News
Corel Close to Release of WordPerfect Office 11
- By Scott Bekker
- 03/06/2003
Corel Corp. this week said the next version of its flagship office suite, WordPerfect Office 11, will be available in late April. That would put Corel's worker productivity suite in users' hands a few months ahead of Microsoft's next version of Office, which is slated for release in early June.
Corel has little chance of turning a two-month lead into market dominance, however, as Microsoft enjoys about 90 percent market share, and Microsoft's biggest obstacle in pushing out new versions of Office tends to be user comfort with older versions of Microsoft's suite. Microsoft is also working on its 11th version of Office, which will be called Microsoft Office 2003.
WordPerfect Office 11 ships in Standard and Professional versions. The Standard Edition includes the word processor WordPerfect 11, the spreadsheet Quattro Pro 11 and the slide show-creation software Presentations 11. The Professional Edition also includes the Paradox database.
Corel officials hope their suite's lower cost compared with Microsoft Office will help sales. The suggested retail price for the standard suite is $300, the upgrade price is $150 and an education version will cost $100. Microsoft Office Standard, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, retails for $479, with an upgrade price of $239 and an education version for $149.
The upcoming version of Corel WordPerfect doesn't appear to be a comprehensive overhaul. Highlights among the modifications and enhancements are:
New Document Map and Collaborative Review functions.
Reveal Codes and RealTime Preview to improve formatting control.
Classic Mode reverts to the WordPerfect 5.1 user environment with a blue-screen interface and WordPerfect 5.1 keystrokes.
Updated legal toolbar adding features from WordPerfect Law Office Editions, including the Pleading Wizard, Concordance macro tool and Publish to EDGAR.
Improved XML integration lets users publish slide shows, spreadsheets and WordPerfect files to XML.
Publish to PDF features in WordPerfect and Presentations, Publish to HTML in all components, support for Open Document Management API and a utility for batch conversion of files from formats including Microsoft Word and RTF.
The WordPerfect file format is unchanged from versions 6.1 to 11 for seamless access to old documents.
E-mail Document Routing capabilities and Microsoft Outlook Address Book connectivity.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.