daily basis in the PCW office. This features frozen cells, macros and outline formatting, and loads fine into both Open Office and Excel, and on PCs and Macs.

Quattro Pro, however, split the sheet in two at the freeze line, adding a set of spreadsheet tabs, forgot outline settings and changed the cell colours to make the text unreadable, all of which makes us question just how Excel-compatible this application really is.

Paradox
Paradox is a relational database with good support for a wide range of file and table formats, including Access and SQL, while its own data can be read by any ODBC-compliant application.

Presentations
Presentations makes short work of producing Powerpoint-like slides. An extensive selection of drawing tools gives immediate access to predefined shapes, while 12 presentation types will set up skeleton slideshows, ready to be populated by your own data.

Little has changed here beyond improvements in its handling of Powerpoint presentations, and integration with the suite-wide spelling tool.

As mentioned at the start, we have some reservations after using this suite. It has some quirky features that run contrary to what is the accepted norm for productivity tools.

While Corel gives options for greater Microsoft compatibility - in terms of working practices, not just file formats - these are not activated by default.

Office 11 is a competent, attractive product with some time-saving features, but in an age when the only way to survive is to mimic the market leader it should be following the example of Sun's Star Office, which apes Microsoft Office very well indeed.

Nonetheless, we feel it would be wrong to mark it down for being bold and sticking to its guns, so despite our reservations it scores very well indeed.

Contact: Corel
www.corel.com

System requirements:

• 166MHz processor
• 64MB of Ram (128MB recommended)
• Windows 98SE, ME, NT4 with SP6a/2000 with SP3/XP with SP1 (Home or Professional)
• 330MB of hard disk space (370MB professional edition)
• CD-Rom drive
• SVGA
• 16-bit colour monitor
• 800 x 600 or higher resolution
• mouse or tablet