Corel Wordperfect X3

Going head-to-head with Microsoft Office, the Standard Edition of Corel Wordperfect X3 consists of the Wordperfect word processor, Quattro Pro spreadsheets, Presentations and the new Wordperfect Mail.

As usual there is a generous bundle of resources including 900 fonts and over 9,000 graphic files.

The Professional Edition adds the Paradox database, Microsoft VBA, and a developers’ kit. Other combinations are offered as Home and Student/Teacher Editions.

You also have the option to copy the installation files to your hard disk (around 300MB) so you don’t need to hunt for the CD should you want to add features or repair damage.

Wordperfect X3 brings with it several new features. Whereas previous versions included the ability to create Adobe Acrobat pdf files (something Microsoft has yet to offer), this version includes pdf import as well.

We found the layout of imported pdf files suffered considerably, with broken text flow, missing spaces between words, distorted graphics and incorrect pagination.

In fairness, the documentation states that this feature ‘makes it easy to reuse text and graphics from pdf files’, rather than claiming to edit them.

There has been some cosmetic work on the toolbars and the Yahoo search bar provides access to various Corel and Yahoo online services.

Wordperfect’s multinational capabilities have improved considerably. Instead of using ‘one font fits all’ for Greek or Arabic scripts, for instance, the program is now capable of using some (but not all) of the Unicode range in the standard Windows fonts.

This not only looks better, but should make for improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.

A ‘Save without metadata’ tool removes all hidden, possibly compromising, data from a document, and the word count feature is now accessible from the status bar.