Washington Post personal technology columnist Rob Pegoraro answers reader e-mail and expands on themes he touches on in his weekly newspaper column. The e-mail version of this weekly feature includes links to the latest gadget and software reviews. • Click Here for Free Sign-up • Read E-letter Archive
The help files in WordPerfect Office 12 lack the usual "what's new" section touting the improvements in this year's release. I can see why it's missing: This release is the least consequential upgrade I've ever used.
I can't see why an owner of either the Office 11 Corel released last year or any reasonably current version of Microsoft Office would bother paying the $150 upgrade price (Win 98 or newer required) for this bundle of WordPerfect, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Presentations slide-show editor.
Nor can I see too many home users lining up to pay $300 for the full release, not when OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) provides comparable utility and better Microsoft Office file-format compatibility for free.
What I do see: A suite that once dominated the market is slowly choking on its own irrelevancy. Aside from the people who will get this software bundled with their new computers, who will rush to buy WordPerfect Office 12?
Corel itself only suggests three new features on a "reasons to buy" handout, none of them remotely persuasive. First, the Workspace Manager -- despite a name that suggests much more -- merely makes it easier to switch between the different toolbar and menu layouts that last year's release offered.
The OfficeReady program, which lets you browse through a library of precanned word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation templates, is hidden on the second CD-ROM and isn't installed by default. And since it can't be invoked from within WordPerfect, Quattro Pro or Presentations (all of which already provide shortcuts to choose from the same set of stationery), it seems unlikely to get much use anyway.
The optional Wireless Office Suite, also buried on disc 2, requires you to use Microsoft Outlook -- yes, a core component of Microsoft Office -- to get such Blackberry-ish options as access to your calendar on a cell phone.
This release of Corel's suite is touted as offering improved Microsoft file-format compatibility, but I couldn't spot this in my own tests.
Quattro Pro did fine overall, but WordPerfect didn't read two of 15 Microsoft Word files, and took as long as 50 seconds to translate those that it could read. The Presentations software was worst of all; its klutzy rendering of slides that layer background patterns, text and images left PowerPoints between ugly and unreadable.
WordPerfect Office 12 did even worse at saving files into Microsoft formats. A simple résumé with a two-column layout displayed fine in Word 2003, but its hidden formatting codes appeared as visible text in Word 2000. A basic Presentations slide show appeared with incorrect margins in PowerPoint 2003.
