Quattro Pro is a respectable alternative to Excel, with reasonably good charting and formatting tools. Thunderbird is rather slow as a front end to Web-based e-mail by default, it downloads only headers, and I experienced significant delays when I clicked on a header to download a Gmail message.
The decision to go with Thunderbird–available as a free download to everyone–hints at WordPerfect Office’s weakness in handling e-mail and newsreading tasks its Exchange support remains incomplete. Accompanying the suite are various utilities, including an XML project designer and a Pleading Expert. A new feature that some business and government users may like is support for data import from Web services. WordPerfect retains its Reveal Codes feature, which makes fine-tuned format adjustments possible.
To scan and fill out a static PDF form, you must upgrade to Nuance’s PDF Converter. PaperPort’s PDF Viewer Plus, the SE version, lets you complete forms that you could fill out with a free Reader plug-in, and annotate static PDFs, but nothing more. It beats having no support at all, but Office users will be at least as well off if they install a good PDF plug-in. In my tests with a group of PDFs, some remained fairly faithful to the original layouts but in others, text and layout became scrambled. WordPerfect’s ability to edit PDF documents–a weakness in Microsoft’s suite–still falls short of perfection.
I looked at WordPerfect Office X5 Standard Edition ($250, or $160 for an upgrade price as of March 25, 2010), which consists of X5 editions of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro for spreadsheets, Presentations (Corel’s PowerPoint alternative), WordPerfect Lightning (a note-taking app), Paperport, and Mozilla Thunderbird for WordPerfect Office (which replaces the old WordPerfect Mail e-mail client and personal information manager). But WordPerfect Office X5 remains a tough sell for general business users who are reasonably satisfied with Microsoft’s core Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps, or their free Web counterparts. Squeezed by desktop competitors (Microsoft’s powerhouse Office suite and the free, open-source OpenOffice) and Web alternatives (apps from Google, Zoho, and others), can Corel WordPerfect Office X5 bring something to the productivity software table? The suite does deliver some unique features–most notably in PDF support and–with the addition of Nuance PaperPort to the suite–in document management.
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