WordPerfect Office X3 Standard Upgrade [OLD VERSION]

List Price: $159.99 Discount Price: $89.00

Features:

• WordPerfect X3 for word processing
• Spreadsheet application Quattro Pro X3
• Presentations X3 for multimedia presentations.
• Includes the new WordPerfect MAIL email application
• Suite-wide PDF export capabilities enable users of Corel WordPerfect Office X3 to turn documents, spreadsheets and presentations into PDF files without additional PDF software, making sharing content via the open PDF format simple and cost-effective

Accessories:

PC World

Customer Reviews:

Corel WordPerfect beats MS Office in almost every respect [Posted on 2006-12-24]
I had to post a review after reading a couple of low ratings from users who I believe have not given the product a fair chance. I've been a WordPerfect user since about 1982 and due to my work environment, I'm fortunate enough to have just about every software package available for comparison.

In my opinion, there is simply no question that except for one area, Wordperfect is the best all-round word processor available today. The one area is in collaborative document production, but if you are not working on a team using something like Sharepoint, you probably don't care about this feature. I also qualify on "all-round" because there are a number of specialty word processors (for large document processing, foreign language handling, etc) that handle specific needs better than WordPerfect. But then you wouldn't be using Word for that either. WordPerfect has its own specialty niche--it has long been recognized as the best suited product for legal document processing.

If your only experience with a word processor has been MS-Word, you can set WP up to emulate Word's menus and commands. It will even run most Word macros (Corel licenses Microsoft's Visual Basic). If you've been a WordPerfect user, you can use the current default schemes or select from a number of "classic" WP menu structures.

To provide a couple of examples of how WP trumps Word, consider something as simple as working with letterhead--a perfectly ordinary task for almost any office. In Word, you have to divide the document into sections and unless you enjoy writing macros or making templates, you have a considerable amount of work to do in setting up the first (letterhead) page to be different from the others. In WordPerfect, all you have to do is set up the document as you want any pages additional to the first to look (with headers and footers). On the first page, select from a menu "suppress headers or footers on this page", and you're done. And if you like doing templates, creating a template based on a structure like this is a breeze.

Word and WordPerfect both do outlines. The difference is that Word outlines are easily corrupted and a nightmare to fix. One of my favorite uses for WordPerfect is opening up a Word document (often sent to me by exasperated colleagues) which has a corrupted outline (boldface that goes on forever with no way to turn it off, outline levels that cannot be returned to a normal structure, etc) and fixing the problems using WordPerfect's "display codes" feature.

For the Amazon customers that mentioned a few specific problems--the complaint about WordPerfect's new ability to import and edit .pdf files was justified based on the originally shipping version of the product. But Corel posted a service pack to fix that problem within a few days of shipping X3, so it's unfortunate that Amazon customers are continuing to see this complaint.

A couple of weeks ago I was called in by a non-profit which wanted to re-do its brochure. The only thing the office staff could find was a .pdf of the brochure. WordPerfect loaded the .pdf and allowed me to save both the graphics and the text so that the organization could re-create its brochure. I think Corel will be enhancing this feature in the future, but for now, it can still be a life-saver in the right circumstances.

Whether Corel or Microsoft, these days we all have to connect to the manufacturer's Web site and download the service packs.

For the customer who complained about some sort of 100 page limit--that sounds a problem unique to your situation. I load and edit documents that far exceed 100 pages (although I haven't done so with X3, I worked on a document that was close to 10 times that size with an earlier version). At the prices Corel charges, it can't afford to provide free support (WordPerfect was once the industry leader in free support, but price cutting has made that a dream of the distant past). But if you've ever tried to get free phone support out of Microsoft, you'll know what I mean when I say that you you might give Corel a fair chance at fixing your problem.

I've written only about the word processor, and most people would probably agree that WordPerfect is the reason to buy this software. But Quattro Pro has always had some good features and if you're not an Excel junkie, you'll probably find it to be all the spreadsheet you'll ever need. Just as one example, Quattro Pro has supported sheets as large as one million rows for many years now--you'll have to upgrade to MS Office 2007 to get that capacity in Excel. Corel Presentations has 99% of anything people care about in PowerPoint. And while we're on the subject of MS Office 2007, I'd like to mention that Corel has provided excellent XML support for many years now as well as support for Web formats that do not require Microsoft products (ie "active objects") and formats to work.

