by Eric Mooney, LACS

When I received the package I was disappointed that it wasn't the professional edition that includes the Paradox database manager. I was really hoping I could try that, because I haven't seen it since the days of DOS and I'm looking for something good to replace Access.

The manual is divided into sections for each program, including a big section for Paradox, which is just a waste of paper since that program isn't included in this package. Each section is a book in itself, with its own index and table of contents. The index of each section appears to be quite thorough. The font used for paragraph headings is difficult to read, but the text in the paragraph body is okay. Since these programs are powerful and have a lot of features, there's a lot to cover in the manual, and it would help if they had used a more readable font for headings.

The system requirements are at least a 200 MHz Pentium; attempting to install on anything less results in lots of error messages like "This application cannot be uninstalled automatically." The installation is typical; you read the conditions and agree, then specify what type of install you want to do.

I easily installed the suite on a 400 MHz laptop. I first opted for the compact installation, where many important files are accessed only from the CD. The result of this is a tradeoff of longer loading time for more hard drive space. The trouble is that it also leaves many of the menu options gray - unusable until you install them. For instance, you can write code in Visual Basic for custom controls in a spreadsheet, if you've installed Visual Basic from the CD. However, the program doesn't advise you to go to the CD and install whatever it is you need in order to use the grayed-out menu option that you want. I found this to be such a drawback that I reinstalled everything without the compact option. The applications are pretty big and take a long time to load anyway.

The first thing I wanted to try was the calendar, part of CorelCentral, which also includes a day planner, alarms, an address book and e-mail program, a card file program and CorelMemo, "an electronic notepad that allows you to add comments to documents you create with any program that supports Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)." As the manual advised, I first had to set up a calendar file and create a database, for whatever reason. The manual doesn't explain why this is necessary; other calendar programs don't require this.

The calendar left me underwhelmed. In the month view, it only displays one month at a time, with no ability to overlap into adjacent months. There are no configuration settings that you can change. The only use of color is blue in the background of the preset holidays, and you can't change that. I dragged an appointment to another day on the calendar and all the information about the appointment was lost - gone. You can set up alarms separately, but an alarm is really no different from an appointment, and you can't review, edit or even see the alarms on the calendar. I'll keep looking for something else to replace the MS Outlook calendar.

The manual makes no mention of the address book, the dialer or the e-mail application, except to briefly note that they exist. The applications in CorelCentral use the Paradox database engine without giving you Paradox itself or telling you what's going on if you go to Help. Each record in the address book carries a lot of fields, displayed on multiple tabbed pages. I tried to add a custom field to the address book, but there's no way to put that field on a particular tab, and you can't specify any other parameters for the field, like type font or size.

I briefly tried the e-mail and telephone dialer functions, and they seem to work pretty much the same as all the others on the market. For the e-mail client, user settings are automatically copied from Outlook Express, which was already set up on this computer. That was helpful. There are some interesting formatting icons conveniently located on the menu bar, to add bullets, insert objects and links, and otherwise make it easier to create an HTML e-mail. It's perfectly functional, but there's nothing very impressive about this contact manager.

I tried the spreadsheet program QuattroPro. One of the benefits of a good program of this type is its ability to import and export files in other programs' formats. I imported an Excel97 spreadsheet that contained lots of color and other formatting. The fonts made the transition pretty accurately, but the colors weren't the same at all. Borders and page breaks also did not import consistently. When a Quattro file with colors is saved as an Excel file, the colors and borders are completely lost. Most of the standard spreadsheet menu functions work the same way as Excel ones. It seems odd that there's no print preview icon among the many available, but the menu bars can be customized, so I added a Print Preview.

QuattroPro can create impressive charts (covered in a mere 1 1/2 pages of the manual), and crosstab reports from multiple spreadsheets. It also has various pre-written formulas for summing or averaging groups of cell values, including statistical formulas, frequency distribution, regression analysis, and matrix operations that other companies sell as an extra option. I tried the conditional coloring feature, which sounds better than it actually works; I found that it can only be applied to an entire spreadsheet, and not to just one column or cell. There's a Column QuickFit button that instantly resizes a column to fit the longest entry, and Quattro has an easy way to total the values in a column, by going one cell to the left and below the last item in the column and typing "total."

It has its flaws but, generally speaking, QuattroPro is a very powerful spreadsheet program - one of the best.

Cleverly named, this is Corel's presentation composer. It's an advanced drawing program that has a slide show function. Individual slides are composed, and the display intervals can be adjusted. Other objects like pictures, charts, text, sound and even movies can be inserted onto a slide or a background.

