WordPerfect Office is the one and only Windows office application suite that isn't a workalike for Microsoft Office. Most of the world—or at least the world that uses office apps—runs on Microsoft Office. As mature and powerful as they are, Microsoft's apps may not be the best ones for your needs.
While plenty of suites are essentially Office clones, only two major suites operate differently: Corel WordPerfect Office, which is for Windows only, and Apple's iWork apps, which run only on Apple hardware or in limited versions in a browser. Apple's apps are sleek and up to date, while WordPerfect has an old-school look and feel that won't attract many new users. What sets the WordPerfect Office suite apart from others, however, is the fact that its namesake word processor, WordPerfect, is the only office app that gives you total control over every detail of the documents you produce. The suite comprises two more apps, Quattro Pro (a spreadsheet app) and Presentations.
How WordPerfect Is Different
Microsoft Word and most other word processors make it almost impossible to achieve the same kind of control that WordPerfect offers. They create frustration that WordPerfect users never face.
WordPerfect was the dominant word processor in the DOS era of the 1980s and early 1990s, until Microsoft Word supplanted it under Windows. Regardless, WordPerfect for Windows continues to be a major player, especially in the legal market, where it's the only app that offers both advanced legal-formatting features and a document management system that doesn't rely on Microsoft's networking software.
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I use Microsoft Word when I merely need to get a document written that I can send to someone else, or when I'm sending something to a publisher. I use WordPerfect when I need to get the format and content exactly as I want it.
WordPerfect uses its own file format, but it can open and save files in Word's DOCX format, and you can set DOCX as the default save format.
In some areas, WordPerfect Office lags other office apps noticeably. As mentioned, it's for Windows only (if you want to run it on a Mac, you need virtualization software) with no mobile apps, and the look is quite dated. It also doesn't support real-time collaboration, something Google Workspace and others have done for years. Later I also point out a few specific features and capabilities missing from WordPerfect Office that you do get from Microsoft Office. Whether you need or care about these features may heavily influence your decision to use Corel WordPerfect Office.
How Much Does Corel WordPerfect Office Cost?
Like other commercial office suites from Microsoft and SoftMaker, Corel WordPerfect Office comes in multiple versions. You certainly get what you pay for with the various versions. For most users, Corel WordPerfect Office Standard ($249.99) is the sweet spot unless you need to access Paradox databases created many years ago, in which case you'll want the Professional ($399.99) edition. Keep in mind that all the Corel WordPerfect Office suites are for Windows only, and the current version is 2021.
A basic $99.99 Home & Student version includes the standard office apps: WordPerfect word processor, Quattro Pro spreadsheet app, Presentations (the presentations app), and a bare-bones note-taking and file-viewing app called WordPerfect Lightning. The Oxford Concise Dictionary is built into the suite, and Corel also throws in its AfterShot 3 photo-editing software.
Move up to the $249.99 Standard edition and you get the same software but with added features such as PDF import, routing-slip and document-reviewing features, and legal features such as pleading templates and a table-of-authority builder.
The $399.99 Professional version adds PDF form-creation, more flexible ePub export, the Paradox database manager, Corel's MultiCam screen-and-video capture software, and a software developer's kit for automating the suite.
The price to upgrade from a previous version of WordPerfect Office is $159.99. You're not eligible for an upgrade if your existing version is labeled Academic, Home & Student, OEM, or Not for Resale.
All the prices mentioned are for a one-time purchase. Many other apps have moved to subscription pricing instead. As an example, Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. The Business edition of Google Workspace starts at $6 per person per month, though Google apps are free for non-business use with an account. LibreOffice is also free.
A Novel Word Processor
The one and only reason to go with WordPerfect Office as your office suite is for the WordPerfect word processor. The included spreadsheet app, Quattro Pro, is more than good enough, and Presentations is a decent presentation and graphics app. But no one would choose them over Excel or PowerPoint. WordPerfect, like Word, includes standard modern conveniences like PDF import and export, file comparison, and more.