All these Corel products allow you to open and save your projects in MS formats, and while it may take a little getting used to, there is no reason you will ever have to suffer from a concern that you won't be able to share work with everyone using MS Office.

So the "bottom line" is that WordPerfect is worth the price of the full package--it beats Word in almost every area, and for that price you get some fine other software as well.

Quattro Pro X3 too buggy for words [Posted on 2006-12-29]
QPX3 cannot handle dialog box objects correctly. Oh sure, you can spend hours building a dialog box, and even test it OK, but if you try to go back and edit it some more the dreadfully misnamed Corel Application Recovery Manager (really a bug report gatherer) rears its ugly head. Even tabbing from one field to another in a dialog box will crash QPX3. And worse, any time a dialog box is on screen your CPU usage pegs at 100% until the box is closed, so even if you do manage to build something QPX3 will eat your CPU. On a laptop this just drains the battery and makes the fan kick in. There are numerous errors in the help documentation. Some are merely typos. Some things just plain don't work, such as the INDICATE macro statement, and it isn't marked obsolete like many of the other macro statements. This is a zero star program, don't waste your time.

Painfully Slow Product [Posted on 2007-01-30]
I have been a satisfied user and fan of WordPerfect since it was the leading standalone wordprocessing software. After Version 8, however, it has been a serious disappointment. If I didn't find MS Word so much to my disliking, I would have stop upgrading WordPerfect and looked for a way to convert all my old WordPerfect files when Version 9 proved such a disappointing product.

The problem is I still like the way the features of WordPerfect work. But its last three versions--9, 12 and X3--have all been incredibly and painfully slow in loading the program and its document files, printing documents, and converting documents to pdf (an otherwise great feature). Unless there are some real fixes in these areas soon, I'm going to have stop using WordPerfect. Waiting for the four functions mentioned above is just too much of a time waster. Of course, that means I'll have to convert a lot of document files to MS Word and use it often, which does not appeal to me. The way Word works is not fluid for me and very counterintuitive.

It's really a shame not to be able to recommend WordPerfect, since it has the features to be a stellar product.

Best, to Fair, but still Better [Posted on 2007-02-03]
I've used WP through many of its incarnations, and Version 8 seems to have reached its apogee (Corel Central has always been its weakest link). As a word processor, nothing is finer. It's exhaustive. It's intuitive. But after Version 8, every edition has been excessively buggy. In WP2002, for example, the Address Book would not insert the address into the document. Why? No one knows, and Corel does not care. The same edition has 1/5 the fonts of V. 8. Why? Still, for all the quibbles, I far prefer WP to MS. I update versions, but continue to use V. 8. It had problems in the XP environment, but they were easier to solve than the subsequent issues with Corel's indifference. If one is lucky, the software will work well enough. If not, aggravation may be resolved by an "open source" processor.

Note: The Personal Information Management of Corel Central is gone, replaced by an email client (outdated, but upgradable). PIMs are too valuable to omit, so one may need the Mozilla suite of software to supplement.

Sitting in the Box [Posted on 2008-02-08]
We purchased this and I upgraded my wife's computer with X3. We found the program buggy at best. Of special note was the fact that many of the documents formatted in X3 lost the pagination when opened with lower versions of the same program. In other words, if you create a document (especially exceeding 20 pages), save it and then open it with a prior version the headings may be on another page, content will be on different pages -- a big mess. My wife had me uninstall it and she reverted to the prior version.

The e-mail program that was added to this suite was worthless, so if you are considering an upgrade for this feature, forget it.

A couple of reviews pointed out that WordPerfect is becoming a mess as big as MS Office. A few years ago Microsoft purchased a major segment, if not controlling interest, in the Canadian company Corel. Maybe that's why it starting to walk like a duck.

Our X3 is sitting in a box somewhere in my wife's home office, never to see light of day again.

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