WordPerfect Office

Reveal codes

Quattro has better built-in tools than Excel

WordPerfect gives you more control over formatting than Word

Natively printing to PDF

using Word documents

Better Excel file use

No e-mail client

REVEAL CODES!

Formatting in general

Importing other file types.

PDF processing

Automate Table of Authorities

Desktop Publishing

Document Templates and Projects

File Security

Quattro Pro, wholly adequate, but beginning to lag Excel

No integrated eMail program.

Database (does anyone use these anymore) hasn't been updated in years.

Built-in publishing to PDF, that supports hyperlinks and watermarks.

Real-time previews of formatting options.

The Variables feature allows a variable or placeholder to be placed in multiple locations in a document.

Quattro Pro needs to be improved over Microsoft Excel.

Paradox Database has not been updated in the past 9 years.

Presentations works but not as well as PowerPoint.

"Reveal codes" is very powerful to figure out formatting glitches.

Sometimes converting for MS Word corrupts the formatting and cannot be used.

On the newest version, if you open a document from the computer explorer, it opens a whole new program, instead of just opening a new document as in previous versions, so it makes toggling more difficult.

There is still a WYSIWYG glitch where sometimes a line does not appear on the screen, but it is definitely there.

WordPerfect Office makes merging documents very simple and I can do more elaborate merges easily.

WordPerfect Office's reveal codes is a major plus! I have used it so many times to find extra coding in a document that is creating problems.

WordPerfect Office could use the option of opening and converting files that were created in Microsoft Word easier.

Being able to cut and paste documents from Microsoft Word to WordPerfect Office would be very helpful.

WordPerfect has kept many of the same features for the past 20 years. It can even open documents made 20 years ago. Large documents are opened easily.

WordPerfect has a ton of formatting options. It is fairly easy to format items and lets you see the code that it is using to format, which does make changes easy.

WordPerfect comes built in with exporting to MS Word and PDF among many others. This is a nice addition since not many people have WordPerfect.

WordPerfect clearly has not updated the user interface in some years. It looks akin to Windows 98 icons and frames. The icons are not always intuitive.

The spreadsheet program seems like it is years behind. Almost everything is easier to do on Excel. It also looks very dated.

It is less automated. While this is nice for formatting, if you want the program to guess what you would like to do with formatting, that isn't going to happen.

The menus have tons of options; way too many really.

Using WordPerfect is very similar to Microsoft Word, naturally, as they are both word processing applications. One way that WordPerfect is a little stronger is that the formatting of documents is a little more fluid and easier to access. You can adjust the margins of a document on a line by line basis without having to use the ruler (simply by dragging the line over to where you want it); I find this helpful when including a large quote.

Another helpful aspect of WordPerfect is the ability to include tables, which can contain formulas, much like Microsoft Excel. This is especially helpful when preparing closing statements or documents that contain a blend of text and numbers.

WordPerfect's interface just seems to be a little more intuitive than Microsoft Office, which I use alongside it. Some time ago, Microsoft Office moved to a tabbed interface which, in my opinion, hides a lot of the features that I need. Long story short, if you are used to using Word, you can probably transition to WordPerfect with ease.

My main gripe with WordPerfect concerns the Reveal Codes function. There have been times when I am working with a document that contains a hard page break and there is no real way to remove it. Attempting to adjust these settings with the Reveal Codes function is nigh impossible.

Unlike Word, there doesn't seem to be any sort of online community of users comparing notes and exchanging advice for solving common problems. This makes it difficult to fix things like the Reveal Codes problem discussed above. When I first encountered this issue (and the second time...) I ran an online search to see if others had the same problem and how they may have addressed it. There were very few results and the ones I did find were several years old. So, this is one downside of WordPerfect being a far less popular application than its competitor.

This might be a nitpick, but WordPerfect has a function for opening PDFs, which I find to be pretty useless, especially when Adobe software is designed specifically for this and is widely available. I never use WordPerfect to open PDFs, unless it is on accident.