Friends, a Great preliminary review from PC Week for WP Suite 8 Beta 2:
For those who don't have the time to read it, here is a REAL quote from the review: "Judging from the beta, Corel's upcoming suite is poised to give both Microsoft's Office 97 and Lotus Development Corp.'s SmartSuite 97 a run for their money."
PIM a plus in Corel Suite
Beta tests find CorelCentral will unite WordPerfect Suite 8
By Herb Bethoney
A new PIM that will be fortified with Netscape Communications Corp.'s Communicator suite of Internet-integrated groupware is shaping up as the best thing about Corel Corp.'s WordPerfect Suite 8.
In the same way that Outlook anchors Microsoft Corp.'s Office 97 suite, the CorelCentral personal information manager will become the hub around which the other applications in the suite revolve. It replaces the company's InfoCentral PIM application.
PC Week Labs was unable to test the full capabilities of the still incomplete CorelCentral in the suite's Beta 2 version released earlier this month, but what we saw, we liked.
Judging from the beta, Corel's upcoming suite is poised to give both Microsoft's Office 97 and Lotus Development Corp.'s SmartSuite 97 a run for their money. In addition to the pivotal new PIM, Corel's suite showed better integration between its applications and broader support for the Web in PC Week Labs' tests.
Expected to ship in June for $299 ($129 for upgrades), WordPerfect Suite 8 will include the WordPerfect 8 word processor, Quattro Pro 8 spreadsheet and Presentations 8 graphics presentation software. The company also will continue its practice of bundling a wide assortment of drawing tools, clip art and fonts with the suite. Corel expects to ship the CorelCentral PIM, along with Communicator, in July, at no charge to WordPerfect 8 purchasers.
The suite only runs under Windows 95 and Windows NT. As is true of competing suites, it takes up a large chunk of a user's hard drive; the beta version occupied about 170MB.
Corel will ship a Professional version of WordPerfect Suite in August; prices for that release have not been set. The Professional version will add updated versions of the company's Paradox database, Web.SiteBuilder Web page authoring tool and TimeLine project manager.
Despite a cursor that hopped around the screen like a crazed circus flea whenever we accessed menu commands, the beta version of the suite was stable during PC Week Labs' tests and crashed only once.
More than just a PIM
The CorelCentral PIM combines the features of a PIM and an E-mail and groupware client by integrating the full-featured Address Book with which Corel users are already familiar and Netscape's Communicator suite.
Available from within each of the suite's applications, CorelCentral's Address Book will supply contact information for everything from performing mail merges and sending E-mail to implementing telephony services such as speed dialing and caller ID.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, Corel will provide suitewide messaging, conferencing and groupware capabilities through Netscape's Communicator client applications, including the Navigator 4.0 Web browser and the Messenger, Conferencing, Composer and Collabra clients. (This is similar to Lotus' approach of providing groupware features in SmartSuite 97 through tight connections to Notes.)
In addition, WordPerfect Suite 8 users will be able to publish documents and calendars to the Web using Corel's Barista technology and Netscape's Calendar client, respectively.
An improved help system called PerfectExpert will be available throughout the suite. Less eye-catching than Office 97's Office Assistant help, PerfectExpert was nonetheless just as capable in PC Week Labs' tests.
Improvements to WordPerfect make the word processor easier to use and include new Web and SGML capabilities. WordPerfect 8 has two cursors now: the usual blinking cursor found at the point where text is entered and a new, gray Shadow cursor that follows the mouse's arrow cursor.
By clicking anywhere in a document where we saw the Shadow cursor, we could move instantly to that point. The Shadow cursor proved especially valuable for moving the cursor quickly into blank areas of a document.
WordPerfect 8's Application bar, located at the bottom of each document's window, saved us considerable time by letting us quickly see all open documents without having to use a menu. In addition, we could add page numbers and the date, as well as change font attributes with a click of the mouse.
SGML capabilities for creating structured documents will be boosted in WordPerfect with the addition of a new graphical view of a document's structure, which we found convenient for locating and correcting structural errors.
Improvements in Quattro Pro 8 include in-cell editing and an extensive cell formatting dialog box that we could bring up with one click of the right mouse button.
In Paradox 8, the new SQL query builder made it easy to create queries to SQL databases. In addition, we could publish forms and tables to the Web as either dynamic or static documents.
The Web.SiteBuilder tool coming in the Professional version of WordPerfect Suite 8 is similar to Netscape's Composer in its capabilities; it's only suited for quick editing of HTML pages.
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Help system skips cuteness, proves competent
PerfectExpert, the revamped help system coming in the next version of Corel Corp.'s suite of office applications, isn't much to look at but gets right down to business.
Unlike the cleverly animated Office Assistant in Microsoft Corp.'s Office 97 suite, which scoots about the screen as anything from a white-haired wizard to a bushy-eyebrowed paper clip, Corel's PerfectExpert stays away from cuteness and stays in one place (a window docked on the left or right side of the screen) once it's been summoned.
PerfectExpert is no slouch, however; it consolidates several help features that are scattered about in the current version of the suite. For example, macros (which Corel calls QuickTasks), templates, Coach wizards and online help all will be easily accessible from the PerfectExpert window.
PC Week Labs found PerfectExpert's context-sensitive tips and wizards especially helpful when testing some of the more complex features in the latest beta version of Corel's suite.
For example, when we used the Presentations 8 application to create a slide-show presentation, clicking on the Publish button in PerfectExpert guided us through every step until the presentation was published on the Web.
Summary: Corel's forthcoming update to its suite of office applications, WordPerfect Suite 8, will be even easier to use, the applications better integrated and each component well-connected to the Web. In testing the latest beta, PC Week Labs found that the full-featured PIM and its inclusion of Netscape's Communicator suite for groupware functions will be the highlight of the new release when it ships in the summer.
Skye |