Every modern word processor lets you create documents from templates, but WordPerfect includes a range of wizard-style projects that conveniently create graph paper or business letters with your default address and phone number. You can record or write macros in WordPerfect's native macro language, and advanced users can write macros in Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications that can automate almost anything in Windows.
What the Codes Reveal
WordPerfect has a few built-in abilities that Word doesn't have, such as redaction that applies to its own documents, plus export to ePub formats and to formats used for legal filings. A feature called Make It Fit automatically adjusts formatting to prevent the last few lines of your document from overflowing onto a new page.
The feature that makes WordPerfect unique and essential is its Reveal Codes pane, which you can open with a keystroke in the bottom part of the document window. The Reveal Codes pane shows the text of your document, interspersed with buttons that represent the otherwise hidden codes that control formatting and other features. It isn't pretty, but, once you've tried it, you'll wish you could have it in Word.
For a typical document, the first code in the Reveal Codes pane is labeled Document Style. Double-click it to open a dialog showing format codes that apply to the entire document, like the default language. You can add, edit, or remove these codes inside the dialog, using menus that show you every available option. Other codes displayed in the documents might include font-size settings or pairs of codes that begin and end the styling for bold or italic. To remove italic type, backspace over one of the paired italic codes, or simply drag it out of the Reveal Codes window.
If you've used complex formatting in Word, you've probably been frustrated by unwanted changes that Word makes in your files and that you can't get rid of, for example, the horizontal line that Word inserts beneath a paragraph if you type a line of hyphens. That never happens in WordPerfect (though other frustrations may arise, as I note later), and if anything gets into your file that you don't want there, you simply open the Reveal Codes pane and remove the offending codes.
WordPerfect has been using formatting codes since the 1980s, and code-based formatting mostly went out of style when Microsoft Word for Windows conquered the market. Code-based formatting is an old idea that's become new again for example with the rise in popularity of Markdown language, which lets you modify formatting by inserting simple inline codes. WordPerfect's codes are more foolproof than Markdown language, however, because you can only enter them through a menu and can't create non-working or nonsense codes as you can with Markdown and similar languages.
Under-the-Hood Formatting
Under the hood, Word works entirely differently from WordPerfect, even when the printed output looks exactly the same. Word stores formatting and other information separate from the text of a file. WordPerfect stores formatting codes mixed in with the text.
All too often, Word loses track of the formatting that affects the contents of large and complex documents. Because Word works this way, WordPerfect far surpasses it as a tool for combining multiple documents into a single file. Both Word and WordPerfect have a Master Document feature that lets you edit (for example) separate chapters of a book in separate document files that automatically get combined into a single document when you open a Master Document that contains links to the chapters. In Word, this feature has always been unreliable, and master documents too easily become corrupt, so that you can't reconstruct the chapters that go into them. Word's Master Document feature has destroyed too many of my documents for me to risk using it ever again. In contrast, WordPerfect's Master Document feature works perfectly every time.
Despite its unique powers, WordPerfect can be uniquely frustrating. It doesn't automatically update the word count in its status bar. It doesn't let you replace, for example, underlining with italics unless you write a macro or use a third-party macro from a site like Barry MacDonnell's Toolbox for WordPerfect. You can track changes only by comparing two versions of a document, not by viewing tracked changes in the current document as you can in Word. Word and other word processors let you view two parts of a document in two panes of the current Window, with changes made in one pane instantly reflected in the other. In WordPerfect, if you want to view two parts of a document at the same time, you have to open a read-only copy in a second window. Serious WordPerfect users, like me, learn to live with these limitations, though I wish Corel would remove them.
Make It Legal
WordPerfect's legal features include built-in Bates numbering (page numbers with trailing zeroes), automated formatting of pleading papers, and export to the EDGAR format required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Law offices and anyone else who works with older documents will value WordPerfect's ability to open files in dozens of legacy formats, including old Microsoft Word documents that current versions of Word refuse to open for security reasons. These old files can be dangerous in Word because they might contain macro viruses, but Word macros won't run in WordPerfect, so WordPerfect can open those files safely.
