Review by Thomas Wikman

Word Perfect Office X5 is in my opinion an interesting alternative to Microsoft Office 2010, 2007 and 2003. You can do almost everything that you can with Microsoft Office 2003 and most things that you can do with Microsoft Office ²⁰⁰⁷⁄₂₀₁₀, as well as some things that you can’t do with Microsoft Office. It includes PDF file handling/editing/scanning features, web publishing capabilities, and special tools for legal professionals and the government. However, it lacks some functionality included with Microsoft Office, for example, the ability write formulas, and Microsoft Excel has more advanced formula handling than Quattro Pro X5, etc. Therefore you can say that Word Perfect X5 is aimed more towards business offices and less towards home, academia and engineering.

Word Perfect X5 costs less than the Microsoft Office business version, which is one of the reasons that I am saying that Word Perfect X5 is an interesting alternative to Microsoft Office. I should mention that if you use Microsoft Office for a business or non-profit organization you cannot use Microsoft Office Home and Student (which would be cheaper). I can add that Word Perfect X5 is supposedly compatible with Microsoft Office. However, even though you can open Microsoft Office files using Word Perfect X5, not all Microsoft Office features are supported, so you may lose some stuff if you convert.

WordPerfect X5 is a word editor, with the capability to open and save to a large variety of file formats including WordPerfect formats and all Microsoft Word formats (.doc, .docx, etc), PDF, RTF, html, and much more. When you start WordPerfect X5 you can choose from four kinds of editor interfaces; Word Perfect Mode, WordPerfect Classic Mode, WordPerfect Legal Mode, and Microsoft Word Mode. If you choose Microsoft Word mode you get an interface, which looks more like that of Microsoft Word 2003 than Microsoft Word ²⁰⁰⁷⁄₂₀₁₀. I was impressed by the PDF editing/handling capabilities of WordPerfect X5 as well as the fact that saving to web formats (.html) result in leaner and less awkward files than when you do the same thing with Microsoft Word. As mentioned I missed the formula editing capabilities. One interesting special feature is that you can save your document without the metadata (security purposes). Metadata is all the other information stored in your document that is not directly related to the display of your document, for example, the edit history, creation date, creator, etc. Unfortunately I’ve noticed that WordPerfect X5 have some minor stability issues (occasional crashes).

Quattro Pro X5 is a spreadsheet application similar to Excel in Microsoft Office and it features both a Quattro Pro mode, Lotus 1-2-3 mode, and an Excel mode. At work we used Excel extensively to collect large amounts of data that was used in fairly complex formulas and displayed on multiple graphs on multiple spreadsheets. When I imported these Excel 2003 files into Quattro Pro X5 a lot of stuff was lost. On the other hand you can do almost everything you can do with Excel with Quattro Pro X5. I liked the fact that Quattro Pro X5 does not have a 64,000 row-limit like Excel.

Presentations X5 is similar to Power Point in Microsoft Office, and like WordPerfect X5 it offers more than one display mode, a Presentations mode and a Power Point mode. Even though the Power Point mode looks similar to Microsoft Power Point interface they are not identical. It also features additional, or rather more accessible, controls for making slide shows and creating animations. It is also very easy to insert movies into your WordPerfect X5 presentations. The WordPerfect Expert can help you create interesting web pages based on your Presentations X5 slide shows. I liked the fact that the slides were listed on a horizontal bar at the bottom. It made navigation easier. It general I liked Presentations X5 a little bit better than Power Point and except for some fonts I could import all my Power Point presentations to Presentations X5.

Word Perfect Office X5 also came with various tools like Word Perfect Lightning, Paperport, an XML based project designer, an email client and a scheduling application called Mozilla Thunderbird, and the so called Pleading Expert that helps legal professionals create custom pleading styles, etc. Some of these tools you had to install separately. I played around with Paperport and found it to be a fun tool, but perhaps marginally useful. Whether you find these tools useful or not I think depends on your situation.

In summary I recommend Word Perfect Office X5 to some people, those who will use it for an office and do not need formulas or very advanced spreadsheet calculations. If you already have everything in Microsoft Office formats, then it might not be a good idea to convert.