Corel WordPerfect Law Office 2000 Upgrade

Customer Reviews:

Some Good Ideas, But Buggy & Disappointing Overall [Posted on 2001-07-19]
For loyal WP users, Corel still produces the best word processing application out there, but Version 9 that ships with WP Office 2000 is a disappointment. A new bug in the Template area -- Corel's KB states that it didn't exist in the first two builds of Ver. 9 -- requires a kludgy workaround. The Address Book doesn't convert your Ver. 8 data. In fact, the new installation leaves the old one on your system intact -- maybe the developers knew that there were going to be some de-installations with this product.

I broke down & purchased the "upgrade," after an unrelated installation hosed my address book. Version 8 users who need to reinstall components have had to do another kludge on the mapi32.dll file to maintain compatibility with IE5.x for quite some time now, a sure sign that a version is getting a bit long in the tooth, & I decided that it was no longer worth it to maintain Ver. 8. I was wrong.

Ver. 8 is much more stable & much more functional. Don't switch as long as you still have a choice!

I purchased the Law Office suite, because I expect to receive my J.D. this school year, & my full-time job in risk management already emulates in-house legal work to some degree. I haven't had a chance to explore all the extra features, but they seem useful & interesting, with the exception of Dragon Naturally Speaking, which I already had to uninstall because it was causing crashes, even though I had not yet used it.

One redesigned feature that I would really like if it were more robust is the new CorelCentral My Calendar. I have been using it instead of my old Organizer application AND my paper planner, but I haven't managed to coordinate it with my PDA yet. There are only two things I dislike.

First, leaving the Calendar running on the Desktop leaves it vulnerable to crashes in other applications that cause freezes & reboots. I've already had to run pfreg.exe TWICE in two weeks to revive it.

Second, its default docking area on the right-hand side of the screen interferes with scrolling. If other people use the scroll bar the same way I do, they park the mouse pointer on the scroll bar while reading. When you do that, the Calendar keeps popping out at you & covering what you're reading, so you constantly have to move the mouse away from there & then move it back to scroll some more. If there were a "Preferences" item or drag-and-drop to place it in another part of the Desktop either permanently or while reading, it would be a huge improvement.

I remain a loyal WP customer, but Ver. 9 reminds me of the bad old buggy days of 5.2. Corel should do better.

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