WordPerfect Office 2000

WordPerfect Office 2000 arrives hot on the heels of Microsoft Office 2000 and is the last of the three major office suites to be revamped and updated. The first was Lotus SmartSuite, whose 1998 'Millennium Edition' rather jumped the gun.

We looked at the standard version of WordPerfect Office 2000, but by the time you read this there will be a voice-enabled version consisting of the same programs plus Philips FreeSpeech voice recognition, and an Enterprise version incorporating Paradox database and NetPerfect Intranet publishing modules.

The standard edition contains three main elements - WordPerfect, Quattro Pro and Corel Presentations, providing word processing, spreadsheet and business graphics facilities, respectively. Supplementary programs are the Trellix Web publishing tool and CorelCENTRAL, which is a personal information organiser containing a calendar, address book, day planner and card file. Trellix can be used as a standalone Web page creation program, or you can pipe documents to it from the word processor and tweak them in Trellix before uploading the pages to a Web server.

WordPerfect Suite 2000 is a slickly-packaged product, but the awkward way in which data is shared between its various modules betrays the piecemeal way in which it has been assembled over the years - by acquiring programs from other vendors and then trying to integrate them. The new version improves on its predecessor by dispensing with tacked-on features like Netscape Communicator, Envoy file viewers and the Barista Web publishing tools. But the only thing that binds its separate elements is the fancifully named DAD, which stands for Desktop Applications Director and is nothing more than a strip of icons incorporated in the Windows Taskbar providing access to each module.

We opted for a typical installation, which requires two reboots and grabs around 190Mb of hard disk space. A system called Install-As-You-Go is meant to minimise disk space requirements by installing a basic set of programs and then offering to install additional features when necessary.

This is a good idea but it hasn't been consistently implemented. For example, neither the clip-art viewer called Scrapbook nor the Web publisher Trellix are included in a typical installation. But, while Scrapbook can be seamlessly added the first time you need it, the same isn't true of Trellix, which has to be installed from the Setup program and followed by a system reboot.

Our copy of Office eventually grew to 300Mb, including Trellix and a plentiful array of file conversion filters, but this is actually fairly modest in 1999 terms, especially as it includes an upgrade from Internet Explorer 4.0 to the more system-hungry version 5.0.

The file filters are excellent and the fidelity with which Word 97 documents can be imported is impressive. Virtually all formatting features are retained and the resulting WordPerfect files can be resaved in Word format if required.

Quattro Pro's import facility is only slightly less impressive and there are no problems converting straightforward Excel worksheets. However, if you import a set of interdependent workbooks with what Quattro Pro regards as illegal worksheet names they're unlikely to work properly without a certain amount of revision. The least satisfactory conversions are from Microsoft PowerPoint to the Corel Presentations format. Imported PowerPoint slide shows lose their embedded sounds and any editable data tables are turned into static bitmap images. Font attributes and line thicknesses may also be altered in unpredictable ways.

In view of the above, potential buyers considering switching from Office 97 to Corel Office 2000 (instead of taking the obvious route of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2000) should carefully consider the work involved in adapting their existing files to the new environment. But those without the baggage of existing documents are free to choose WordPerfect Office for features like its PerfectExpert tutors. These are movable panels that remain onscreen while you work and provide tips, tools and instructions to guide you through the process of creating documents from scratch. They are available in all WordPerfect Office modules and are accompanied by a natural language help system called 'Ask the PerfectExpert'.

The strongest part of the suite is the eponymous WordPerfect word processor. Little touches like an Autoscroll icon to make an ordinary mouse act like a wheel mouse are clever, but the two best features are Prompt-As-You-Go and Publish to PDF.

Prompt-As-You-Go manifests itself as a box on the toolbar displaying the most recently typed word. Click on a correctly spelt word to get a list of synonyms, or click on an incorrectly spelt word for suggested corrections. When we used this facility, the program suggested 'ate' as a correction for the child's common mistake of 'eated', which we found genuinely impressive.

Publish to PDF is the ability to turn your work into a fully formatted and interactive Adobe Acrobat document, indistinguishable from one produced by Adobe's Distiller software. For anyone concerned with producing documents for electronic distribution, Publish to PDF could be reason enough to choose WordPerfect Office 2000.

WordPerfect Office 2000 is rather loosely integrated and the lack of e-mail facilities from within the personal organiser is disappointing, but we would be happy to find this suite preinstalled on a new PC.

SPECIFICATIONS

WordPerfect word processor, Quattro Pro spreadsheet, Corel Presentations, Trellix Web publishing and CorelCENTRAL information organiser

Install-As-You-Go reduces disk space requirements

Easy font and formatting decisions with Real Time Preview

Document automation using Corel Scripting and Visual Basic for Applications

WordPerfect documents can be converted into readable Acrobat files

Autoscroll tool turns an ordinary mouse into a wheel mouse

PerfectExpert onscreen guides £311.78 (inc VAT)

£149.63 (inc VAT) upgrade

Corel: 0800 973 189

www.corel.com

COREL WORDPERFECT OFFICE 2000 (standard)

Ease of use ****

Performance ****

Features ****

Value for money ***

Overall ****

Minimum requirements: Windows 95, 486 PC, 16Mb of RAM, 295Mb of free hard disk space, CD-ROM drive, VGA monitor, mouse. For speech recognition: 48Mb of RAM, 380Mb of free hard disk space, Pentium 133, 16-bit sound card.

BATTLE OF THE OFFICE SUITES

Microsoft Office 2000 and WordPerfect Office 2000 are each based on a set of three highly capable main modules for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation graphics. In terms of additional features Microsoft offers Outlook 2000, which is a far more versatile personal organiser than CorelCENTRAL, but Corel fights back with WordPerfect's ability to create Acrobat documents.

While Corel Office 2000 offers a progressive installation system, Microsoft Office 2000 goes one better by providing not only an 'install on demand' system but also adaptive menus that change in response to the way a program is used.

A new feature in Microsoft Word, but one that has long been provided by WordPerfect, is the ability to click anywhere on a page and start typing without having to use tabs and blank lines for spacing. A welcome improvement to both word processors is that you can select a font by its appearance instead of by name, which is a privilege Apple Mac users have been enjoying for many years.

Where Microsoft Office leaves Corel at the starting post is with its system-wide features and tighter integration. For example, the Office clipboard allows you to copy multiple items for pasting, and the Detect and Repair feature, which, in some cases, can reinstate a corrupted version of Office.

It is also possible to publish Microsoft Office documents directly to a Web site without the fuss of using a program like Corel's Trellix, though only when the Web server is enhanced with suitable Office extensions.

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