Sarasota PC Monitor

Wordperfect Office 2002, Pro Version

A Software Review
by Herb Goldstein
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.

I haven't missed a new version of WordPerfect in the past 40 years. Call it customer loyalty if you will, but "customer satisfaction" would be a more accurate description. Over this period of time, we've both undergone considerable changes. In the case of WordPerfect it's all been for the better. The latest version, Office 10, provides no radical change from the previous version 9, but offers many interesting nuances in a gradual move forward. WordPerfect has always been very good to its users by avoiding making recent prior versions obsolete. In keeping with modern needs and technology, WordPerfect today is offered as a suite of products that include:

  1. WORDPERFECT 10- The world's eminent word processor with far-reaching and sophisticated capabilities of producing literally any type of text document imaginable, be it a letter, book, newsletter, legal document, chart, table, proposal, report, Web document, thesis, or you-name-it. The program will also create, edit, retrieve or validate SGML or XML Web documents. All manner of graphics can be included in any of these.
  2. QUATTRO PRO 10- A spreadsheet application to analyze, report, manage and share data. Incorporates sophisticated mathematical capabilities and formulae. You can create anything from a simple personal or home budget, to a financial analysis of a complex international business. Prepare financial statements, data analysis, reports, tax and investment analyses and more.
  3. COREL CENTRAL 10- A tool for managing your personal or organizational information. Create calendars, schedules, reminders, appointments, and the like. Compatible with your Internet browser. Contains its own email client providing you with multiple mailboxes and email security.
  4. COREL PRESENTATIONS 10- Create high-quality slide shows, drawings and text/graphics documents. Edit and create bitmap images and convert vector to bitmap.
  5. PARADOX 10- Included only in the Professional Edition of WordPerfect Office. Powerful and easy to use database application to organize, track and manage data. Can be used on an individual computer or across a network. Permits you to share database tables on the Net. Experienced users can create customized databases using its ObjectPal programming language. Paradox can be used as a standalone application.
  6. DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING- The king of voice activated software that allows you dictate information into WordPerfect and the text will magically appear without your touching your keyboard. Provided only with the Professional Edition.
  7. WORDPERFECT GRAPHICS - A CD is provided containing a sizable collection of clipart, photos, fonts and assorted graphics for inclusion in any document created in the components of the suite.
  8. ADOBE ACROBAT READER- View, navigate and print PDF documents. Save WordPerfect documents in PDF.
  9. BITSTREAM FONT NAVIGATOR- Find, install and manage fonts. View font samples.
  10. CORELMEMO- An electronic notepad that allows you to add memos and comments to any document that supports Object Linking and embedding (OLE)>
  11. DESKTOP APPLICATIONS DIRECTOR- Organize on the Windows taskbar the icons for each of the suite's components.
  12. EQUATION EDITOR- Insert and format mathematical and scientific equations in a WordPerfect document.
  13. QUICK VIEW PLUS- View, copy and print the contents of most documents created in any Windows program even if that program is not present on your computer.
  14. FILE FILTERS- Allow you to import files created in other programs.

Office 10 contains a number of new features which include various enhancements in choice, compatibility and performance. They include among numerous other enhancements to the individual suite components: - Corel Application Recovery Manager- Helps you recover from most application failures without losing your work.

New and very important in this version is Corel's Application Recovery Manager feature. It is an anti-crash utility designed to intercept crashes and keep you alive long enough for you to save your work.

WordPerfect is not a product designed with the casual user in mind for whom it would be the equivalent of trying to kill a flea with a sledgehammer. It is aimed at business users and intermediate to experienced individuals whose word processing needs go beyond simple memos or letters. If you are a novice with casual needs, you don't need and likely won't master WordPerfect or any of the other sophisticated word processing applications around. Such individuals will find everything they need in the free accompaniments to Windows, Notepad or WordPad.. For more complex needs, WordPerfect offers the most innovative, advanced and complete solutions to any word processing task you could possibly imagine, and a few that may well go beyond your imagination. Installing WordPerfect Office is effortless, but for some strange reason it keeps the previous version intact and does not provide the option to update it. Consequently, you need to start from square one in recreating all the options, modifications and preferences you worked hard to create over the long period you worked with the previous version. Your choice in this matter needs to be addressed in a future version. Corel lets you select either a "typical installation (completely automatic), a compact or a custom installation which allows you to include or exclude the components of your choice. The installation of Office 2002 does not remove previous installations of Office 2000. You can either keep 2000 or uninstall it separately at your choosing. Any omissions can be installed individually at a later date.

