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Reading the computing presses, one could be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft's got the market fairly well sewn up with its highly successful Office suite of Windows business software. But what of its rivals?
Journalistic curiosity aroused, we decided to take a look at Corel's WordPerfect 7 Suite. Canadian based Corel Corporation took the product over from networking giant Novell, back in January '96 at a cost of £18 million in cash, linked to a complex share deal and licensing arrangement.
Nicely packaged on CD ROM and promising a whole host of wonderful enhancements, including Internet publishing, I was itching to rip open the packet and give this latest all-32-bit word processing and office suite a whirl.
Then we hit a snag - it won't work under the new Windows NT. This seems an astonishing omission, since NT is the latest Windows 32 bit operating system, and even very old versions 16 bit Microsoft Word and WordPerfect will run quite happily on NT.
Heavy on hardware, the full installation of WordPerfect Suite gobbles up some 220 MB of hard disk space, though you may run it from the CD ROM by installing a mere 10 MB, but only if you are prepared to work at a snail's pace. Installation takes about an hour, more than twice as long as Microsoft Office on the same machine.
Hunting around the office trying to find a machine still running Windows 95, we were forced to enlist the services of a mid market laptop PC for the bulk of our tests. This machine, a 486 with 12 MB RAM runs Microsoft Office 95 at a fairly pedestrian speed, loading Word for Windows 7 in about 20 seconds. We were staggered to find Corel's WordPerfect, takes over two minutes - six times as long - just to load.
Then typing the first few words, there was a further 10 second's delay before the letters appeared on screen. It got faster after the first sentence, revealing a host of nice features including a check-as-you-go type spell checker, and a device called a PowerBar which invokes a series of tiny pop ups to change text colour and alignment, table insertion and magnification.
The rest of the word processor part bears a remarkable resemblance to the Microsoft product. It will even open and save Word for Windows files, using its automatic file conversion system. However, some complex Word documents can get a bit scrambled in the process! It will also handle early WordPerfect and Lotus Ami Pro documents.
Its 10,000 strong clipart gallery is superb and includes a collection of excellent photographs as well as a good library of WordPerfect graphics files. Most impressive is the ease with which you can convert a WordPerfect document into an Internet page.
Included with the Suite is Corel Presentations. Similar to Microsoft Powerpoint, it enables you to convert WordPerfect documents into an impressive looking series of slides, ready to win that special contract..
Indeed, the entire WordPerfect suite looks very pretty, showing the design flair for which Corel is famed. It is aimed at users who want to present their work elegantly, and is packed with tools to help you do so. Boasting spreadsheet and database capabilities, Quatro Pro included with WordPerfect Suite is very similar to Excel - the spreadsheet bundled with Microsoft Office.
Retailing currently some very good looking work. You need a very powerful PC to run it, and until an NT version becomes available, you're stuck with Windows 95.
