Corel’s WordPerfect is an all-in-one office suite solution designed to help you produce high-quality work with features for personal productivity and flexible infrastructure. With metadata removal and Microsoft Office compatibility, what’s not to love about WordPerfect? By looking at the good and bad, let’s find out if WordPerfect is the right platform for you and your team.
Comparing WordPerfect to The Best Office Suites Software
Unfortunately, WordPerfect didn’t make it onto our top list, as there were more up-to-date and functional office suites to choose from. However, this doesn’t make WordPerfect a bad option, as it offers incredible compatibility and features many users can’t fault.
We reviewed dozens of office suite software on the market and narrowed it down to the top five. We looked at each option to see who it’s best for, what features to consider, and how to find the best option for your needs. Want to scope out all of your options? See all of our top picks here.
WordPerfect: The Good and The Bad
Just like for all office suite software, there will be good and bad features to consider. After extensive research, we found that WordPerfect offers excellent features that most users found to increase their productivity, with only a few drawbacks surrounding functionality and outdatedness. Let’s take a deep dive into both sides of the spectrum before you decide.
The Good
Reveal Codes: By far the best feature of WordPerfect is the reveal codes, which help users display codes for font attributes and text alignment. You can use the reveal codes feature in table cells, rows, and columns. In the reveal codes window, you can get a clear picture of your cell and row codes without needing to adjust anything.
Your codes will pop up on the left-hand side of the screen, but you can also choose to showcase them on the bottom or right-hand side instead. WordPerfect makes it easy to change codes with a drag-and-drop system, and you can also choose to reveal each code in detail, to make changes quicker.
Redaction Capability: If you have a confidential document, WordPerfect offers a redaction feature that lets you black out sensitive information, ensuring that others won’t be able to retrieve or reveal the text. Redacting information on a document is one of the easiest things to do thanks to WordPerfect’s functionality. All you have to do is highlight the text you want hidden and save the document, and WordPerfect will do the rest for you.
The redaction feature is extremely versatile and allows you to search a document for words and phrases to hide and automatically applies the redaction afterward. You can also save these redacted files in either PDF, WPD, or DOC format and keep your information safe and secure.
Metadata Removal: Metadata is a common component in many office productivity files and can cause potential risks to your confidential information. Luckily, WordPerfect offers a seamless and automatic metadata removal feature that only takes a few clicks. Metadata includes the undo/redo history, reviewers’ notes, hidden texts, and comments, but with WordPerfect, you won’t need to worry about the potential risk of these components again.
With a built-in function that allows you to remove this sensitive information from your documents, all you have to do is enable the feature and let the system do the rest. Within seconds, WordPerfect makes sure that your documents are clean, safe, and secure to share with others.
Microsoft Office Compatibility: If you don’t want to break away from using Microsoft, that’s perfectly fine, as WordPerfect is compatible with the Microsoft Office suite. With new and enhanced features, you can open, edit, and save the newest Microsoft file formats in any WordPerfect application. Whether it’s a word document, spreadsheet, or presentation, you can expect hassle-free collaboration within the WordPerfect system.
Not only is WordPerfect compatible with Microsoft Office, but you can open, edit, and share with more than 60 formats, all while being able to save multiple formats in bulk, such as PDF and HTML. In fact, you can publish to HTML formats, including HTML5, as WordPerfect provides more publishing options, like relative font sizing and the ability to publish footnotes.
Excellent Productivity Functionalities: If you need more productivity within your team, WordPerfect offers excellent ways to be more productive by offering quick search functions, mail merge, and keystroke menus. With enhanced UI, WordPerfect can help you pinpoint data in spreadsheets by tapping into recently searched criteria and allowing you to perform multiple find-and-replace actions. If you need help with locating and managing your macros, WordPerfect has just the trick—a centralized macro manager feature that allows you to view macro properties, add descriptions, or run and edit the macros individually.
When it comes to mail merging and keystroke menus, WordPerfect knows exactly how to do both brilliantly. You can address all mail and labels more quickly and efficiently by associating a data source and having the Mail Merge Expert guide you through the process. On the other hand, access settings and commands by typing a few letters of the feature you are looking for and WordPerfect’s keystroke menu will do the rest for you.
Flexible and Supportive: It’s always nice to know that the solution you decide to invest in will have your back, and with WordPerfect, you can have peace of mind knowing that it’s an incredibly flexible and supportive platform. WordPerfect offers a range of code optimizations and lets you customize certain components, like keystrokes, to help deliver better application performance and improved file stability.
When it comes to user support, WordPerfect offers a few ways to get in touch with their support team. You can either visit the WordPerfect community forum, create a support ticket and receive a response within 24 hours, start a chat session with a Corel agent, or call them from Monday to Sunday. WordPerfect has all of its contact information available on its website, and after reading a few reviews, it seems that many users found the support helpful and proactive.
