Furthermore, until you change the settings in each application, the Corel programs will nag you to save an Office document as a Corel file, instead of making the polite, common-sense assumption that you'll want to stay with its existing format.

Corel's applications can also translate your work into HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Portable Document Format (PDF), and a new Compatibility Toolbar makes this feature's presence much more obvious -- if you know to enable this option.

My advice is to use PDF, which precisely preserves the looks of your documents. Exporting any moderately complicated WordPerfect file into HTML is begging for trouble -- that résumé's layout disintegrated in the process -- while publishing Presentations files in HTML with the standard settings shrinks each slide into a thumbnail image.

Taken on their own, the individual applications in WordPerfect Office 12 can have their moments.

WordPerfect, while it still lacks the now-common ability to select multiple bits of text for all-at-once editing, displays a surprising agility with text styles. As you scroll up and down its font menu, a large-type preview shows what the next few words in a document will look like in each typeface; pause over a font and the entire document changes to show what it would look like in that new style.

As somebody who writes to a word count every day, I was also pleased to see that Corel has finally moved this command to the Tools menu.

Quattro Pro remains a decent all-purpose spreadsheet, if also the stranger in this suite. Eleven years after it was first sold in a suite with WordPerfect, Quattro Pro continues to look like the product of a separate development shop: The 3D effects in its toolbars look flatter, its menus don't use the same icons to highlight important commands, and its Options dialogue box is much more cluttered.

Presentations adds a "Show on the Go" option in this release that can export a slide show as a self-contained Windows program file. Along with WordPerfect, it can embed any custom fonts in a slide-show file, allowing another Corel user to read and edit that file without losing its appearance.

But as a whole, this suite needs major work if it's going to challenge Microsoft's hegemony effectively. Start with its grotesquely cluttered user interface -- its toolbars are littered with cryptic or meaningless icons, and its "enhanced" file dialogue boxes are uglier, more complicated and less useful than the standard Windows interface.

Better yet would be for Corel to think afresh about how people use this kind of software. How about making it a one-click procedure to put a copy of a file on your handheld organizer? Why not let multiple people add their ideas to one document at once, as if it were an instant-messaging chat? (Lest that seem impossible, a free Mac OS X text editor called SubEthaEdit does this quite nicely.) How about recognizing that many home users employ word processors as desktop publishing programs and including the necessary page-layout tools? How about adding Web-page design from the start instead of tacking it on as a file-export option?

In other words, how about making an office suite that feels a little less like work?

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.