By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, February 5, 2006; F07

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.

You can't even use the canonical text-selection shortcuts that other Windows programs employ-- triple-clicking doesn't select a line of text, and the Ctrl-A command doesn't select all of the text in a given frame.

Although a basic slide show done in Presentations looked almost exactly right in Microsoft PowerPoint, the reverse did not apply. Presentations mauled most PowerPoint files thanks to its incompetence with transparent layers in graphics: Instead of showing a logo floating over the background, it would display that logo surrounded by a box.

(OpenOffice mopped the floor with WordPerfect in these compatibility tests, translating the same set of Microsoft Office files far more quickly and accurately.)

All of the WordPerfect suite's programs crashed several times in my tests; a document-recovery feature stopped me from losing data but didn't make this any more fun.

Depending on which version you buy, WordPerfect Office X3 can include one of two disappointing extras -- an e-mail program and a digital-photo album.

The Standard edition, $300 or $160 at the upgrade price, adds WordPerfect Mail. The world badly needs an alternative to Microsoft's feature-bloated Outlook, but this isn't it.

Think of Corel's Mail as a database for your e-mail with minimal calendar and contacts-list tools. It excels at making sense of overflowing inboxes with fast, full-text searching that delivers results nearly instantly, plus sorting options that, for example, differentiate messages sent only to you from those sent to you and other people.

But Mail is much less adept at everything else. Of the two major type of e-mail accounts, it provides only basic support for one, POP, and barely works with the other, IMAP. Its address book doesn't track birthdays, lacks a to-do list and can't synchronize to a handheld organizer.

Corel's $100 Home Edition leaves out Mail and Presentations and instead throws in a batch of third-party applications -- Pinnacle's video-editing and disc-burning software and a copy of Symantec's Norton Internet Security that only includes 90 days of updates -- and Corel Photo Album 6.

That last program is another mediocrity -- fine for basic image management and fine-tuning but no competition for such free photo editors as Google's Picasa. For instance, if you didn't hold the camera level, there's no "straighten" command to level out the shot.

In that respect, Photo Album seems too much like the rest of WordPerfect Office. It's designed as if users have no other alternative to Microsoft's hegemony, so Corel doesn't need to try harder.

True, Microsoft's updates to Office have been as ho-hum as Corel's (though that streak seems likely to end with the dramatically revised version of Office due this year). But Microsoft can at least point to its near-monopoly market share to justify its apathy. What's Corel's excuse?

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