
It's a superior tool to competitors such as Zoho or Google. Presentations X4 will get the job done for creating a slide show. Corel's similar, new Visual intelligence features-which we did not test-are meant to make it easier for business users to analyze data patterns through charts and color coding.

We found Microsoft Excel 2007's data-analysis improvements among the best reasons for an Office user to upgrade. Microsoft Excels' Pivot Tables and other intelligent features feel more intuitive and rich. It's one of the heartier Excel alternatives, and in our limited tests we found it to be easily compatible with Excel spreadsheets. Quattro Pro is a fine spreadsheet application that handles loads of formulas, builds attractive charts, and can create professional-looking reports. We had to open the document in Microsoft Word, then cut and paste it back into WordPerfect to keep using Corel's application. Instead, in several attempts, we selected various versions of Microsoft Word to no avail. With its touted support for more than 60 file formats, WordPerfect X4 should have figured this one out. WordPerfect wouldn't let us back into the DOC file, claiming that it needed to convert the format and then giving us a list of several dozen options. We were extremely frustrated when opening a WPD file hid the DOC file we were composing.

Unfortunately, we found it hard to manage multiple open documents, which appear under the File menu, and you can't flip between document open within an application using the CTRL-Tab shortcut. Luckily, we were able to cancel the action without losing our work.


We also panicked when hurried typing led us inadvertently to hammer out a keyboard shortcut designed to configure PerfectExpert Projects. When we accidentally highlighted huge chunks of text, it wasn't as easy to let go as in Word. This also happened while running in Word mode. For instance, when we used the down arrow to move to a blank line, the cursor sometimes appeared in the center rather than on the left margin. To get started on a slide show, Presentations offers many helpful templates, including those designed for specific purposes.Īs regular users of Word and Google Docs, we found that minor behaviors in WordPerfect were hard to get used to.