The Bad
No Email Program: The main gripe that most users had with WordPerfect is that there’s no integrated email program within the system. Many other office suite software offers an email integration that can help you increase productivity while remaining professional. The downside of WordPerfect not having a dedicated email program is that many users will have to outsource another solution for email, which can be time-consuming and sometimes even pricey.
Outdated User Interface: After looking through an array of different user reviews, we found that many users complained about WordPerfect’s outdated user interface and database. Many users found that its interface, alongside certain icons and frames, was similar to Windows 98, and some icons were not always intuitive. The problem with an outdated interface is that it’s not particularly user-friendly, which can make it difficult for users to navigate the platform efficiently.
Lackluster Spreadsheets: As an all-in-one office suite solution, all of WordPerfect’s components should be updated and work properly. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case, as many users complained that the spreadsheets were particularly lackluster and very outdated. One user claims that the spreadsheet feature is seemingly years behind in terms of functionality and appearance.
Another user claimed that the spreadsheet automations were laggy and weren’t working the way they should have been. While spreadsheets aren’t a big concern to many individuals, it’s still another component that someone might have to outsource, which again, is time-consuming and can be costly in the long run.
WordPerfect Pricing and Options
When it comes to pricing, WordPerfect has three different options for standard, professional, and educational use. Here is an overview of the pricing tiers:
Before we jump into the individual pricing tiers, we should note that each package comes with the following resources:
- WordPerfect word processor
- Quattro Pro spreadsheet application
- Presentation slideshow creator
- WordPerfect Lightning digital notebook
- Aftershot 3 photo editing
- 900+ TrueType fonts
- 10,000+ clipart images
- 300+ templates
- 175+ digital photos
- Concise Oxford English Dictionary
- WordPerfect address book
- Presentations graphics
- WordPerfect XML project designer
So before you invest in a Corel product, know that each tier offers the same features, but the pricing comes down to specifics.
WordPerfect Office Standard
- $249.99 one-time fee
The WordPerfect Office Standard tier is the perfect all-in-one office suite for individual use. You receive the document, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, extensive file compatibility, easy formatting, and built-in PDFs. Even for individual use, the WordPerfect Office Standard is still an excellent product full of rich features at an affordable price.
WordPerfect Office Professional
- $399.99 one-time fee
The WordPerfect Office Professional tier is the perfect all-in-one suite for business use. Corel designed this package to specifically help you streamline your workflow, no matter the industry you work in. You get access to the same features in the Office Standard package, except you also get a file-based paradox database management system, which lets you store, track, manage, and retrieve data.
You also get access to additional tools, such as PDF import, PDF form, metadata removal, bates numbering, and an eBook publisher.
WordPerfect Office Home and Student
- $99.99 one-time fee
The WordPerfect Office Home and Student tier is the perfect all-in-one suite for home and school use. If you are a student or currently work from home, this package will help you stay on top of your workload with intuitive tools and extensive compatibility. This suite is easy to set up and provides you with learning resources, templates, photos, and graphics to help you work from home without disruption.
Corel offers a free trial on all products and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Corel PDF Fusion
Corel has a wide variety of products for increased productivity alongside WordPerfect, and the PDF Fusion offering is one of them.
As an all-in-one PDF creator toolkit, you can boost your productivity by assembling, editing, and creating PDFs for individual or professional use. Not only is it a PDF-based solution, but it also supports more than 100 different file formats.
PDF Fusion offers an intuitive interface and lets you navigate and customize the platform easily with a drag-and-drop feature. To make the process even easier, you can take pages from different documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and then drag and drop multiple files into one PDF document and go about your day.
You can also customize your PDF documents by adding new text, bookmarks, and comments. Or you can redact sensitive information, add watermarks, insert hyperlinks, and rearrange, rotate, or crop pages. Do you need to share these files after editing them? No worries! Corel’s PDF Fusion lets you do that by allowing you to convert your documents into PDF, PDF/A, XPS, or Microsoft Word formats.
PDF Fusion is an affordable toolkit, only costing $54.99 for a one-time fee. You can also purchase the business version of the PDF Fusion, which comes with a volume licensing program, maintenance, support, and flexible deployment and installation—but you will have to contact sales for a pricing estimate.
How WordPerfect Ranks
While WordPerfect doesn’t rank on our top list, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. Corel’s WordPerfect is a decent all-in-one office suite suitable for most users, especially those in business. With powerful and automatic features like redaction tools and reveal codes, it’s no surprise to see many positive user reviews.
Here is a short overview of the top office suite software:
- Google Workspace — The Best for Most
- Microsoft 365 — The Best for Online And Offline Use
- Zoho Workplace — The Best Bare-Bones Basic Suite
- iWork — The Best for Apple Devices
- WPS Office — The Best Microsoft Clone for Non-Microsoft Users
Overall, WordPerfect is a decent office suite software, for the most part. The only drawback is that its interface is quite outdated and there is no email program. But it’s not all bad—as a flexible and supportive platform, a lot of users are happy to continue using WordPerfect as their all-in-one office suite solution.