Three CD's are provided with WordPerfect Office Pro. The first contains all the programs of the suite; WordPerfect, Paradox, Quattro, etc. The second contains graphics and fonts, and the third is the voice activation software, Dragon Naturally speaking. The box also contains a concise software manual, and a microphone-headset for use with Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Functionally. If you are upgrading from a recent WordPerfect version, you can readily jump right into Office10 without noticing any difference. Most of the enhancements are behind the scenes. If you are switching from another word processor, your learning curve will be easy to handle. The only competition to WordPerfect is Microsoft Office which costs about $100 more and takes up more hard drive space. Additionally, WordPerfect is not encumbered by any intrusive copy protection scheme. However, Office 10 is aimed more at loyal WordPerfect fans than at attempting to convert MS Word users.

Although the two major products have many comparable features, WordPerfect stands apart from the pack in one essential and innovative feature. WordPerfect provides a "reveal codes" setting. Click alt-F3 and the lower portion of your screen shows your document with all the various word processing formatting codes it contains revealed. You can readily see what is presenting any problem and instantly make a suitable correction. Many times something funky happens in your word processing document and you can't seem to correct it. Reveal codes will show you exactly what and where the problem lies and allow you to fix it. No other word processor contains this vital innovation. As a new feature that WordPerfect users will enjoy, reveal codes is now also available in two-page view.

Another very useful nuance is WordPerfect's new Variable's tool that lets you insert a placeholder in your document. Changing the contents of that placeholder automatically updates the contents of the placeholder throughout the document. A new tables menu lets you translate tables into text and vice versa. A select Sections command lets you choose large sections of a long document without making you scroll down manually to find them. Another welcome addition is the 30,000 word Oxford English Dictionary accessible on the tools menu.

Help is readily available and abundant in the suite's components. The help menu also provides the "perfect Expert" to give you step-by-step guidance through various problems and techniques. Elements on the WordPerfect ruler have been redesigned and improved. WordPerfect provides an endless variety of buttons on its default toolbar, and wide choice of toolbars to display, each of which bears its own variety of relative buttons. Additionally, each bar can be further customized by adding a button to display any menu item of your choice. One I found particularly useful was to add a button for "case toggle" since I never learned to touch-type and I am forever inadvertently leaving my caps-lock on. Microsoft Word offers an automatic solution to this common problem by automatically turning off caps lock and correcting the case of words whose first letter starts in lower case and is directly followed by upper case letters. WordPerfect needs to pick up on this!

Another great WordPerfect feature that I constantly make use of is a prompt-as-you-go display that provides a generous list of synonyms and alternatives for any word in your document on which you place your cursor. There are few things as disturbingly amateurish as repetition of the same words in adjacent sentences. The list of tweaks, options and preferences go on forever, permitting you to make WordPerfect a completely personal, customized application designed to satisfy your every need or desire.

In this imperfect world, WordPerfect offers to correct your spelling in a choice of ways, the most common of which is spell-as-you-go. Incorrectly spelled words are automatically underlined in red. Right-click on them and you are offered the correct spelling to automatically replace your error. A "quick-correct" feature permits you to list any word you frequently misspell along with its correct spelling. Further misspelling of that word is automatically corrected as you type without any intervention from you. Grammatik, WordPerfect's grammar checking utility can be deployed to check your document for grammatical errors at any time, or to perform that function as you go, the same as spell-checker. Creation, insertion and use of tables, charts, borders, fills, art forms, graphics, text-art and more permit you to make your documents an impressive work of art.

In using WordPerfect, I have discovered 2 vexing annoyances. The first is a carry-over from previous versions. Double-clicking a word should select only that word for whatever modification you want to apply. Well, sometimes it does, and sometimes it selects the entire sentence, paragraph, or entire document. The second is new to Office 10 and not present in Version 9. A word will sometimes be underlined in red as misspelled while there is nothing at all wrong with its spelling. This is a new glitch not present in prior versions. I have tracked the culprit down to WordPerfect misinterpreting the spacing between words. A wrongly underlined word can be corrected by adding an additional space either before or after the word in question. You can then eliminate the extra space once the underlining is gone. Perhaps these deficiencies will be addressed in an upcoming service release.

Office 10 offers handy Web publishing features. You can publish a document to HTML or establish hyperlinks for a URL. To browse the Web, simply click the Corel Connector button on your toolbar. You can convert a graphic to GIF, JPEG, or publish a document to PDF or XML

QUATTRO PRO 10 is an unbeatable spreadsheet application for managing, analyzing and presenting numerical data. You can create spreadsheets and charts in a wide variety of descriptions and display your data in cells, rows and columns that you can custom format, calculate, analyze, and apply a variety of pre-formed and custom formulae.. This new version has enhanced features that help you create and present your spreadsheet information and includes a new charting engine with enhanced functionality. Investors can build queries that will download stock prices from the Internet.

One of the strong features of WordPerfect Office has always been and continues even more so to be its powerful connectivity between the individual modules of the suite. You can spice up the looks of your spreadsheet with colors, fills and artwork, some of it borrowed from Corel Presentations.

A new charting function now includes histogram, gantt, 2D surface, and pie of a pie chart in addition to the more common varieties of previous versions. A multiple undo function now corrects a string of errors at one time.

