It's been easy to write off WordPerfect and the PerfectOffice suite in light of the marketplace domination of their competition from Microsoft. Since Novell sold the one-time market-leading WordPerfect to Corel Corp., you can't even buy it as a standalone retail product.
But that hardly means WordPerfect is dead. The impressive new 32-bit WordPerfect 7 now serves as the anchor for the renamed Corel WordPerfect Suite 7. The word processor and its suitemates offer a solid set of features, and are more Internet-ready and better integrated than their Microsoft counterparts.
Core Applications
Besides the word processor, the other core applications in Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 are new versions of the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and Presentations presentation graphics programms. Other suite members include Dashboard, a Windows shell enhancer; Envoy, a portable document creator and viewer; CorelFlow, a flowcharting programme; and Sidekick, a popular PIM. By the time you read this, Corel should also have released Corel Office Professional ($822), which adds the Paradox database application and the GroupWise e-mail client.
WordPerfect
In this upgrade, WordPerfect catches up in small but handy areas in which it previously lagged behind Word. For example, it now automatically converts words to the correct capitalisation. Its Spell-As-You-Go capability flags words if they aren't in the programm's dictionary, while the QuickCorrect feature fixes misspelled words as you type. You can change margins, even in draft mode, simply by dragging onscreen guidelines.
As with previous versions, WordPerfect has more thorough typographical controls than Word, including more character-spacing options. Its Make It Fit feature automatically shrinks or lengthens documents to fit on a specified number of pages. The programme still has powerful file-management capabilities that let you perform functions such as copying and deleting folders and files from the Open dialog box. Its search capabilities remain easier to use than Word's.
WordPerfect's elegant extras streamline many operations. For example, when you position your mouse pointer over a paragraph or graphic, a QuickSpot button appears beside it. If you click on that button, a dialog box appears providing extensive formatting capabilities. This saves time, since you no longer must dive into the menus for these functions.
