Review by David Stapleton

Always on the lookout for an alternative to Microsoft products, just because I like to spread the wealth and promote competition, I had high hopes for this product.

Installation went smoothly, and initial tests of the product were encouraging. My hope was for a suite of products that would be a plug and play substitute for Microsoft Office, the standard for office product suites in today’s market. The product performed well in that most of the controls were easy enough to find (if the user is moderately familiar with Microsoft Office 2007, something I still find myself struggling with on occasion). Document, presentation and spreadsheet creation and usage within the product were pretty much the expected routine, no fanfare just good functionality.

The problem I had with the product suite was with files created outside of the Corel product suite. A product that bills itself as a replacement/equivalent product for Microsoft Office needs to be able to open and work with files created under the competitor’s suite. Unfortunately, after a couple of weeks of opening and having to tweak layouts on presentations or formatting in documents, I had to give up the ghost on the Corel suite; it was too much work trying to redo files created under Microsoft Office because they did not import to Corel Office cleanly.

Bottom line, I have uninstalled and returned to Microsoft Office; I just cannot afford to use a product that is not 100% compatible with the industry standard. P-)