CNET Editors' review
Corel Home Office has much to recommend it, but this new productivity suite isn't for everyone. It was never meant to be. Smaller in size, lighter in features, and with certain optimizations built-in for small-screen resolutions, Corel Home Office is squarely aimed at Netbook owners, and among them, home users--both casual consumers and those operating home businesses.
The program's familiar layout emulates Microsoft Office 2007 with tabbed menus and a clean, visual display in all three applications--Write, Calculate, and Show. Its leaner feature set contains all the basic and intermediate features you'd expect in word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, but skimps on the advanced tools that the majority of home users may not use. Innovations include pressing F11 to hide the toolbar and customizing with color. Being able to save in Corel, Microsoft, and PDF formats is a necessity for sharing files with others on different systems.
Despite its pros, Corel Home Office is dogged by some serious cons. Cross-program compatibility was at times subpar, especially when importing data into Calculate. Write has some wrongs when it comes to pasting information from other documents and the Web. Creating and editing charts is confusing and frustrating in all three applications.
Detractions aside, Corel Home Office holds its own as a light productivity suite and is the only one at the time of the review that's been optimized for Netbooks' munchkin size. Consumers looking for the familiarity of Microsoft Office 2007 without the hefty price tag will do well with Corel Home Office, as long as they don't foresee needing the more advanced features for composition, spreadsheets, or presentations and can work around the occasional garbled data conversion.
Watch the CNET video review of Corel Home Office:
Publisher's Description
From Corel:
Specifically designed for your personal and home business word processing, spreadsheet and presentation needs, Corel Home Office makes your at-home work simple. The sleek and simple interface includes tabbed toolbars that put the features you need right where you need them. It's similar to the office suites you've used before, so it's easy to learn and use. It's compatible with Microsoft Office files and supports PDF publishing from any application. You can switch languages at the click of a button.
Take the publisher's product tour:More Popular Office Suites downloads
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All versions:
1.7 starsout of 3 votes
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Current version:
1.7 starsout of 3 votes
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My rating:
Write review
Results 1-3 of 3
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"Requires online registration before you can run it"
Version: Corel Home Office 1.0
Pros
Another Office suite for home users - nice to have an option.
Cons
Uses the ribbon UI, the target audience are home users who are probably more used to the standard menu system from older Office versions and from OpenOffice.org. Requires creation of online Corel account. Not expensive, but compared to OO.org, it is.
Summary
OpenOffice.org is a better choice because it's free, and because you can run it on more operating systems. I won't bother with Corel Home Office again, even though I was pretty enthusiastic about it.
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"Why buy you get free Open Office"
Version: Corel Home Office 1.0
Pros
No Pros b'cause its not free.
Cons
You can have full fledged openoffice suite with almost fully compatiable with M$ Office.
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"Okky but not cheap ($69.99 to buy)"
Version: Corel Home Office 1.0
Pros
Nice interface, nice features.
Cons
Not that cheap.
