Review by Jerry Jackson Jr.

I’ve sent the last few weeks using Corel Home Office on my HP Pavilion dv4t laptop. Since 2008 I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2007, so it took a few days for me to get used to the slightly different interface of Corel Home Office. Before I go into detail about the software, I wanted to mention something about how the software ships. Corel doesn’t include a CD/DVD with the software and instead gives you a USB flash drive with the software on it. I REALLY like this because I removed the CD/DVD drive on my laptop and have a second hard drive there instead … so it’s nice to be able to plug in the USB flash drive into a USB port on my laptop and install the software that way.

I know several people will be upset by the fact that the Corel Write portion of Corel Home Office is optimized for laptop screens with 1024x768 resolution and doesn’t resize well for higher resolution screens, but this isn’t the end of the world. It’s great for netbook users or people like me who own a laptop with a 1280x800 resolution.

The control interface for Corel Write (Corel’s version of Word), Corel Calculate (Excel), and Corel Show (PowerPoint) are all very similar to Microsoft Office 2007 and you can even save files so they are compatible with Microsoft Office (and open/edit files created using Microsoft Office).

I like the fact that you can save your text files as PDF files, but I found it annoying that Corel Write cannot open PDF files. If the Corel software can save PDFs then that means it should have the ability to open/edit them as well. It’s very frustrating that if I save a file as a PDF I can’t open it again using the Corel software and make edits.

Overall, Corel Home Office is a great value for laptop and netbook users who want an affordable alternative to Microsoft Office. PC users who have large 1080p displays might not like this software since the interface is optimized for lower resolution screens, but Corel Home Office is still a fantastic deal for the money.