Microsoft Office might be the 800-pound gorilla of general productivity applications, but it’s not quite the only ape in town: Corel Corporation took the wraps off its Corel WordPerfect Office X3 productivity suite today, sharpening up its word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications with new features, stronger compatibility with Microsoft Office, and a new email client called WordPerfect Mail.
Available in Standard, Home, and Professional Editions, WordPerfect Office X3 consists of WordPerfect X3 for word processing, Quattro Pro X3 for spreadsheet work, and Presentations X3 for (you guessed it) multimedia presentations. The Standard Edition ships with WordPerfect Mail, a brand-new email client, and Presentation Graphics, an extension of Corel’s long-standing stock clip-art and photography offerings. The Home Edition also features Corel Photo Album, Pinnacle Studio SE, Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD LE v8, Norton Internet Security 2006, and two WordPerfect Template Packs (Personal Finance plus Home and School Essentials). The Professional Edition includes everything in the standard edition plus the relational database Paradox, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, plus an SDK (with full file format specs) plus guides to macro programming, VBA, and network deployment.
A separate Student and Teacher edition is available for non-profit and educational customers, and includes WordPerfect X3, Quattro Pro X3, and Paradox.
New features in the suite include the capability to publish directly to PDF files, enhanced compatibility with Microsoft Office document formats, an updated user interface (customizable via a Workspace Manager which can also emulate Microsoft Word modes), a “Save without Metadata” feature to ensure no confidential or private data is invisibly sent out with your files, and online integration with Yahoo Search. WordPerfect Mail offers email, calendar, and contract management along with RSS capabilities and a “lightning-fast” search. Other enhancements include a Paste Without Formatting command, improved Word Count capabilities, the capability to print and view documents from within a Web browser, improved reporting and charting tools, and a two-hour training CD from lynda.com.
WordPerfect Office X3 Standard Edition is priced at $159.99. The Home Edition is $79.99, the Student and Teacher Edition is $99.99, and the Professional Edition starts at $259.99, with volume and site licensing options available.
Corel also announced CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3, an update to its graphics and rendering applications, will be available in February 2006
