WordPerfect-ly Impressive

WordPerfect Office X3 is Corel’s latest in a long line of suites. We grabbed a copy of it in the GCN Lab and were not disappointed.

File conversion and compatibility have improved greatly. A long-time feature of WordPerfect has been robust Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format publishing, but for the first time you can create a PDF from its spreadsheet, Quattro Pro X3. And the Publish to PDF feature of Presentations is better, allowing you to set a bookmark at every slide.

Another area in which WordPerfect Office has always excelled is compatibility with its competitors. X3 allows you to open many different document formats and provides interfaces that resemble WordPerfect’s competitors’ so you don’t have to learn another suite. When you start WordPerfect X3, a pop-up window gives you a choice between four interface modes: WordPerfect Mode, Microsoft Word Mode, WordPerfect Classic Mode (version 5.1) and WordPerfect Legal Mode. Although we looked at all four, we focused on WordPerfect Mode.

The WordPerfect X3 interface is similar to the prior version’s, with nine menus and the toolbars arrayed at the top. If anything, we thought there were too many menu items in the default configuration, making it difficult to find the one thing we needed. You can change this by going into Settings and editing each item of each menu until it’s the way you want it. So while the actual interface has not improved significantly, WordPerfect X3 has definitely improved the level of customization.

Document scrubbing, or removing metadata before saving, is definitely a hot topic among users nowadays. Fortunately, WordPerfect X3 addresses it. There’s a “Save Without Metadata ...” option right below the “Save As ...” command, so starting the process is painless and easy. A window then opens with the file name and check boxes to indicate the types of metadata you’d like to remove. From headers/footers to routing slips to comments, you can choose which are kept and which are stripped out.

WordPerfect expands on its already impressive level of file compatibility in a couple of ways. First the “Save As ...” window gives you the option to save a document in any one of 77 formats, including five versions of AmiPro and three versions of XyWrite III. Basically, if a word processing program still exists in the world, WordPerfect X3 can export to it.

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