Corel Wordperfect X3

Another new and welcome touch is the ability to paste plain text, for example from a web page, directly from a right-click. This again is far easier than in Word.

Quattro Pro can also create pdfs for both worksheets and charts. The cross tab report feature, which lets you combine and analyze data from multiple sources, has been enhanced to include ODBC databases, and Corel’s Advanced Rendering adds 3D shading to charts.

The Presentations application has had its drawing module promoted to a standalone application, making it easier to create graphics for use in the other suite members or third-party programs.

Start Wordperfect Mail and it will offer to import messages and settings from a variety of email clients, including Outlook and Outlook Express, without modifying the original data.

The first time we tried this feature the program crashed, but after restarting the PC it worked flawlessly.

As well as handling email and contacts, there is also a calendar for scheduling events with the option to subscribe to other calendars over a network or Internet server.

A spam blocker, Saproxy Pro, is integrated into the program. There is also support for RSS feeds and a quick search feature lets you retrieve messages by sender, subject or keywords.

Throughout the suite you can preview most formatting of text and graphics in place, for example by hovering the pointer over a font list or colour palette.

The Perfectexpert, as in previous versions, provides context-sensitive help and commands from a pane alongside the document – we found this rather more useful than the Microsoft Office Task Pane.

Finally there has been a general improvement in compatibility with Microsoft Office – you can make .doc, .xls, .ppt or .xml the standard save format.

Despite a few areas that could be improved on, Wordperfect X3 is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office.

System requirements:

466MHz processor
128MB RAM
575MB disk space
Windows 98SE/2000/XP