Customer Reviews

WordPerfect Office X3 Professional [OLD VERSION]

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I recently loaded the one month demo version of Corel WordPerfect Office X3. The main changes appear to be improved compatibility with other software. In addition, Corel changed the skin to make it look more like XP, added a Yahoo toolbar, and for those who need it, the WordCount feature is on the application bar at the bottom of the WordPerfect window. This new version appears to be very stable. My main complaint about the suite is that Corel after WordPerfect 10, Corel took out Quick View Plus, a very useful piece of software which would let you look at just about anything.

I don't have much use for anything in the suite except WordPerfect. I've been using WordPerfect since before Windows, when it had a blue screen, displayed ASCII characters in Courier font (there were no fonts except Courier), and laser printers cost a small fortune. I work for a number of attorneys -- WordPerfect is the software of choice for wordprocessing in most offices I've worked in because, in my opinion, it is the better product for the job. It may also be because WordPerfect has been around for so long that everyone just migrated without changing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

When WordPerfect came out, it took over the market. (It was far superior to the software then available, and remains one of the best.) When MicroSoft came out with Word, I had the feeling they did everything they could to make it different from WordPerfect just to use their power in the industry to take over the wordprocessing market, just like MicroSoft did with every other good software idea to come along. (e.g., Mozilla/Netscape, Norton Utilities.) I hate Microsoft's stupid animated paperclip -- it makes me feel like a 7 year old. "It looks like your writing a letter ..." Go away! It was amusing to watch it roll itself up and spit itself through some imaginary pinch rollers when you print a document. But only once. I want to tell MicroSoft to wrap that annoying the paperclip around their cable modems!! I'm an adult!

I have two versions of Word and WordPerfect 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 and now X3. I use the MicroSoft product only when absolutely necessary -- usually because someone else sends me a document in that format. If possible, I will use WordPerfect and save it as a Word document using the "SAVE AS" feature on the "file" pull down menu.

In my experience, Word does one thing better than WordPerfect - it works better (although not perfectly) with WEB pages. It would be nice if WordPerfect went to the Web and got the pictures and had the resulting document look like the web page being pasted in. HEAR THAT COREL!?! However, I don't often copy entire web pages into my documents. (In a perfect world ...)

The reason I like WordPerfect so much is that it types more like a typewriter. You can set up and use styles if you want, but you can also just hit the tab button to indent the first line of a paragraph. If you want to change the margins for the entire document, you simply change the margins. The rest of the document follows the change. You don't have to change each paragraph.

In addition, you can get to the formatting codes. Hit Alt-F3 and the screen splits in half and displays all of the format codes -- bold, underline, tabs, indent codes, line spacing, column on and off, etc. Then you know exactly what you have done and fix and format it easily. This ability has proven useful on several occasions when clients, who insist on using Word for legal documents, cannot cajole Word to put their unruly documents into the format they want. (This is particularly true when using OCR with scanned or faxed documents.) By opening the Word document in WordPerfect, I have been able to use "Alt-F3" to identify the errant codes and quickly repair them. WordPerfect can then save the document in Word/RTF format with the problems fixed. This is particularly useful when combined with the global search and replace. For example, you can search and replace all [paragraph style] and end up with a manageable document.

Working with columns is also easier. You turn on columns and tell it how many colums you want, set the width of each, and the space between them, and away you go. You have four types of columns to work with -- newspaper, balanced newspaper, parallel and parallel with block protect. I've tried the other software, and if you change text or printers, you can never get the columns to line up the way you want it. With Word, each colum change or page change seems to introduce a whole new set of control codes, and a complete set of formatting, and you can never get it back the way you want it. I once tried to scan in a list of names and addresses which were in two or three columns into Word. Each name and address was placed in its own text box. I could never work with it.

Another very important feature is the ability to view a document from the "open document" screen without having to actually open up the document. This way, if you are searching for a specific document or a document containing certain specific information or "language" you need, you don't have to serially open a document, close it, open another document, and so on until you find the one you want. This is particularly powerful when combined with the "find document" feature on the "open document" screen. Using the find button opens a screen which is similar to the windows "search" screen. You can type in a series of words, and WordPerfect will search all files on the hard drive or in the folder/subfolders in which you are working for all documents containing your target search terms. You can then scroll through and look at each document to quickly determine their contents. From the "find" screen, you can access the "quickfinder" program which pre-scans folders on the computer so that searching for documents is nearly instantaneous. Just tonight I needed to find a "Declaration re Ex Parte Notice" to use as a template from amoung thousands of documents. The entire search took perhaps half a minute.