This word processor is obviously the flagship of the suite. It was in popular use before Windows came along, installed in a majority of professional offices, and a standard requirement for any secretary to know. Throughout its evolution, the company has maintained compatibility with the original operating standards as much as possible while achieving compatibility with Windows standards. This isn't always possible though, because many Windows keyboard shortcuts conflict with original WordPerfect ones.

Corel also prides itself on compatibility with Microsoft Office and other products and often has better filters for importing and exporting files than MS Office provides. WordPerfect’s features are similar to Word’s, although they are sometimes implemented differently. Which is "better" depends on the feature and, of course, what you are used to. WordPerfect retains its lead in providing "Reveal Codes," a very useful tool when you can’t otherwise figure out why your document isn’t looking the way you expected it to. Word 2000 and 2002 provide a limited version of this feature.

To test WordPerfect, I created a one-page flyer with color graphics interspersed with text. This was a project I had just started using MS Word, so the comparison was interesting. I found WordPerfect to be slower and the graphics more difficult to manipulate in WP. I couldn't get some simple .gif images to layer properly, and it never did come out as well as it did in Word. I also noticed that WordPerfect often couldn't keep up with my typing, and I'm not a fast typist. Maybe this is a problem with the computer, being a portable.

An interesting feature that comes along with WordPerfect is Adobe Acrobat PDF Distiller for exporting documents into Adobe's patented Portable Document Format, which is supposed to make a document able to be read by any kind of computer and yet difficult to alter or forge. It didn't handle the graphics very well at all, placing them in the wrong place or losing them altogether. I use Adobe's separate product (Acrobat) for this and still have lots of trouble with it though, so this can't be blamed on WordPerfect.

This set of powerful programs can't be effectively taught with a thin manual that's deliberately kept brief. There are third-party books just on WordPerfect that are three times as thick as Corel's whole manual, and Corel recommends that the user turn to these.

More help is available at Corel's web site (www.corel.com), and the menu bar of each application has an icon that opens your browser and connects to the Help website. With forums and FAQ areas, this is somewhat helpful, especially if you have a high speed Internet connection (as in many offices). The only trouble I found was that the FAQs didn't cover enough subject matter and the forums were enormously loaded.

It would be nice to have some tutorial sample files or even some demo programs, but nothing like that is mentioned in the manual. I eventually found a handful of sample spreadsheet files on the CD; they don't get copied during installation, and there's no tutorial or demo whatsoever. A demo is helpful when you'd like to see all of the capabilities of an unfamiliar program.

Technical support is available by toll telephone (free for the first 30 days) and Web sources (the Corel KnowledgeBase and Corel Newsgroups).

The minimum requirements for WP Office are: a Pentium 166 MHz processor running Windows 95B (OSR2), 98, 2000, NT 4.0 with SP6 or higher, Windows Me or XP, 16 MB of RAM (32 MB recommended), 165 MB of hard disk space (250 MB typical install), a CD-ROM drive, a VGA monitor, and a mouse or tablet. Some features require a sound card, microphone and speakers.

As with the Microsoft Office collection and others like MS Works and Lotus Office, the distinction between a word processing document, a spreadsheet and a presentation in WordPerfect Office becomes blurred. You can copy and paste freely among them to the point that there is some functional overlap among them. I'm starting to think that the main difference between these suites is the look of the human interface, that is, the way they present data on screen. After reviewing WP Office, I still haven't seen anybody's office programs that make good use of color.

Corel grouped a few good programs and threw in some other applications in order to offer a competitive office suite, but the good parts are WordPerfect, QuattroPro and Corel Presentations.

Standard edition: list price, US$ 389, upgrade price, US$149. The professional edition includes Paradox, MS Visual Basic for Applications for writing scripts, and Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition. Its list price is $489 and the upgrade is $249. Upgrade versions are available to buyers who are registered owners of WordPerfect 5.0 or higher, Paradox, CorelDRAW 3 or higher and recent versions of competing products from Microsoft (Office, Works) and Lotus (SmartSuite).

The Amazon-Egghead price for the Standard edition after rebates is $330. For comparison, the price of Microsoft Office XP Professional is $527 at Amazon-Egghead, and it will work on only one machine ever.

If you don’t need the state-of-the-art versions or Paradox, the just released Corel WordPerfect Family Pack 4 (which includes the previous version 10 of WP and of QuattroPro, McAfee’s VirusScan, Picture Publisher, Britannica Ready Reference Encyclopedia, and two other programs) is a bargain at $89 list, and $79 street.