Mover Over, Microsoft Office

Home Office Computing, June, 1999 by Joel T. Patz

9.0

9 9 9 9 V P E S

WordPerfect Office 2000 Professional Edition

Requirements   Win 95/98, 32MB of RAM, 295MB of hard disk space,
               CD-ROM drive

List Price     $449 (upgrade, $159)

Publisher      Corel Corp., 800-772-6735, www.corel.com

ALTHOUGH EACH OF THE Big Three application suites offers annual upgrades, only Corel WordPerfect Office 2000's improvements truly address everyday tasks.

We tested an early version of the Professional Edition--which bundles WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Corel Presentations, CorelCentral, the Paradox database, and Dragon Systems' Naturally-Speaking (not included in our prerelease copy)--and came away impressed. For starters, the new RealTime Preview feature lets you see the effect of a formatting change, such as fonts or number of columns, before applying the change to your document, instead of just selecting a feature and hoping for the best.

Quattro Pro spreadsheets can now have up to 1 million rows--a number that seems ridiculously high, until you realize that most people use spreadsheets to keep lists. Perfect Print is another new feature within WordPerfect, Presentations, and the CorelCentral personal information manager (PIM); it can create booklets or enlarge or reduce documents to fit any paper size.

Navigation within the suite's word processor is easier, too; the new AutoScroll key lets you work with a two-button mouse as though it had a thumb-wheel. With Block Make It Fit, you can adjust selected text to specified dimensions or a desired number of pages without affecting the rest of your document.

Quattro Pro lets you customize menus, shortcut keys, and toolbars, or even mimic Microsoft Excel. Bowing to market realities, Microsoft Office 97 file compatibility is greatly improved throughout.

Like Excel, Quattro Pro includes a Page Break view and Dynamic Cross Tabs (akin to Pivot Tables) for looking at data in a variety of ways. Conditional numeric formatting lets you display values within a range in a special color (highlighting low values in red, for example). Type "Total" in a column, and the spreadsheet automatically inserts the appropriate formula.

As for Internet support, the bundled Trellix 2.0 utility helps you create, convert, maintain, and update content for the Web from WordPerfect. Presentations' Internet Publisher provides step-by-step instructions for putting your slide shows online. And you can save WordPerfect documents as Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

On the downside, the improved Corel-Central is still a lackluster phone book and calendar compared with Lotus Organizer. Otherwise, the new PerfectOffice suite is an excellent upgrade or addition to your home office.

PROS The easiest office suite-period

CONS CorelCentral PIM still a weak link

RATINGS

HOME OFFICE COMPUTING'S product scores are weighted averages of 1- to 10-point ratings for: Value (30 percent of total), Performance (30 percent of total), Ease of Use (20 percent of total), and Suitability for Home Office Use (20 percent of total).

KEY:

V = Value

P = Performance

E = Ease of Use

S = Suitability for Home Office Use