Review

Created: October, 2000

Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux

By Terry Fong, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

If you're a Linux user looking for a full-featured productivity suite that will make your work compatible with that of Windows users, WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux provides good value for the price ($150 US, $225 Canadian).

It's a great office suite that is completely compatible with the Windows edition, including file formats.

The standard edition includes four programs: WordPerfect 9, for word processing; Quattro Pro 9, for spreadsheet creation and manipulation; Corel Presentations 9, a presentation application and CorelCENTRAL 9, a personal information manager. The Deluxe edition adds Paradox 9, a relational database.

Sadly, the promotional Linux Penguin toy is available only with the Deluxe edition.

The hitch? Even if you're techno-savvy, installation can be problematic and this suite could take more time to get running than most small business owners can afford. Successful installation of the review copy was tricky and required several attempts.

First, a double check for adequate hard drive space is essential. The test installation gave every indication that all had gone well, when in reality it never finished due to lack of space.

Second, although the manual says that there is a "custom" setting for installation, this did not seem to make it into the final edition. Only two options are provided: a complete install and a minimal install. The latter installs only the files necessary to run WordPerfect and Quattro Pro.

Third, stability is an issue. During testing the system locked up tight, forcing a reboot in Linux. Not even the Windows edition (and Windows is notorious for requiring reboots) did that.

When the reboot was finished, there appeared to be no alternative to completely rebuilding the system because every attempt to invoke the program failed. Later, an uninstall script was found on the Corel site that would have made this a lot easier. A mention of it at somewhere in the (expletive deleted) documentation would have been more than nice.

Once the installation ogre has been vanquished, however, users of Windows versions of the WordPerfect Suite will feel right at home with this edition. It looks and feels exactly like the Windows version, down to the shortcuts used for menu and feature activation.

WordPerfect can conveniently be set to save in other formats. Testing showed that it can read and write Microsoft Word 97 files, including ones with embedded graphics files and columns.

WordPerfect is also customizable, coming with several menu structures, including that of Microsoft Word 97. Toolbars can be activated and deactivated and can be further customized by adding or deleting functions.

Fans of WordPerfect will be glad to know it retains its "reveal codes" ability, showing the text with its formatting codes in a separate part of the window. The codes can then be individually edited or deleted.

A great cross-suite feature is RealTime Preview. This permits you to preview changes before implementing them. For instance, if you highlight some text and choose a new font from the font pull-down menu, the highlighted text will appear in the new font but won't really change unless you click on the new font in the pull-down menu.

Like WordPerfect, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet can be customized to use other menu structures (including Excel 97, Lotus 1-2-3, or older Quattro Pro). Quattro Pro also has a formula marker that marks cells where formulas have been entered.
Corel Presentations allows users to make slides or drawings, which may be useful to small businesses with presentation needs.

CorelCENTRAL is a personal information manager with calendar and address book functions. It does the job, but is nothing to write home about.
Word Perfect Office 2000 integrates nicely with the Web. In addition to saving in hypertext markup language (HTML), it lets you publish to portable document format (PDF, the format used by Adobe Acrobat) and to extensible markup language (XML).

In order to use the PDF abilities, a print driver must be installed.
Quattro Pro and Corel Presentations can also publish to the Internet. Quattro Pro can also retrieve data directly via a Web query, potentially useful to a small business that needs to update research on a regular basis. Given a Web address, Quattro Pro can be set to periodically or manually query the Net for data (for example, a stock quote) and insert the data directly into a spreadsheet.

Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications was not ported from the Windows version but PerfectScript was included for those who want to program the suite.
There are a few unresolved issues. Hyperlinks saved in Microsoft Excel can not be read in Quattro Pro. E-mail links in WordPerfect are sometimes a problem: they might not be saved or linked properly when published to PDF file format.

In addition, the suite uses HTML for help files. These are indexed but, unfortunately, the same team who created the HTML help for Corel Linux also did it for this suite. As with Linux, the left-hand pane is not resizable.

These issues are minor, however. If installation hadn't provided its own special kind of hell, it would be easy to recommend this suite. Compatibility and ease of use is a snap. Hopes are high for the next edition.

Reviewer's rating: 3 / 5

Comments: Despite its lack of stability, WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux is a great office suite, at a fabulous price. For now, it has very little competition on the Linux platform.

System requirements: Kernel Release 2.2 or higher/X-Windows, Pentium 166 (Pentium 200 recommended), 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended), 450 MB of hard disk space, a CD-ROM drive, a VGA monitor and a mouse or tablet.

More info: http://www.corel.com

Price: Standard edition: $100 US, $150 Canadian