by Graeme Bennett
Product: WordPerfect Suite 7
Requires: Windows 95
From: Corel
Neither WordPerfect nor Corel were ever accused of being slouches in the features department. In many areas, the WordPerfect Suite closely parallels Microsoft Office, with a top-notch word processor, spreadsheet, scheduler, presentation package and other business tools. As is typical with Corel offerings, the product goes somewhat over the top in terms of value-adding extras (would you believe 10,000 clipart images and 150 fonts, plus a selection of added utilities including Sidekick, QuickView Plus and Dashboard 95), but these extras are not the best reason to choose the package. After all, features are worthless if their usability is lacking. In general, this package succeeds admirably on the usability front. In the inevitable comparisons with Microsoft's Office suite, we would have to give the nod to Corel for a somewhat more elegant approach to common tasks.
For example, Microsoft Office uses a standalone taskbar, while Corel's suite uses the existing Win95 taskbar. While the advantage of having a second bar is the user's greater freedom to move the bar around the screen to a suitable position, using the standard Win95 taskbar interface seems a good choice to us, despite this reviewer's personal dislike of the look of a taskbar littered with nearly a dozen tiny icons.
Similarly, Corel's inclusion of Starfish Software's SideKick 95 makes it a handy tool for anyone who needs to keep track of appointments, contacts and to-do lists. Although Sidekick 95 strikes us as a little sluggish, it is undoubtedly a better interface than that of Schedule 95.
The main attraction of WordPerfect Suite is, of course, its word processing prowess, and here we were quite delighted to find that the program is elegant and powerful. We have used virtually every version of WordPerfect over the years (including the little-seen Atari and Amiga versions that were the company's initial forays into the WYSIWYG arena), and it's safe to say that WordPerfect 7 is the easiest and most versatile version yet. The program has exceptionally strong Help (including multimedia tutorials that feature recorded audio and animated how-to sessions), plus an improved version of the feature, formerly known as Coaches, that walks you through common tasks, or alternately performs them for you.
WP7 has strong links to the World Wide Web, and we were able to use it as a WYSIWYG Web page editor without reading the manual, simply by using one of the "Do it for me" Wizards in the Help menu.
Unlike some programs (PageMaker 6 comes to mind), WP7's "Web mode" disables all features that wouldn't translate properly to hypertext markup language (HTML), so pages are likely to display as intended, once posted onto the Net.
Another interesting feature is the program's emphasis on accessing online information. A Taskbar function called QuickTasks includes an option to "Read my Web Pages." This opens a Wizard-driven dialog that lets you add or remove pages of news, stock prices, comics or other information (several are provided) and read the data.
Converting information from HTML is not as common as converting to it, but both are possible in WP7.
There's even a Browse Connect function in the taskbar that displays a list of your Web browser's Bookmarks. When clicked, it launched our Netscape browser.
Flaws in the ointment
Right-clicking the mouse button on the Win95 desktop produces the "New..." submenu, to which the Corel software has added several blank document templates, including WordPerfect 7 Document. The only trouble is, it didn't work on our test system. Instead, we received an error message advising us that "...the system cannot find the file specified." Other Corel templates worked as expected.
While we are the first to admit that a Windows 95 system with Inso QuickView Plus (included with Corel WordPerfect Suite) is a great improvement over one with the somewhat crippled version included with Windows 95, we found a few problems and limitations with the utility. You see, the version of QuickView included with Win95 lets users view BMP, Word, text and a few other file types directly from Windows, without requiring a separate program. QuickView Plus expands Windows 95's file-previewing abilities to encompass several dozen types of files, ranging from graphics (GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and so on) to the most popular spreadsheet and word processor formats (including, of course, every variation of WordPerfect document).
We found a few of the viewers a bit lacking, specifically:
They don't support the full GIF standard.
For example, now-common animated GIFs generated an error message in our tests.
HTML files with anything other than the <HTML> tag at the beginning of the file were displayed as tagged text, rather than proper formatting. QuickView Plus correctly displayed basic HTML tags and some "Netscapisms," such as the CENTER tag and tables, but didn't support numerous other recent HTML enhancements. Still, this was a handy feature that worked well on most HTML files.
There was no PDF (Acrobat) support.
Progressive JPEG was not supported.
As well, we found the QuickView Plus interface to be a little clumsier than that of Adobe File Utilities, which performs a similar set of functions.
Nevertheless, QuickView Plus is a great bonus to be included in Corel WordPerfect Suite 7. Of all the package's features, we anticipate the average user will find QuickView Plus to be the most often used. (A time-limited version of QuickView Plus is downloadable from www.inso.com.)
Conclusion
In our tests on a P100 with 16 MB RAM, performance was good, and the package's value is undeniable. It seems safe to say that Corel has at least a fighting chance at succeeding in making WordPerfect once again a serious contender in the office-suite market. Although we wouldn't have expected it, WordPerfect Suite 7 is superior in enough ways that Microsoft had better watch its back. Corel has a winner here.