WordPerfect Office X4

Once upon a time, WordPerfect was more popular than today's reigning rival, Microsoft Office. It has long since lost that exalted role in the market, but WordPerfect remains a powerful competitor with all the features needed for typical office work plus a bit of extra oomph.

This version of the Corel suite comes with five separate applications. Along with the standard word processor WordPerfect, the spreadsheet-creating Quattro Pro, and Presentations--for multimedia presentations, natch--X4 comes with an e-mail client and a digital calendar. The basics up through power tools are well represented in each, so new users switching over should find much that is familiar. Spell-checkers and formula editing, and macros and document collaboration are all part of WordPerfect. We had no trouble opening or saving documents in Microsoft Office's format, and it includes a special interface and a section in the manual designed to simplify the switch from Microsoft's software. WordPerfect also supports the Open Document Format and more than 60 file types overall.

However, it doesn't just mimic the market leader, adding its own office suite innovations such as a tabbed interface and automatic converters to PDF and XML formats. Online services include storage, e-mail, and calendars, and it even comes with native character recognition for scans. Powerful and relatively inexpensive, WordPerfect is recommended for home and business users who want an alternative to Microsoft's dominant tools.