The most prominent change between WP 10 and 12/X3 is the workspace manager which allows you to switch between legal mode, original (classic) WordPerfect 5.1 mode (with the blue screen), legal mode, standard WordPerfect for Windows mode and Word mode. They have also included and upgraded the ability to publish to Adobe PDF, HTML, and RTF/Word formats.

This is full featured software, and does everything I need. It handles tables, tables of content, tables of authorities, column sorts -- everything I need in a law office. Graphics can be dropped in with a click of the mouse. I'm considered to be almost an expert, and there is a lot I don't know!

One of the great advantages of WordPerfect is that the files are much smaller than Word documents. This means you can transport them on floppy drives.

As a final thought, Word works very well for short documents such as business letters. If you do anything over several pages, you are much better off with WordPerfect.

Take time to get to know the software and you'll be glad you purchased it.

I like Word Perfect and the seller, getgamznow, had a good price. Unfortunately, it was shipped in a factory sealed package without the system disk. So, getwamznow sent me another. But the serial number didn't work. When I e-mailed them, rather than mess with it, they just refunded all of my money, including shipping.
That's how to take care of customers with a problem. If you can't fix it, give them their money back. You can bet that the next time I buy from an Amazon seller and one of the choices is getgamznow, that's who is going to get my business.

I got stuck on Paradox way back in the dark ages, when Access was too expensive and too complex for a normal mind. At that time Paradox was owned by Delphi, who took good care of it, while Corel had the leading office software.
Corel picked up Paradox to complete the suite, then quit paying any attention to it, focusing instead on bells, whistles, templates and graphics for their suite.
I used WP Office (now X3) exclusively for about 18 years with constant frustration. (Calls to support often ended with "yes, it's a bug. Tech knows about it, but they aren't going to do anything.")

New roll outs have resulted in a bloated product which plays poorly with others, focused on web issues rather than real productivity, loaded more templates and graphics. Corel interacts poorly with windows especially in issues such as address book and merges, file interaction, etc.

X3, like all other Corel products, is presumptuous, inserting extra icons outside of the Start>Program succession. As a desktop neat freak, I find this particularly annoying.

One good thing that Corel does is to save files as PDF, but there are other programs for that, but you will not be able to edit existing PDF files. (That's their entire purpose.) Corel can save files as Microsoft or RTF documents, but with considerable format corruption. Word Perfect documents require users of other platforms to install conversion engines, which means that WP documents are poor choices for anyone who converses via the Internet. At last count, Mac users could not open the files.
Files saved to a Word .doc insist on opening in Corel rather than word, despite the .doc extension.

As for web publishing, you can do simple web work on both Corel and Microsoft Word (or more complex, if you desire), but both suites leave a lot of messy, gratuitous proprietary code on the pages, which messes up presentation. Front Page or another web presentation software would be preferable.

Without overly loving Microsoft, my long term experience is that they have given much attention to making Office function better. Since this is the gold standard of productivity suites, I would council anyone setting up an office or seeking a word processor to start at the accepted center rather than investing in a somewhat cheaper product with a questionable future.

The only reason to put more money into WP Office Pro is to get the database program, Paradox. While I have this program just where I want it, and it is very useful to me, it also has bugs which I have learned to live with. The general Paradox user community is shrinking, and there are valid questions about the future of the product, the most interesting being that Delphi will buy it back or it could be taken by Sun or Microsoft. It is unfortunately not possible to completely transfer a Paradox file with embedded documents to FileMaker or Windows (otherwise a simple ascii transfer process). Again, anyone beginning a database project with pictures, etc would be well advised to start with Access or FileMaker (or SAP, Oracle, etc.)

Every so often CD Net touts WP as the budget alternative to MS Word. It's not. Unless you are painted into the Paradox corner, get MS Office. It just works better.