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Corel Word Perfect 2000
By Anurag Phadke <cbca@mantraonline.com>
Corel Word Perfect 2000 Office tools form the core job of an average person's computer usage. One of the basic reasons why people preferred Windows to Linux was the availability of an excellent office suite in form of MS Office 2000. With bigwigs such as Corel showing great interest in taming the Penguin, the scenario is fast changing. First it was Corel Linux (the OS) and now it is Word Perfect Office 2000. A first hand look is all what is required to get hooked to it. A Word Processor, Presentation, Database Management software all makes an impressive ingredient list. The installation job however is a bit tedious and might ruin one's appetite. Installation Blues The Happy Part There's not much difference in the looks as compared to its counterpart MS Office 97. The menus are in the same position, the short cut keys perform the same operations, there are macros, insert clip art buttons, variety of fonts, sizes and almost everything that one has seen in the Windows counter part. The CD Drive has to be manually mounted each time if you have used the minimal install option or preferred to save space by using clipart CD option in place of downloading it on the hard disk. So if your OS doesn't support the auto boot option you need to do some self-service. All the windows short cut keys have remained the same. There's Ctrl-S for saving files, Ctrl-Z for "Undo". This proves practically the efforts that have been put up by the Corel Software Team in developing the product on the lines of the Windows version. Problems arise when we wanted to use the formatting tool as it suffered from some serious flaws. After highlighting a particular sentence when we tried to use the 'Caption' mode nothing happened. Then we tried changing it to Heading 1 mode. Not only did the entire line have a different look, but also the entire para was formatted to Heading 1 mode. Pretty dumb! The spell-check feature is impressive though. A small menu drop box in the upper right hand side of the screen will show the nearest matching word for the typo. Type 1 Fonts pave the way in. Though these fonts are impressive, Windows users will still miss the popular names of the like of Times New Roman or Courier New. Addition of Auto Scroll feature is also a good bet. But just moving the scroll wheel won't suffice. One first needs to press the wheel and then rotate it in the desired direction. Make a small mistake and there's help available at hand. The PerfectExpert explains as to how to go about the various features. There's even a topic on Microsoft Word Help in HTML format that explains the basic how-to's in making the suite design on par with MS Office. Sound effects also liven up the environment. If you don't have a soundcard then the PC speaker occasionally beeps itself. The entire package comes with 2 CD-ROMS, a recovery floppy and two manuals. The second manual shows the entire clipart collection on paper while the first one explains on how to install and use Corel WordPerfect. However the manual leaves much to be desired. Dependancy problems are not even mentioned in the book. The basic part of installing the suite is itself wrong. The manual mentions that one needs to type "setup" to install while the real way to install is to type "./setup". Depend on the manual only to know the basic features of Corel but for troubleshooting, this book is a piece of junk. Email-id's written in the book took a fairly long time to respond and some of them did not care to follow up after a couple of replies. Star Office is yet another player in this office warfare. Both Corel and Star Office offer same functionality with different appearances. Star Office scores a lot better over Corel when it comes to installing. The Setup screen shows the amount of disk space required and also gives the option of installing in a different directory. Plus the suite can be started with zero reboots. Like previous versions, one still cannot import Corel Documents into Star Office and vice-versa. This is quite confusing since both the software run on Linux and yet compatibility issues keep popping up. Documents saved in MS Word Format can be imported without much hassle. A full Star Office Install consumes around 270MB space. Comparing on a one to one basis, the absence of a wide variety of clip art gallery and slow loading time gives Corel the upper hand. To start Star Office the usual "./soffice" command needs to be typed. This might bug some users as Corel makes it's own icons in the "Applications" menu making it simpler to start and use. To summarize, both the suites are similar to MS Office and are leaves of the same tree. Each one is winner in its own way. When it comes to choosing between the two suites if you don't mind the installation hassles, Corel WordPerfect 2000 is a smart choice. Product Reviewed: Corel Word Perfect Office 2000. Specs of the machine on which the suite was tested: PIII 500 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 4MB Matrox MGA Display Card.
Other articles by Anurag Phadke
Current Rating: [ 5.22 / 10 ]
Number of Times Rated: [ 158 ]
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