Corel's new WordPerfect Office X4: PDF capabilities galore and "only" $99

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 08:50

Opinion and Analysis

There will be four different versions of WordPerfect Office Suite X4 available.

The cheapest version will exclusively sell at Officeworks (an Australian office supplies store) for AUD $99, “for a limited time”, and will contain the “Standard Edition”.

The Standard “upgrade” Edition includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro (spreadsheet), Presentations, WordPerfect MAIL, Corel Connector online services, WordPerfect Lightning for digital note taking and Corel Visual Intelligence SE for data visualisation and business intelligence.

This is obviously an attempt by Corel to kickstart sales of the Standard Version of WordPerfect through the highly popular Officeworks chain, as the software is classed as either an “upgrade or crossgrade” – but no previous software or other versions are required on your computer to install it, you just buy it and install.

So if you are tempted by WordPerfect Office Suite X4, and want something with more grunt, compatibility and features than Open Office or Google Docs, and don’t want to pay Microsoft Office prices, this $99 version will be the one to go for.

The other versions of Corel WordPerfect Office X4 are the Standard edition at the normal price of AUD $329, the Home and Student edition which is for non-commercial, home and education use, and can be legally installed on up to 3 computers for AUD $249, and the “Office” version for commercial, office uses will retail for AUD $599.

These other versions are also available at Officeworks, Harvey Norman, Dick Smith Powerhouse and other software retailers.

So, will all of this make Corel WordPerfect Suite X4 a massive success all of a sudden? Well, that's clearly unlikely.

The market is dominated, after all, with Office 2007, but in an era of growing inflation in the cost of petrol, groceries, utility bills and more, just how happy will consumers truly be with paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for Office suites which can cost as much as buying the computer itself?

Although Office 2007 can be purchased relatively cheaply when bought as a "Small Business" version with a new computer from a vendor such as Dell, and purchased for home and student use, it's not as inexpensive as the $99 WordPerfect X4 version available from OfficeWorks, or the free alternatives that are Open Office or Google Docs.

But Corel must still be making sales and expecting to make even more. Paying programmers to upgrade the WordPerfect Suite wouldn't have been cheap, and Corel obviously knows about all the free alternatives.

Are the PDF features and Office 2007 file format compatibility in Corel's suite of interest? Or are you a dedicated Microsoft Office user that will never change? Or perhaps you're a user of Open Office/Google Docs and are quite happy? Let us know!