WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition review

Jeff Bertolucci CNET

Published: 23 Sep 2005

WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition combines the core features of Corel's respected WordPerfect Office 12 suite -- WordPerfect 12, Quattro Pro 12, Presentations 12 and Symantec Norton Internet Security 2005 -- with two new additions: WordPerfect Mail and Paint Shop Pro 9. The result is a powerful, feature-rich package with plenty of punch for small-business users. Even better, Corel's Small Business Edition costs less than the comparable version of Microsoft Office 2003 but offers more features. There's room for improvement, though. We'd like to see better integration among this suite's applications, including the ability to use Paint Shop Pro's powerful image-editing tools inside a WordPerfect document. And since WordPerfect Office 12 does a poor job of importing Microsoft Office files, it's not a great choice for businesses already standardised on Microsoft's suite. But for a small business or home user, WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition is an affordable, complete and reliable productivity package.

Setup & interface

Our installation of WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition took from 30 minutes to an hour -- overall, a smooth ride, aside from some speed bumps. For instance, one test PC already had a trial copy of Paint Shop Pro 9 installed, so we had to cancel the suite installation, remove the image-editing app (long past its 30-day trial period), then return to the WordPerfect Office 12 installation. On another PC, Norton Internet Security 2005 installed itself--even though the computer already had another antivirus program, McAfee VirusScan. Corel's express-installation program didn't prompt us with an offer not to install; had we thought about it, we could have opted for a custom installation and manually deselected Norton. After installation, the two virus fighters were running simultaneously, so we had to manually uninstall McAfee.

WordPerfect Office 12 performs some clever interface tricks. For instance, it can mimic the keystrokes, menus and toolbars of Microsoft Office applications -- handy for converts. Corel's Small Business Edition adds WordPerfect Mail, a well-designed email client with a familiar icons-and-toolbars layout that's straightforward to learn.

WordPerfect Office 12 also adds the new Task Manager, a job-oriented interface that provides templates for specific tasks. When you select Business Plan Presentation on the Task Manager screen, for example, the appropriate template will load inside the Presentations application. This is simple but redundant; this suite's task-based utility OfficeReady already offers dozens of templates for invoices, purchase orders, job estimates, brochures and so on. Hopefully, Corel will merge OfficeReady and Task Manager in future versions of WordPerfect Office.

Features

The £149 (inc. VAT) WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition is designed for businesses with 50 or fewer employees. Among the new components are the WordPerfect Mail email client (formerly known as Bloomba); Paint Shop Pro 9 (an image editor that Corel acquired with its purchase of Jasc Software in 2004) and the Task Manager.

This suite's core applications are powerful and popular, including Corel's first-rate WordPerfect word processor, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Presentations business slide-show maker. We find WordPerfect 12 easier to use than Microsoft Word, especially for creating long documents or tweaking complex formatting. Quattro Pro offers all the data-organising features you'll find in Excel, although some tools are named differently. And Corel Presentations' dozens of wizards make it easy to create slide shows, although it has problems displaying Microsoft PowerPoint files accurately.

We wish that Corel would provide more than a 90-day free trial of Norton Internet Security 2005; if you buy Norton separately, at retail, you'll get a one-year subscription. Still, Corel's suite costs significantly less than Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003, and the Microsoft suite lacks an image editor and a security program. If you like Corel's programs but don't need Mail, Paint Shop Pro or Norton Security, opt for the £235 (inc. VAT) WordPerfect Office 12 Standard Edition instead.

Although Corel WordPerfect 12 Small Business Edition is a bountiful bundle, it's more a collection of applications than a smoothly integrated suite. When you edit an image inside a WordPerfect document, for example, you're provided a simple set of WordPerfect paint tools instead of Paint Shop Pro's comprehensive image-manipulation toolkit. In the future, we'd like to see Paint Shop Pro better integrated with WordPerfect, Quattro Pro and Presentations.

Service & support

Corel provides free email support to registered users of WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition. Turnaround time is one business day, and Corel met that promise in our tests. Telephone support costs slightly less than for Microsoft Office 2003, but it's still expensive: $25 (~£14) per incident, three calls for $70 (~£39), or five calls for $100 (~£56).

Each application provides plenty of text-based tutorials that cover basic tasks; in WordPerfect, for instance, easy-to-follow guides describe working with footnotes, changing fonts and so on. All of the programs apart from WordPerfect Mail provide help menu links to Corel's support Web site.

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