There’s a new release of WordPerfect, so I went through the Corel support newsgroups to get an idea of what people think.
The reports are pretty good. It’s reasonably stable for most people, and Corel has taken out some of the most troublesome parts of the previous releases. I’m especially pleased to see that they’ve dropped “Corel Central,” the broken information manager. WordPerfect 11 instead attempts to integrate with Microsoft Outlook – and it might not do it very well, but at least it doesn’t seem to break Outlook in the process, like previous versions. (Anybody that attempts to use the Corel address book deserves problems anyway.)
WordPerfect 9 and 10 were both riddled with bugs. The consensus seems to be that WordPerfect 10 could be made pretty stable on Windows 2000/XP if it was brought up to date with huge service packs.
Corel has no money. It couldn’t afford to rewrite WordPerfect 10, but it didn’t want to release another service pack for free. So WordPerfect 11 is essentially WordPerfect 10 with a new service pack, marketed as a new release so Corel can generate a bit of revenue.
Okay, it’s pretty stable. I feel compelled to add: so what? Spending money on WordPerfect is silly. Send a document in WordPerfect format to a customer or client and you’re likely to lose a customer or client. The battle is over and Word won. Accept it, switch over, and move on.
