Review by Tanya McHenry

So to start, let’s get this out of the way. There are a lot of free products out there. These suites are perfectly fine for an average users, with a notch down on the scale in terms of the user interface and visual appeal. These suites do lack some features for power users, or, if money is not really a consideration, maybe the user interface is worth the extra funds.

This is my first WordPerfect product. I’ve been using Office products for years, but I used to use Lotus and OpenOffice as well with no real issues. There was a slight learning curve with this product, but nothing too great. The word processing portion was fine, worked great, no reason to dislike it really. Creating the document, spelling checking, a quick check, nice formatting options. It’s all there and right up there with Word I felt. The power point presentation equivalent, Presentations, worked great. There were themes, easy to use animations, a some sounds, clip arts. It worked exactly as expected and required very little in terms of investigation to figure things out. Word Perfect Lightning, basically a an advanced note taking product was kind of compact and fun. I kind of liked that little edition although I am not sure light users would do much with that. I found the XML project offering kind of interesting too, but that will take more investigation and a hobby approach that i didn’t get into fully to really review that… which leaves Quattro, the excel equivalent.

Here’s the problem I ran into Quattro, it was really, really buggy. And by was I mean is. It would not actually launch the first dozen times I attempted to run it. I ran it as an admin, tried running the .exe, ended the process in Task Manager and finally ran it in compatibility mode. Once i ran it in compatibility mode, i could launch the program but none of the budgets or built in projects would load. I spent more time crashing out of the program that stopped responding than actually using it. I did install the service pack, tried looking through the knowledge base to no avail. I am running Win 7 64-bit. It is a gaming rig i built myself, so it is not lite in terms of specs. There is no logical reason for this to be happening really, although I have read Win 8 with ATI cards might have a problem.

For me, without a fully functionally spreadsheet, this just won’t work for me as an Office replacement. I use excel professionally, and it looked like there were Pivot Table replacements, they call them reports, the formulas worked fine, Macros are available… this is a really rich suite that would great for a better price and especially since the EULA allows for 3 PC installs at the same time when Microsoft is going the opposite direction with a single install and a much higher price. I can’t fully recommend a product I cannot get up running at 100%. Of the all the products on here, including Winzip, Paperport and some interesting utilities like the custom dictionary and XML offering, Quattro was the only one with an issue. In an office suite though, that spreadsheet is important.