Corel Wordperfect Family Pack 5

With each new release of Corel Wordperfect Family Pack, one or more components is dropped and new ones are drafted in, so of the seven programs in version 5, only two were present in the original: Wordperfect and Quattro Pro. These two are still the stars of the show, and both of them are dressed in their best clothes, coming as they do straight from version 11 of Wordperfect Office.

There are five supporting acts which, in no particular order, are McAfee Anti-virus, Corel Photobook, Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference, Family Tree Maker and a utility program called Iclean. This selection puts Family Pack 5 in direct competition with Microsoft Works Suite, and it's interesting to compare the two because Family Pack 5 is around £20 cheaper than Works at mail-order prices.

First we'll look at what you get, starting with Wordperfect itself. It offers all the features you'd expect to find in a top-flight word processing system: spelling and grammar checking, mail-merging, watermarking, auto-correction, smart formatting and a useful thesaurus incorporating a defining dictionary. New in version 11 is document mapping, which works very like the system in Word, and an excellent Publish as pdf function which can turn any document into an Acrobat file.

Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet rivalling Excel in almost every department. It offers multiple tabbed worksheets, sophisticated charting, flexible reporting options and an instant filter feature on the lines of Excel's Autofilter. It can read and save any Excel format up to and including Office XP and, when we pumped in some complicated multi-sheet Excel workbooks, they were handled perfectly complete with formulas, notes, named ranges and formatting. There is, however, a short list of Excel functions with no direct equivalents that need to be rewritten for Quattro Pro.

Corel Photobook(previously known as Micrografx Picture Publisher) is a basic red-eye-removing, image-enhancing photo editor. It's not bad, but neither is it much of an improvement on the software you get free with most digital cameras.

McAfee Anti-virus 7 is a valuable tool for anybody currently operating without protection, and for users of pre-XP versions of Windows the inclusion of McAfee Firewall 4 is a bonus.It is easy to install too, unlike Encyclopaedia Britannia Ready Reference, which insisted on the installation of Java 2 runtimes and plug-ins before it would run. When we did get it going we were disappointed to discover it is based not on the full Britannica but on a single-volume print version.The difference shows, and this program is not in the same league as Encarta. Its best feature is an easy-to-use study centre where younger users can cut and paste text and pictures into homework projects.

We don't know how Family Tree Maker, a genealogical research tool, found its way into this package, as the number of people who might use it is miniscule. Genealogy is a popular but hardly mainstream activity and, unless you take tracing your family history seriously, the program is no use to you.

A tool with much wider appeal is Iclean from Aladdin systems. This is a simple clean-as-you-surf utility for those who haven't got to grips with the tools in Internet Explorer and Windows itself, and it contains a simple pop-up killer that works well without a lot of configuration.

It is unlikely that anybody would need all seven programs, but Corel has very cleverly made it easy to install only those you need without going through a laborious selection process. To this end there are three CD-Roms - the first one containing Wordperfect and Quattro Pro. When you install either or both of these you also get a front end for the entire suite called Task Manager. You then install the other programs individually and launch them from Task Manager or from their own program groups.

So is Wordperfect Family Pack better than Works Suite? The answer depends on whether you need a professional spreadsheet. Quattro Pro knocks spots of the one in Works, but to our mind Works has the better set of supporting programs.

Contact: Corel 0870 774 0202
www.corel.co.uk

Specifications:

• Pentium 166MHz processor
• Windows 98SE or above
• 64MB of Ram
• 1GB of free hard disk space
• 800 x 600 colour display
• CD-Rom drive
• Internet Explorer 5.5 or later