Review by Phyllis Staff

I found lots to like about Corel’s WordPerfect Office X4. And, speaking as an unhappy employee forced to use WordPerfect back in the Dark Ages, I can attest to the improvements that Corel has made in this suite of Office applications. Here are a few of the pros and cons of this program as I’ve experienced them:nnPROS:nnWordPerfect X4 is easy to use, and it is easier to manage my blog with text from WordPerfect than with text written in Word 2007.

Same with Quattro X4 - easy to use, fast-running. No complaints here.

WordPerfect Office X4 comes with a tutorial video that shows you how to do all manner of interesting things with your office suite. I’ve only completed half of it, and I’ve already learned some new time-saving tricks.

I’ve used the PDF maker to great advantage, and I’m very pleased with the results. I also appreciate not having to buy Adobe Acrobat yet again.

CONS:nnWordPerfect is designed to work with documents from every conceivable word processor. Ahem - isn’t that a bit of overkill, or could it perhaps be managed during program installation so that my computer doesn’t have to host such a big program?nnWordPerfect Lightning was a big problem for me. It did not work and play well with the rest of the programs on my computer. I finally uninstalled it because it popped up unexpectedly and interfered with my ongoing work.

I have yet to try the month’s free trial of Corel’s Visual Intelligence, but I can report that it is a subscription-based service. Every year you get to pay again, and, somehow, that rubs me the wrong way. I’ll buy a program (I know, I know, I’m only leasing it), but I don’t want to buy the same program over and over every year. So I consider this feature, which may in fact be very good, to be a pain.

Overall, I find more pros than cons with WordPerfect Office X4. It’s not perfect, but, as a regular user for two months, I’ve found that it meets my needs most of the time. I won’t be going back to Microsoft Office.

Three and stars!