Review

Created: January, 2000

WordPerfect Office 2000, Standard Edition, for Windows 95/98/NT

By Terry Fong, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

• WordPerfect 9, for word processing.
• Quattro Pro 9, for spreadsheet creation and manipulation.
• Corel Presentations 9, a presentation application; 
• CorelCENTRAL 9, a personal information manager.
  

An important facet for those who need multilingual capabilities is that support for 36 languages and dialects is included out of the box.

The install process was relatively simple. Each of the three install options includes an additional choice to run off of the CD. Doing this requires that the WP CD be left in drive at boot up, however, otherwise the system will complain every time. A minor hassle was that two reboots are required on a fresh install of any type. 

The Install-As-You-Go (tm) feature allows an application to be partially installed and if an uninstalled item is called for the application will offer to install it for you.

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

The user guide covers all versions of the suite, so features available only in other editions (e.g. Paradox) are also discussed. The guide is task-based, discussing briefly how to perform various tasks, and refers to the online help for more advanced or esoteric topics.

WordPerfect can conveniently be set to save in other formats. Furthermore, limited testing shows that it can read and write Microsoft Word 97 formated files, including those with embedded graphics files, columns and different languages. 

WordPerfect is tremendously customizable. It can use several menu structures, either its own or that of Microsoft Word 97. Toolbars can be activated and deactivated and can be further customized by adding or deleting functions.

Microsoft Word and WordPerfect fans can be differentiated by whether they like or dislike WordPerfect's "reveal codes" ability. This shows the text with its formating codes in a separate part of the window. The codes can then be individually edited or deleted. 

Quattro Pro is the spreadsheet component of the suite. Like WordPerfect, Quattro Pro can be customized to use other menu structures (including (Excel 97, Lotus 1-2-3, or older Quattro Pro). In addition, Quattro Pro has an interesting visual cue, called a formula marker, which 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 basic personal information manager, which includes calendar and address book functions. The install process can make it part of the system start-up process. It does the job, but is nothing to write home about.

Closer integration with the Web seems to have been a key goal of WP Office 2000. In addition to saving in hypertext markup language (HTML), WP now offers the ability to publish to portable document format (PDF, the format used by Adobe Acrobat), to extensible markup language (XML) and to Trellix 2 formats. Trellix 2 is a separate, limited application included for desktop Web publishing. The version included can be upgraded for a nominal fee. 

Quattro Pro can also publish to the Internet in HTML or XML format, or 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. Corel Presentations has an option to publish to the Internet.

A key addition for power users is the addition of Visual Basic for Applications. This variant of Microsoft's Visual Basic, along with the native PerfectScript, gives it powerful scripting abilities.

At half the cost of the MS Office Suite, WordPerfect Office 2000 is a bargain at $275 US ($400 Canadian). 

One minor drawback is that if you want to share your documents with the MS Office-dominated world you have to remember to toggle the switch that sets the programs to save in MS format. If you're going to save in this mode regularly and don't need to toggle between formats, you have to do this only the first time, however.

Reviewer's rating: 4.5 / 5
Comments: A solid office suite, at a fabulous price compared to some of its competition.
Price: Upgrade- $140 US / $190 Canadian; Full - $275 US / $400 Canadian