Corel Offers Customers Greater Compatibility through Microsoft VBA

Business Wire, Oct 9, 1998

OTTAWA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 9, 1998--COREL (NASDAQ:COSFF) (TSE:COS.) Corel adopts Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications across graphics and business application product line

Corel Corporation today announced it has licensed Microsoft(R) Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) for use in its award-winning line of graphics, desktop publishing, spreadsheet, database and word processing software. VBA is the leading application customization technology that enables developers to easily build business solutions by automating and integrating packaged software products. Integration of VBA into Corel's products, including the CorelDRAW(TM) and Corel(R) WordPerfect(R) Suite product lines, will provide developers with the power and productivity of the Visual Basic development environment. Corel will continue to support its existing scripting languages, in addition to VBA, in order to ensure backward compatibility.

"Our products have always been designed with the ability for users to customize to their own particular working needs," said Dr. Michael Cowpland, president and chief executive officer of Corel Corporation. "With VBA we can further deliver on that strategy by providing the best programming technology to our customers. By partnering with Microsoft and integrating VBA, we are opening our products up to the enormous Visual Basic developer community, making it easy for them to customize and integrate Corel products with other VBA-enabled applications."

VBA is the edition of Microsoft Visual Basic that tightly integrates rich development capabilities with host applications. Developers using VBA to extend Corel's applications will benefit from the familiar Visual Basic language, RAD (rapid application development) integrated development environment, and fast runtime performance in the resulting integrated solutions. Developers will also benefit from an extensible forms package that supports ActiveX(TM) controls for creating rich user interfaces, easy access to the full Windows(R) API and the underlying file system, connectivity to corporate data and integration with other COM-based software. The Visual Basic language is used by more than 3.2 million professional developers worldwide.

"We're excited about our new partnership with Corel," said Paul Gross, vice president of the Developer Tools Division at Microsoft. "By licensing VBA, Corel joins the group of leading ISVs who are transforming their applications into full-powered development platforms that support the Windows DNA architecture. Desktop applications that integrate VBA can serve as rich clients to multi-tier business solutions, automating the flow of information from server-side business components and corporate databases to the desktop application where the information is needed."

The integration of VBA is part of Corel's continued commitment to offer customers the highest quality technology, compatibility, value, and choice in software applications. Corel Corporation

Corel Corporation is an internationally recognized developer of award-winning graphics and business productivity applications. Development of market-leading products such as the CorelDRAW(TM) line of graphics applications and the Corel(R) WordPerfect(R) Suite of business tools is continually evolving to meet the demands of the corporate, retail and academic markets. Committed to value, compatibility, choice and open standards, Corel develops products for the Windows(R), Macintosh(R), UNIX(R), Linux(R) and Java(TM) platforms. Corel's common stock trades on The NASDAQ Stock Market(sm) under the symbol COSFF and on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol COS. For more information visit Corel's Web site at www.corel.com.

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