Corel Keeps On Truckin’

Stubbornly refusing to give in to the wretched excess that is the ‘ribbon interface’ and yet offering compatibility with the Office formats, Corel releases another revision of its office productivity suite. This set of programs has been in more hands than the car-exiting pictures of Britney Spears, yet it manages to keep fairly well integrated, and continues the good fight against total Microsoft Office domination.

The basis of the effort, WordPerfect, continues to get better, and still is better than Word for complex formatting of text documents. The other parts of the suite, gathered mostly from Borland, by way of Novell, still lags behind the Microsoft offerings, but only a little - and remain much more straight forward to deal with than the applications they battle with from Microsoft.

The Lightning product will not put the smackdown to One Note anytime soon, but continues to get better (and for those who wish to try it, there is still a totally free version, recently updated).

For business users, there is a new database, noted to be better than Quattro Pro, for large databases - although note that Quattro Pro is still included. I find Quattro Pro very comforting, as it tends to work like dBase products from Borland used to, and I’ve never cared for Access.

So - while it will never wipe out MS Office, and for the greatest number of people, Star or Open Office will do nicely, those that prefer to have the quality of WordPerfect (or are writing a large book or other tome) this is a welcome addition to the market!

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Quote of the day:
All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. - Sean O’Casey

Tags: corel, quattro pro, wordperfect, lightning, borland, novell