Review: WordPerfect Office Is Far From Perfect

I imported PDF files created from a variety of sources, from Acrobat to Microsoft Word and Nuance PDF Professional. The PDFs were usually close, but never exactly what they should have been, in WordPerfect. The software would often create text columns in the imported document, but they wouldn’t line up properly. It also had trouble with some embedded graphics. I had much better luck with the same files in Nuance’s PDF Converter.

And the WordPerfect’s published PDF files are on the heavy side. A 51KB PDF document I created in Nuance PDF Converter—imported and edited in WordPerfect and then republished—came out at 135KB. I had made changes, but added no new significant content.

Some of the test documents, including an IRS W-9 form, are fairly complex. The W-9 includes sideways text, many boxes, shading and other distractions for OCR. But scanning and file import were problematic even with simpler documents.

My luck was better with DOC and DOCX documents, but there were some significant problems there, too. One Word document became completely unusable inside of WordPerfect, whether it had been saved as DOC or DOCX by Word 2007. Corel said that the document used an old template that had been tweaked (which is true). This gives them problems, but they say they are getting better at these things over time.

A lot to love

Once you get past all that, there is a lot to love about WordPerfect, including the famous reveal codes feature. These days, reveal codes looks like a precursor to markup languages such as HTML, and perhaps it was a predictor of why HTML became so popular: It makes format markup so much more obvious. This feature alone, all other reservations aside, makes me consider using WordPerfect regularly.

WordPerfect Office includes a copy of Mozilla’s Thunderbird. It’s a nice mail client, but it only supports POP3 and IMAP, making it inadequate for most enterprises. Corel says they are working on MAPI support, which they will contribute back to Mozilla.

Quattro Pro X5 is the spreadsheet program and now supports reading XLSX files and publishing PDFs. I tested some fairly complex Excel spreadsheets and, while I didn’t delve into the reasons for it, it calculated different numbers than Excel did. And I know the Excel numbers are correct. Quattro Pro may be correct within limitations of conversion of which I’m unaware, but it’s still disappointing.

Presentations X5 worked well for me, reading PPTX files reasonably well.

If the bottom line on WordPerfect Office were the price then, at $159.99 (£105) for the upgrade and $249.99 (£160) for the full version, it would be a winner compared to Microsoft Office. But there’s more to these programs than price. The only really interesting part of the suite is the word processor. If you don’t like Microsoft Word, you may really like WordPerfect, but cross your fingers.