Corel has decided that we all need to get along, and in doing so, its share of the word processor and office application market should thrive, or so the theory goes.

A beta has been released of the Office X3 system, which allows users to open and save files in both the latest Microsoft formats, but also the Open Document formats. Hedging its bets? Sure. Successful? Perhaps.

Corel seems to be the forgotten giant, as many tend to forget that Word Perfect, its word processing application, once owned the market. Word Perfect did things that Microsoft apparently did not think were necessary, or desired. It was the darling of the law profession, handling formatting for legal documents with aplomb, where the same things were difficult, if not completely impossible to do with Word.

Corel has done this before, allowing the user to decide which interface they would use, from the newest graphical interface choice for Windows, to the old familiar blue screen of the DOS versions of Word Perfect. This alone should have made the applications more popular than they currently are.

The open document format was created by many, and Corel was part of that effort, so it does seem natural that the company would allow interoperability with the other applications using that format.

The beta does little other than adding the format changes, as Office X3 has not been available in its current incarnation long. The changes, along with the growing dissatisfaction with the ribbon interface of MS Office 2007, just may allow Corel and Word Perfect to make a comeback.

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Tags: corel, word perfect, quattro pro, odf, office x3, format wars, ooxml