THE NEW WORDPERFECT IS JUST ABOUT PERFECT

Corel’s WordPerfect has long been a favorite with lawyers and bureaucrats. But the new version should draw other users as well.

WordPerfect Office, like Microsoft Office, comes with a slew of programs, including word processing, a spreadsheet and presentation software. Unlike Microsoft Office, however, WordPerfect Office also includes programs to publish e-books, organize PDFs, create zip files, edit videos and a tool to automate the legal citation process.

The new version, X6, allows automatic “Bates numbering.” We mentioned that to a lawyer friend and he said “What’s Bates numbering?” (Bates numbering is a system for indexing and time stamping sections of a brief for the court.) We guess he’s not a trial lawyer.

WordPerfect Office X6 also shows you how your document or show-and-tell presentation will look on an iPhone or Android Phone. It also adds a routine for easy publishing to a Kindle. Long overdue is support for multiple monitors. Using two displays is handy for those who like to put a document on one screen and a spreadsheet or some other file on another. You can also do this with a split screen option found in Windows and Macs, but you then lose a lot of screen real estate, as they call it. 

WordPerfect has a tiny market share compared to Microsoft Word but we always liked the easy way it lets you arrange pictures or move blocks of text in your document: You move pictures and other marked blocks just by highlighting them with your mouse and dragging them wherever you want on the page. WordPerfect still has “reveal codes.” (This goes way back to the early days, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.) They reveal the formatting codes for a document, which lets you see and easily correct problems in the layout or fonts.

There’s a “home and student” version of WordPerfect Office for $99 and a free trial at Corel.com.

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