Corel Wordperfect Office 12 Standard Upgrade Description:

Corel Wordperfect Office 12 Standard Upgrade review:
1 stars (Word is much better!) - Due to my laptop crashing I had to use a rental computer to finish my novel by the deadline. I've used word to write 3 books, magazine articles and numerous academic papers and I've always found it easy to use and understand. Wordperfect is a complete pain, the help file is useless and the text often overlaps and looks like it is a typo which makes editing on the screen a nightmare. It was impossible to instructions of formatting a document for double spacing in the help menu (it only tells you that book reports should be double spaced, but doesn't tell you how to make it do it). I will be glad to get my laptop back and go back to work in Word.
1 stars (could not reliably loads jpegs) - I upgraded from version 8 to version 12 because I could not reliably load jpeg format pictures in v. 8. All jpegs were created using Photoshop 7 but only some random subset of them will load into Wordperfect. I have the same problem with v 12. (Microsoft Word takes all jpegs with no problems.) The same problem exists whether using Windows 98 or Windows 2000 professional so it is not likely the OS. This product is of no use to me; I have again wasted $150 on Corel Wordperfect. However this was their last chance with me. I guess, long live the Microsoft monopoly.
5 stars (The better word processing program) - 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 or a green screen, displayed mostly ASCII characters, 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. 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 and 12. (I just threw out 5.2 for Windows and 7 when I moved.) I use the MicroSoft product only when absolutely necessary -- usually because someone else needs the document in that format.



In my experience, Word does one thing better than WordPerfect - it works better (although not perfectly) with WEB pages better. 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.



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.



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. It handles columns much better. 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 new 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.



The most prominent change between WP 10 and 12 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 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!



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



I recommend purchasing the stand alone student and teachers version as it contains all of the same programs at a lower cost.