Very strong help functions are present in Quattro in the form of "Experts:"

Quattro Pro can be anything from a useful financial tool for the average user, to a complex statistical instrument for the more expert. Like WordPerfect, you can modify and customize it in a wide variety of ways. Password protection can be assigned to your spreadsheet to insure the confidentiality of your data. Inserting, importing, exporting and linking your charts, tables and data with other elements of the suite are basic to its connectivity. As yet another example, you can create Crosstab Reports to organize and analyze data from your spreadsheets and databases.

COREL PRESENTATIONS is the member of the Office suite that will allow you to create slide shows, drawings, speaker notes, transitions, flowcharts and more to display your products that may incorporate material from one or more of the suite components. It contains sophisticated tools to combine text, graphics, fonts and artwork into an impressive visual or printed presentation. It is easy to use, especially if you have had any experience with a simple graphics application.

In this version, you can add multimedia, animation and sound to your slide show as well as saving it in Macro media Flash format to publish it on the Net. You can import and export to and from Microsoft Power Point and include PDF files. A Master Gallery contains layouts and backgrounds on which you can build a custom presentation. You can create bitmapped images and add them to your slide shows and drawings.

PARADOX 10 is the latest version of Office Suite's venerable relational database and is present only in the Professional version of the suite. It allows you to create tables that display your data in the manner you elect to organize it, and provides for you to retrieve that data at any time. You can query your database to extract the information you need, and create custom reports for displaying it. Paradox is an exceptionally powerful database that you can easily manipulate in a wide variety of ways. Along with word processors, databases provide the most commonly used functions for computers.

Among the nuances in Paradox 10 is an enhanced print engine that more accurately reproduces screen displays. A report print preview has also been added to allow you to see more accurately what your report will look like before printing. An advanced HTML publishing feature has been added along with an increased number of file format graphics and text import filters.

Interconnectivity is also readily demonstrated here too. You can use a database table as the base of information to be used in a WordPerfect merge document. Although Paradox saves its tables in its own .DB format by default, it provides the option to save in the more common .DBF format for use in other programs. Conversely, Paradox will readily import .DBF files and save them in .DB format. It is also compatible with the Microsoft Access .MBF file format.

As is the case with Quattro Pro, you can password protect database tables to control who has access to your data. It is extremely easy to go into a database table of any size and immediately find exactly the data you are looking for. You can cross-reference tables in creating reports and create custom forms for entering data.

Although the Reports Expert makes report creation of reports a whole lot easier than what it used to be, there's a lot more than needs to be done in this category. Microsoft Access and the other major database players are no better in this regard. For some unknown reason, database programmers make it easy to create a database table, yet make it a real bear to create a report from it. Choices and methods in report creation are for the most part confusing, irrational and unnecessarily difficult for the largest percentage of users, and time just does not seem to address or relieve the issue. This problem has been around and has drawn complaints for ages now. Queries are another area that can stand a good deal more plain-language simplification. Both these features need to keep the average user rather than the nerds in mind!

Corel Central is a personal information manager that contains a collection of extremely handy and effective applets that help you organize and manage your daily life, personal information, contacts and activities. They include:

Last but not least, Office 10 offers the latest version of the leading voice activation software, Dragon Naturally Speaking. If you take the time, patience and effort (and it requires a fair amount of both) to learn this application and train it to your voice, it will allow you dictate to your computer, and the words will appear on your screen without you touching your keyboard. With Dragon's publishers, Lernout and Hauspie, going into bankruptcy a few months back, its future is somewhat unclear. For the present, it's the best of its kind available.

There is about an $80 difference between the standard and the pro version of Office 10. If Paradox and Dragon Naturally Speaking are important to you, your choice would be the Pro version. Most home users are likely to find that their database needs are more than satisfied by the card file, address book and other applets in Corel Central.

All-in all, Corel Office is a superb product and in keeping with WordPerfect's long history of excellence. It contains the most essential products that need to be on most everyone's computer and will work in all versions of Windows from 95 up. It is ahead of the competition in the areas that I have described , particularly in cost, hard drive space (needs 150 MB), and in the unique WordPerfect "reveal codes" and Application Recovery Manager features. Although WordPerfect is not perfect (nor is anything else for that matter), it is a powerful and worthy product that will do most anything outside of painting your computer blue. Like everything from aspirin to underwear its price has gone up, but so has its features. At a street price of about $420 ($213, upgrade edition), Office 10 Professional is about $50 more than the previous version, but almost $100 less expensive that the competition. The standard edition sells for about $333 (street), and $128 for the upgrade.

Corel Corp., 1600 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON, K1Z8R7, Canada; (800) 772-6735; www.corel.com :

Copyright 2001. This article is from the August 2001 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/

The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,300+ members and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are members of the America Online Ambassador Program.

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