WordPerfect Office 2000 Professional Edition Upgrade

Some might see this as an unfortunate abdication, but I tend to view it as a smart choice in a changing situation. In the Windows market, they clearly have been beaten by superior advertising and third-party interest in their Microsoft competitor. It is comparatively difficult, for instance, to find many books to help you unlock the full potential of Quattro. It is also hard to find many specialized spreadsheets for Quattro. This stands in stark contrast to the abundance of instructional materials, plug-ins, and function-specific spreadsheets available for Excel.

Happily, this is not the case with Paradox, the included relational database, and Word Perfect. There are more than enough instructional materials around to help you become proficient in these parts of Office 2000. Both have many devoted followers, and you'll have no problem quickly getting up to speed with the largely intuitive programs.

Out-of-the-box usability is thus a mixed bag. Some parts of the package are well documented, some are obscure, but still Corel has the advantage of the superior product. They also have the advantage of having maneuvered themselves as the first Linux office software solution. And it's guaranteed to work well in Linux because Corel have developed their own Linux OS.

Plus, the Corel website is one of the best and most helpful places to be on the net. Try saying that about Microsoft's cumbersome, charge-you-around-every-corner site. When you buy a Corel product, you really do become a part of a family of other users who inhabit the ultra-friendly, ultra-useful Corel.com. Beyond that, though, Corel itself puts tons of instructional materials on its website, so you're likely to find the answers to your questions, if you're willing to do a little digging. Some with slow web connections might find this arrangement unbearable, and will logically choose Microsoft simply because they can find out how to use the software a little easier. This is an important consideration for some people, but I tend to look more for long term usability, rather than ease of initial use.

By choosing to stay in the Windows game by improving their product's portability, and by more aggressively marketing Word Perfect as _the_ Linux solution, Corel is playing a smart waiting game. Since the upgrade version of this software is less than $200 the risk you might take by joining Corel is a negligible one. It's affordable enough to be running alongside Microsoft Office, and it's hedging your bets on Linux' importance over the next decade. The more you use it, though, the more likely you are to find that you keep opening up because you actually _want_ to, not because it's a good investment.


The best Office Suite out there!   March 1, 2000
Roy Kirk Lindhardt (Ogden, Utah)
29 out of 30 found this review helpful

I don't know why every one is buying Microsoft Office. People have told me that it's easier, but, respectively, I know that's not true! Microsoft says that WordPerfect is inferior because it isn't WYSIWYG, which they say is because one "has to" use the code editing feature to make quality changes. That's a falicy, because the code editing feature is there to make it so that you can more easily see where the codes start and end and then edit them so that less memory space is taken up with codes. I made the same document in both suites and edited both the best I could after initially making it and the WordPerfect version not only looked better, but was two to three times smaller in the memory it took up. I know that hard drive space is not much of an issue today, but I would think that any conscientious business person would still find ways to save space and money and would certainly like to have better looking documents. So why not give WordPerfect Suite 2000 a chance? Microsoft may have more options but WordPerfect gives you more power to actually edit your document.