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WordPerfect Office 2002, parts 1 and 2

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for May 24 and May 31, 2001

Note: Although originally written as one column, the following was split over two dates: May 24 and 31, 2001. I've recombined them here. mw

After a delay while Corel figured out what was wrong with the first version of the WordPerfect Office 2002 Pro suite (apparently something to do with memory management), I now have a working version to evaluate. In the first round, all of the suite components would run, except for WordPerfect 10, the suite's core word processor.

I won't bore you with the installation hassle details on the second CD the company sent, except to say that it crashed twice, but after hammering on it for a while, I can finally have a look at all of the suite's components.

However, I understand that the flawed version is what is shipping in the first round. If, once you install the suite, you discover that WordPerfect 10 won't run on your system, you'll find the patch file at www.corel.com.

Suite Success

The full list of components in the Professional Edition of the WordPerfect Office 2002 suite includes (all version 10), WordPerfect, Quattro Pro (spreadsheet), Paradox (database), Presentations (drawing and slide shows), CorelCentral (mail and calendar), and Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Both Paradox and Naturally Speaking are left out of the Standard Edition.

Utility applets in both editions include QuickView Plus (more on this later), Bitstream Font Navigator, Chart (more on this one, too, below), Text Art, an application recovery module to protect you a bit from crashes, a Web server, PerfectScript (automation language), Net2Phone (an Internet "long distance" application), Adobe Acrobat Reader, and an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) project designer tied to WordPerfect.

Corel also recently began the process of burying the hatchet with Microsoft, so there's cooperation with Redmond's Visual Basic for Applications. Unfortunately, the cooperation didn't extend as far as document conversion; you can only export to Microsoft's Office 97 components' formats (there's no mention of Office 2000).

WordPerfect 10

WordPerfect doesn't look any different on the surface and that's carried on throughout the suite; there are no major facelifts or menu changes to require extensive retraining. All document formats remain the same as the previous several versions, too.

There is little that is brand new to version 10. Instead, Corel has focused on enhancements to existing features from version 9, such as providing more preview features in real time (select text, go to change fonts, watch the text change as you scroll through the font list).

The merge function allows for more fields in a document for sending customized form letters. It's easier to select a text style, but just as confusing as ever to create one. Table cells with formulas in them are now highlighted differently so that you can tell them apart from other cells at a glance.

The ruler has larger components to make them easier to see and change.

Nothing earth-shattering. In fact, paging through Corel's detailed list of enhancements and features, I could only find three that were completely new: WP10 now contains support for digital signatures. When you convert a WP10 document to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) for use on a Web site, you can now embed custom styles in a cascading style sheet (CSS). And, when managing large, complex, multi-part documents with a master document, you can now select a range of pages, chapters, or volumes for quicker editing.

Quattro Pro 10

One of the first things you see when you check for new features in Quattro Pro 10, is the reference to AutoScroll. This feature is supposed to give you the same ability to scroll forward and sideways on a large spreadsheet as those who have Microsoft's Intellimouse (or any mouse with a scrolling wheel).

Unfortunately, while the promotional material and the "What's New" blurb on the shipping CD makes this claim, there's no instructions in the onboard help file to help you figure out how this is supposed to work, except for one vague reference to having a three-button mouse (something few current PC users have or have ever seen).

Save All and Close All aren't revolutionary file management tools, but Corel mentions them, anyway, along with the Undo feature. Here, again, there are no revolutionary new features, merely the odd catch-up to existing MS Excel features.

Still, Quattro Pro does at least one thing that Excel doesn't do and that's to allow for huge spreadsheets. And I mean huge. Any single sheet can have up to 1 million rows and 18,278 columns. Each workbook can contain up to 18,278 sheets.

Charting

I've broken charting out of the Quattro Pro 10 overview, because it's another example of marketing getting a little ahead of reality.

"Charting 10" is highlighted when you install the suite, as well as in the "What's New" files and much is made of a new feature that allows you to set varying degrees of transparency for chart series so that in a 3-D chart, tall bars (or whatever) in front of shorter chart shapes needn't be occluded.

To me, the blurbs are written and presented in such as way as to make you think that the suite's chart applet (the one that comes up if you wish to embed a chart in a WordPerfect document or Presentations slide show), will have this feature. It doesn't. Only the charting feature in Quattro Pro 10 has the Advanced Rendering module required to do the task.

And, although you can embed a Quattro Pro chart into any other document, you may be led to wasting a lot of time looking for transparency on the regular charting module without finding it.

One real enhancement in Quattro Pro is the ability to select multiple rows in a sheet, then to trigger Auto Height. Instead of setting all rows to the same height, Quattro Pro figures out the optimum height for each row separately.

Paradox 10

Like WordPerfect 10, Paradox 10 can also export HTML files with attached style sheets. And the database files are now more flexible with the added ability to store graphics in the same formats as WordPerfect (including Corel Photo-Paint .CPT, Windows Bitmap .BMP, Joint Photographic Experts Group .JPG, Graphics Interchange Format .GIF, and Windows Metafile .WMF).

Paradox 10 also now supports TWAIN so you can scan images directly into the database.

Making forms for export to other countries? Now you can embed translatable strings of text into your forms.

