WordPerfect's Unlucky 13th Edition Is Full of Pitfalls

The odd suffix of Corel's new WordPerfect Office suite -- "X3" -- makes sense when you realize that the last version was called WordPerfect Office 12. Ottawa-based Corel Corp. didn't want to label the new software with the unlucky number 13.

Corel has reason to feel nervous about this release. It arrives in the market as Microsoft Corp.'s market-dominating Office is nearing a major upgrade and not long after the free, open-source OpenOffice.org suite had its own significant update.

And even thought it's been almost two years since WordPerfect Office 12's arrival, the new suite ($100 and up in various editions for Windows 98 SE and newer Windows versions) feels like a rush job. Its core components -- the WordPerfect word processor, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Presentations slide-show editor -- exhibit usability and compatibility problems that have festered for years, and its new WordPerfect Mail is dismally underdone.

WordPerfect itself is the strongest part of this weak bunch. It simplifies the tricky job of formatting documents by offering live previews of any change you make: Select some words, hit the font menu, and that text changes styles as you move from one font to the next. Meanwhile, its PerfectExpert toolbar breaks down the program's many commands into obvious categories ("Formatting," "Add Visual Elements," "Edit and Proofread"); choosing one reveals only tasks relevant to that topic.

Unfortunately, WordPerfect is just as gung-ho as Microsoft Word at "improving" your writing with a variety of automatic formatting and automatic corrections -- whether or not you asked for the help.

Adding a picture to a WordPerfect document sent this program off a usability cliff. After drilling down a couple of menu listings to find the right command, it offered a dialog box listing only file names, without the usual preview of their contents. Enabling a preview option yielded a "No Viewer Available" error. Then the program idiotically claimed that it couldn't use some old digital photos because their "width or height exceeds 27 inches."

(One cause of this dysfunctionality: the custom file dialogs Corel uses instead of the simpler, more useful ones that Windows provides to any properly written program.)

WordPerfect also stumbled badly at the unavoidable task of reading and writing in Microsoft Word formats. It couldn't even open some Word documents, incorrectly saying they were in an "unknown file format," then couldn't preserve moderately busy page layouts when saving files in Word format.

Given that unreliability, you're better off exporting your work in Portable Document Format, which will preserve its looks anywhere it's read. WordPerfect X3, unlike earlier versions, can even edit PDF documents, although complex designs such as Metro timetables flew apart when opened for editing.

Quattro Pro and Presentations fall several steps below WordPerfect in their utility. Quattro Pro has its own PerfectExpert toolbar, but its helpfulness ends once you try to compose a formula. There, Quattro Pro serves up a long list of categories of equations without any search tool to narrow down that selection; once you pick the right one, a pop-up Formula Composer window blocks your view of the numbers you want to crunch.

Quattro Pro had intermittent success at translating a variety of Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files. It inserted mathematical errors into a travel-expense report -- a capital offense for any spreadsheet.

Presentations is worse yet, inferior to Microsoft's PowerPoint in almost every way. It has the same brain-dead photo-importing interface as WordPerfect -- far more of a nuisance here, given the importance of graphics in slide shows-- plus a clumsy set of tools to dress up text and add or edit simple graphic objects, such as lines and boxes.