If you're looking for heavy duty database power, it's not here. You'll need to raise the stakes and buy the more comprehensive Corel Office - all the same stuff, with the addtition of the Paradox 7 relational database, and the InfoCentral personal information manager. Now for the bad news. As the core product in the Corel suite, WordPerfect is the application you'll use when you want to tie a project together. here's where you'll create your dazzling reports full of charts, pictures, graphs and fancy curved headlines.
In theory, it's easy. Toolbar buttons make it simple to insert graphics, charts or on-the-spot drawings in your document. Tehre's even an icon for starting up Quattro Pro from inside WordPerfect, so you can create your spreadsheet data without switching apps. So the bad news? On our review machine kitted with a Pentium 100 with 16mb of RAM, it's painfully slow.
Loading Quattro Pro from inside a blank WordPerfect document takes a tedious 62 seconds, twice as long as a standalone load. Creating a blank Corel Presentations frame in the same empty WordPerfect document takes 51 seconds. Importing a pre-drawn graphic file is even worse, with a 27 second wait for the file requester, 36 seconds of mindless disk thrashing, and 15 seconds of wonder-if-it's-crashed nothingness adding up to a painful 78 seconds. It gets worse - if you accidentally double-click on an image or a chart while you're doing something else, you'll be subjected to the same delay again. And there's nothing you can do except sip your coffee and wait. That's true multitasking. Not.
A critical bad point of Corel Wordperfect Suite 7 is it's sluggishness compared to other suites of it's kind... occasionally the performance is extremely unbearable: Our other complaints about the suite are comparatively minor. For example, the suite's methods of helping users are so numerous that they're sometimes confusing. There are wizard-like Experts to walk you through various tasks within applications and QuickTasks you can apply to individual or multiple applications. In addition, QuickTasks sometimes launch experts. Finally, there is also a natural language query engine for the help system called Ask the PerfectExpert.
Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 offers ample proof that rumors of the death of WordPerfect and its office suite are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps it's naive to think that the quality of these products can overcome Microsoft's market domination. But WordPerfect and its suite are feature-rich, well-integrated, and Internet-savvy products that deserve your attention.
