The suite of tools is available in several editions, including Professional, Standard, and Home. For the purpose of this review, we took a look at the Standard edition.

WordPerfect Office X3 sports a clean, intuitive interface with a design influenced by Windows XP. In addition to the core word-processing application, the Standard edition of the suite includes spreadsheet and presentation programs.

While Quattro Pro X3 and Presentations X3 are apt replacements for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint, respectively, hardcore fans of Excel and PowerPoint might find Corel's versions a bit less robust.

But the same cannot be said about WordPerfect X3. After one week of putting this word-processing program through the paces for all of my writing tasks, I found myself preferring it to Microsoft Word.

Interface and Usability

WordPerfect can run in several modes that change the workspace to suit different needs. These modes include WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect classic, and WordPerfect legal.

While changing the modes keeps some of the basic interface elements that are native to WordPerfect X3, the menu structure shifts to accommodate user preferences. For instance, the status bar at the bottom of the screen will remain, regardless of which mode is active.

WordPerfect Office X3 also offers several features that make it convenient for power users. One is an Internet toolbar, similar to Microsoft Word's Web bar, that lets you launch a browser from within the application. The ability to access online services from within the word processor can boost productivity significantly.

Another nice feature is the ability to launch the spelling and grammar checkers -- along with the built-in thesaurus and dictionary tools -- in a viewing panel that switches from one function to the other as needed.

File Handling

File security is an essential concern today for many home and business users. Office X3 lets you control access to sensitive comments and other information embedded in your documents with an option to save a file without any metadata attached.

This option clears out everything that is hidden in the file from previous editing sessions, including deletions, comments, and any tracking history. The metadata-removal feature preserves the original document and saves the cleaned version with a new file name. (continued...)

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