Review by S. Lawrenz

So many of the other reviewers have said what I would say about Wordperfect Office x4 that I’ll keep it short. I didn’t use the most of the programs much as my main use of office suites is word processing.

I got this suite for my laptop which runs on Vista. My desktop runs XP and I have a copy of MS office that works on XP. Short of buying another copy of MS office, I needed a word processing suite that would convert my word files back and forth with a minimum of formatting destruction. I do genealogy and among my projects is a detailed transcription of family letters in book format with photographs and images interspersed among the text along with complex uses of headings and footnotes. When converting between different programs, headings, picture placement, etc will be changed due to the nature of how different programs format documents. This essentially has limited me to using Word on my desktop. I’ve tried several editing suites, including Open Office. All were a bust.

Wordperfect however, did a great job. Not only did documents for word show up correctly in Wordperfect, but they translated back correctly too. Formatting, complex headings and section breaks, all converted flawlessly. That to me is a great bonus going for Wordperfect X4. It really is compatible with Word. With the vast majority of the office and professional world using Word, this compatibility is a strong selling point for me.

Added to that, WP actually has adjustable menu setup settings, so you may set the menu and tool systems to be configured much like Word is. For someone who works mainly in Word, this is a godsend. It helps avoid relearning where everything is. While some things will still be different, it goes a long way to make that transition easy.

Another feature that is of great interest to me is the ability to publish files to PDF format. Being a genealogist, I do a lot of file sharing with other genealogist. PDFs with their compact size and sharability across platforms are the perfect way to do this. Word perfect makes it easy to do and even allows several types of PDF conversions, from highly compact versions to a commercial printing version. Word does not offer this option at all.

Would I personally convert from Microsoft Office to Wordperfect? I’ve used Word for so long that I think it would be a bit of a stretch. WordPerfect to me has some features that are superior to Word, but for the most part, for my purposes, Word has been sufficient. Still, for a casual user such as myself WP is a good option.