WordPerfect Office is solid, but probably will not replace Microsoft Office
January 31, 2019
WordPerfect Office is solid, but probably will not replace Microsoft Office
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with WordPerfect Office
My office uses WordPerfect Office for creating and editing legal documents such as agreements, deeds contracts of sale, and many others. We also use forms that are created in WordPerfect and can be adapted for each specific transaction or situation. Everyone who works in my office uses WordPerfect on a daily basis.
- 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.
- My office wouldn't be able to make money at all if we didn't use WordPerfect; we use it to generate all of the documents that we use in our business. Granted, if we used Microsoft or another Office suite, we could eventually obtain the results we currently get, but we seem to have positioned our workflow around WordPerfect and to use something else would potentially hinder our productivity.
I have used Microsoft Office extensively as well as Google's suite of office products. I think that Microsoft is more versatile overall; from Powerpoint to Excel to Word, as well as Outlook, it has the whole office pretty much covered. WordPerfect is a very strong word processor and great for everyday use, but I don't think it could replace Excel, despite its useful tables function. I don't know if WordPerfect has an email application, so I can't compare that to Word, but we use WordPerfect side by side with the rest of the Microsoft Office suite.