Presentations 10

Presentations 10 is Corel's Swiss army knife application, used for both creating slide shows and simple drawings. The drawing module certainly isn't intended to replace CorelDRAW or Photo-Paint, but there are both rudimentary vector and bitmap tools.

This is also the module you'd use to create an organization chart.

The slide show portion of the application is somewhat more sophisticated. New features include the ability to render a slide show as a Macromedia Flash .SWF file. You can also embed fonts in a presentation, which makes them easier to use on computers that may not have the same set of fonts installed as yours.

Adding sound to animations is an old trick for Microsoft PowerPoint users, but Presentations fans get this ability, too, in version 10.

It also now supports animated GIF images.

There's a viewer applet, called Show On the Go, that parallels the functions of the PowerPoint viewer so you can take a presentation on the road without having to install the full application.

Corel Central 10

Corel's answer to Outlook now has a completely re-written e-mail module not based on Novell's GroupWise. That's good.

Its main advantage may be that because it's so new, it will take awhile before the Net.Nasties find a way to exploit any security holes it may have to send you ugly things.

The biggest disadvantage is that it has no filtering. So, there's no way to automate incoming mail handling and, for example, refuse to download attachments, separate known spammers from real messages, and so on.

You can set up separate mailboxes and sort mail into folders, as well as tap into the Corel Central Address Book (which also serves the other suite modules), but Outlook Express has more functionality when it comes to automating other common e-mail tasks.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 5

I'm dictating this section using Dragon's NaturallySpeaking 5.

I've been searching my memory, and I think the last time I looked at NaturallySpeaking, it was in version 3.

From an admittedly limited half-day test of this version, I can see some vast improvement. For example, the "training" time has been cut from nearly a half-hour to five minutes. Even with that limited amount of training, the program's accuracy is significantly improved. Once you become accustomed to its shortcut commands for moving around the document, formatting text, and correcting the small inaccuracies that are inevitable when you first start using speech recognition software, you'll probably find it quite useful.

Although NaturallySpeaking 5 ships with the "Pro" version of the WordPerfect 2002 Suite, you're not restricted to using it with the suite components. It will work with other word processors, as well as with Internet Explorer, the Windows calculator, and other applications. Even if you can't get it to work with the word processor you use, it also ships with a basic word processor, called DragonPad.

And you may find DragonPad necessary. For example, I was able to dictate words and punctuation into Star Office 5.2, but text selection and formatting commands, as well as menu selection commands, didn't work properly. The same was true in my e-mail application, Eudora Pro.

Eventually, with practice, you'll be able to use it without constantly referring to its help file. However, I found it invaluable to have help constantly onscreen.

Although NaturallySpeaking 5 continues the evolution of speech recognition software, there are a couple of small things about it that are still nagging. For example, when you ask the program to create a paragraph, it automatically drops in two carriage returns and that's not an option you can change. There's no command for placing either an en-dash (-) or em-dash (—) into text.

It will also take some time, and be partially dependent on the speed of computer you have, to get comfortable with how quickly you can dictate safely. For today at least, I find myself going back to the speech rhythms I once used in a much earlier life dictating to a secretary to ensure higher accuracy. It's much slower than I can type.

Nevertheless, for people with physical disabilities or poor typing skills and those of us who need to take a break from the keyboard and mouse in order to give our wrists a rest, recent versions of applications such as NaturallySpeaking and IBM's ViaVoice Pro, are now worth serious consideration.

Other notes

It may seem as though I'm largely unimpressed by WordPerfect Office 2002 and I admit I'm a little underwhelmed by the relative lack of new features. However, I'm also aware that according to a number of surveys conducted over the years, most computer users ignore most of the features in the office productivity software they use on a daily basis.

And the components of this suite are advanced and quite capable of doing everything you need from an office productivity product.

But, once you can embed pictures, charts, and data into a document, have it checked for spelling, grammar, and (if you wish), formatting as you type, use it to set up automated forms and generate merged correspondence, there isn't a heck of a lot left to add.

In fact, the thing that most excited me about the new version of the suite is that it gave me back Inso's QuickView Plus. That may not be a biggie for you if you're still using Windows 9x or Me, because QuickView is one of the standard Windows components. But Microsoft took it out of Windows 2000 Pro and it's a feature I used several times a day. I'm pleased as punch to have it back.

It's also worth mentioning, as my colleague, Richard Morochove did a few weeks ago, that the WordPerfect Office 2002 Suite doesn't have the same type of registration requirement that later versions of Microsoft Office 2000 and the upcoming Office XP have. Corel does include nagware that will remind you to register every couple of weeks (until you find its listing in the Registry and kill it), but Corel doesn't insist.

How much?

I knew you'd ask. The Standard Edition is $599 (all prices in Canadian funds which are not shown at Corel's Web site) or $249 for an upgrade. The Professional Edition is $769 or $369 for an upgrade. To qualify for the upgrade price, you must be a registered owner of a previous version of WordPerfect (Windows or DOS 5.0 or later), CorelDRAW (version 3.0 or later), Microsoft Office (95 or later), Lotus Smart Suite (97 or later), or Paradox (version unspecified).

You can get more info at 1-800-77 COREL (772-6735) or at www.wordperfect.com.

Contacting me