InformationWeek

June 14, 1999

WordPerfect Office 2000 Shows Its Maturity

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WordPerfect Office 2000 continues to use HTML as a standard format. For very simple documents, HTML and these programs' HTML preview features are sufficient. But Corel has included the ability to publish files to PDF, the very rich Adobe Acrobat portable document format. Anyone with the free Acrobat reader can see the document exactly as you formatted it. Combine that with Paradox's ability to publish to HTML, and you have a practical way to create intermediate intranets with distributed contributors who need no sophistication to maintain up-to-date content.

The intranet publishing task requires organizational tools as well as content-creation tools and WordPerfect Office 2000 has two separate but parallel publishing tools: Trellix 2 and NetPerfect. NetPerfect's goal is to make the management of the intranet publishing simpler through automation; Trellix helps you push responsibility for the publication of individual documents out to a wide range of contributors. In principle, this makes perfect sense, and Trellix is an adequate tool for the task, as good as any that I've seen. But there's plenty of room for improvement in all the tools that support the distributed responsibility model. I'm not convinced that any of the tools provide sufficiently low-cost training to make this simple scheme an obvious win in most organizations.

Paradox's HTML publishing, while having fewer extras (such as interactive forms that let you post data as well as read it) than that of Microsoft's latest version of Access, has fewer dependencies on other products and does a straightforward job. But watch out for very large HTML output, larger than I think necessary. Paradox's native Web form designer uses Java applets.

Useful Additions
Corel has made changes to the word processing and presentation programs that will be valuable to people who produce documents (such as marketing materials or newsletters) that need to fit specific form factors. The feature they call Block Make It Fit lets you select a block of content and force it into a specified number of pages without affecting other areas. This will be a life-saver to anyone who has ever tried iteratively to make something fit a page through many minor margin- or font-size changes.

Real Picture
Users with more straightforward tasks will benefit from another new feature: real- time preview. When you select formatting (typeface, size, italics, etc.) the document shows you how it will look without having to execute the change. This may seem small, but it takes advantage of the graphical user interface precisely the way programs always should have.

The portion of your staff that communicates best by voice will get a big productivity gain from the bundled Dragon Systems' Naturally Speaking, a continuous-speech recognition utility that's been integrated with WordPerfect. The technology is a great way for nontypists to quickly lay down a draft, and is meshed well into the suite. A warning, though: it requires a contemporary computer with an up-to-date CPU and lots of memory.

A sign of maturity in people is the ability to say "no" at times. A sign of maturity in product design is the ability to leave out features that someone, somewhere, might want sometimes. WordPerfect Office 2000 does a very good job balancing feature glut against fads and real user requirements. If you don't need to "shoot the moon" and dislike the elephantiasis of your current productivity suite, Corel has found what I believe to be the sweet spot that balances features against complexity.