By the way, WordPerfect's Reveal Codes pane is unique, but WordPerfect isn't the only app that displays formatting codes. The specialist academic word processor Nota Bene can display formatting codes among its view options, though it doesn't have WordPerfect's two-pane view with codes shown in the second pane. Nota Bene is a uniquely powerful system for academic research and writing, especially in ancient and modern languages. It can perform feats of data storage and retrieval that other apps can't even dream of. It effortlessly formats output to match the demands of specialist publishers. That said, it's designed exclusively for the academic market, not general users.
The Rest of the Suite
As I said, you’ll only want this suite if you want the WordPerfect word processor, because all the other apps in the suite are outclassed by the competition from Microsoft, LibreOffice, TextMaker, and other vendors. But if you buy the suite, the Quattro spreadsheet app, Presentations app, and Lightning utility work well with WordPerfect, and the whole suite holds together in an impressive way.
Quattro Pro
Quattro Pro is a solid spreadsheet app that supports advanced features such as web queries, spreadsheet groups, and the equivalent of Excel's pivot tables, which Quattro calls Cross Tabs. Quattro can't manage worksheets as large as the enormous ones that Excel can handle, however, and it slows to a crawl when handling massive data sets. Excel keeps adding convenience features, like one that lets you combine columns of first and last names in a single column, while new versions of Quattro Pro add little more than tweaks, like a redesigned search dialog in the latest version.
As part of the WordPerfect suite, Quattro Pro has the advantage that it can use two kinds of automation, depending on what feels most comfortable. It can use the same PerfectScript macro language used by WordPerfect, or it can use its native Quattro Pro macro language, which dates to the time before the app became part of a suite. A law office that uses WordPerfect can easily create systems that automate the word processor and the spreadsheet for efficient large-scale business operations.
Presentations
Corel's app for making presentations, called Presentations, has an impressive range of transitions and effects. Compared with PowerPoint and Keynote, though, its templates look amateurish, and Presentations lacks advanced features such as the ability to show only part of a video or start a video at a specified time. As part of the WordPerfect suite, Presentations uses the same macro language as WordPerfect, so it’s easy to automate the word processor and presentations app via a single macro that, for example, feeds content from a WordPerfect document into a new presentation.
Corel’s Presentations also doubles as a graphics editor. When you install the suite, it creates two shortcuts for the Presentations app, one labeled Presentations, the other labeled Presentations Graphics. They both open the same app, but the second shortcut starts up the app as a bitmap editor. If you have graphics in WordPerfect’s own WPG format, Presentations is the only modern app that can edit this file format directly.
If you don't care about dazzling new features, both Quattro Pro and Presentations get the job done well, and like WordPerfect, both can save to Microsoft Office formats by default if you need to share files in an Office-centric world.
Lightning
Another optional feature of the suite is WordPerfect Lightning, a note-taking app that can’t approach the feature set and flexibility of Microsoft OneNote, but has some unique features that you may want if you use the rest of the suite. Lightning lets you view PDFs and Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect documents without taking the time needed to open them for editing. It also lets you create a folder-based structure for any notes that you create in the app, and it lets you send those notes to WordPerfect for use in documents. I’ve never made much use of it, but it can be useful to anyone who collects text and images from the web and from other documents for use in your own work.
One of a Kind
Do you need WordPerfect Office? If you're a longtime WordPerfect user, as I am, then you don't need my recommendation because you'll buy it anyway. If you're not a longtime user, you might want to consider it if you need advanced automation features for your law office, or if you're frustrated that you can't get formatting exactly as you want it in other apps.
WordPerfect is one of a kind, and if it suits your needs, there's no alternative. I use Word for all my work that needs to get finished quickly. I use WordPerfect for long-term projects where I need to be confident my files won't start acting in unpredictable ways and that I have total control over how they look and act. Microsoft Office still rules the office-app universe, but that universe has room for enclaves where Office is not enough.
WordPerfect has the only Windows-compatible word processor that doesn't work like Microsoft Office; it allows for precise, predictable control over formatting. It's a worthy upgrade, but new users may be turned off by its dated UI and lack of collaboration tools.
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