Quattro Pro 10

   Quattro Pro is the spreadsheet software of the WordPerfect Office 2002 suite. It was originally created by Borland and sold to Corel. Over the years, Corel has improved Quattro Pro to keep the wide base of corporate users. Quattro Pro 10 supports up to one rows (but who’ll be brave enough to fill out more than 1 million of rows??) and up to 18,000 columns. In return the size of the file it produces has never been so small! In its challenger quality, Quattro Pro can easily import Lotus 1,2,3 and Microsoft Excel 97/2000/2002 spreadsheets files.  

Quattro Pro 10 lets users access and retrieve data from any ODBC data source, if there’s a compliant 32-bit ODBC driver installed on the computer. Quattro Pro has been recently Internet re-oriented so you can create HTML pages directly from Quattro Pro. Users can also convert charts into images, add titles and create advanced headers. But the whole thing can also be exported in XML. The web query tool lets users create and run web queries and import data from the Web, such as currency exchange rates, stocks prices or price lists from corporate internet sites. The queries can also be automatically & manually updated.

QuattroPro 10.0 (click to enlarge)

The brand new PivotTable feature allows users to resume wide data quantities in a single crossed analysis table. This feature is Microsoft Excel 97 compliant. Dynamic CrossTab Reports can also be generated to summarize, retabulate or re-organize data. 

Graphs can be quickly created simply by selecting the cells! Then you can change the graph style using a toolbar button. The charting engine of Quattro Pro has been totally redesigned in order to give users more power, control, flexibility and ease of use. More elements of a graphic can be tweaked and users can take advantage of features like rich text for chart titles and error bars. Quattro Pro 10 lets you create dazzling 3D charts while offering advanced rendering settings like adjustable lighting and panning. You can even use color schemes in your graph à la Corel Draw. Quattro Pro 10 even lets you present your data more exotically with Gantt, Pie of a Pie graphs, for example. 

QuattroPro 10.0 3D Graph (click to enlarge)

Sure Quattro Pro can contains many sheets in one folder and supports advanced arithmetic expressions. Due to the Microsoft VBA integration you can design powerful macros that will accomplish complex tasks for you. You can even design your own dialog boxes. The Microsoft VBA language is based on the Microsoft award winning Visual Basic programming language. So it’s almost easy to learn. Though you can scan pictures directly pictures from a Twain compliant scanner in WordPerfect of Presentations, Quattro Pro doesn’t offer this feature.  

As Corel Quattro Pro 10 uses the same interface as WordPerfect 10, it’s remarkably reliable and easy to use. However Corel Quattro Pro 10 has some obvious interface problems under Windows XP. The menu bar is white while the min/max/restore buttons of each document window are partly truncated and sport the old school Windows 9x look.

Corel Presentations 10

   Corel Presentations 10 is a top of the range ‘presentation maker’ software that can be easily compared to Microsoft PowerPoint. It allows you to create multimedia shows, slide shows, to present your corporate, your products, your brand, your corporate mind, or other multimedia projects… In fact this software offers great and useful features, such as special animations effects that really look pro. Creating shading off effect is as easy as in CorelDraw 10! You can create slide-show on a variety of support: A4 paper, envelops, legal, letter… Sure you can use as background (Corel Presentations manages Background in a special tab so you can change it easily): pictures, shading off (different ones are available), textures, colors with or without motifs… 

Corel Presentations offers high end ready-to-use models that can be used for a wide variety of needs (booklets, streamer, sales, poster, reward, report…) . It displays tabs to switch between scene view, scene titles and scene preview. As it’s an MDI software you can work on different presentations at the same time: you can switch between multiple documents using the Corel Presentations taskbar. When you employ a “ready-to-use” model, a Corel Expert (not a wizard but an expert) will guide and help you to customize your slide-show. Slide-shows are printable: the print feature as always with Corel is very complete. You can choose what to print (1 slide or the entire slide-show) , you can even print both sides papers, and sure you’ve got a very useful print preview feature that will show your slide-show in colors (if you’ve got a color printer) or in Black & White,. Customizing TurboKeys enables you to define a precise action to do when you push a keyboard key, for example ‘A’ will switch to the next slide.  

Corel Presentations 10 GUI (click to enlarge)

As with every presentation software you can add sound with the following formats : WAVE, MIDI or MP3. Corel Presentations 10 also supports Music CD! So you can insert your favorite music from a CD –Audio and during the Slideshow, Corel Presentations will play the tracks you have chosen. Corel Presentations 10 is fully ready for the internet: indeed all the presentations you create can be exported to HTML files! The software now supports the Macromedia Flash format. That way your presentation can be published on the web very easily; keeping most of its effects when it’ll be watched in a browser. But you can also pack your presentation as  a single file through an innovative feature that create in a few second a single executable file that you can send or share as you want : when double click on the file the slideshow is automatically launched. Great isn’t it? (it even supports Windows 3.x).  

Corel Presentations 10 MP3 Support (click to enlarge)

If you use your slideshows as a support during a conference, you’ll be glad to know Corel Presentations 10 manages notes. So you can add comments to every slide… Corel included to its software an enhanced help system with perfect expert that will answer to your natural questions and the Corel Knowledge Base will unstuck you. One thing as always been a problem in this kind of software: the alignment feature! But Corel Presentations 10 includes a very accurate alignment feature, inherited from Corel Draw, that will help you position your various objects precisely. Sure Corel doesn’t want you to make spelling or grammar errors so Presentation 10 comes with a spell-checker and a Grammatik tool.   

Corel Presentations 10 is packed with the Corel Bitmap Editor, based on the Corel Draw technology. It helps users create their own schemas or illustrations easily by using auto-shapes or drawing/painting tools. Corel Presentation 10 now supports animated GIF thus you can insert that kind of graphic files to liven up your presentations.  

One good feature is that you can directly scan documents from Presentations 10 if you’ve got a TWAIN compliant scanner. Finally the transitions effects of Corel Presentations 10 are certainly the most complete ones we’ve ever seen but the animations effects are too few.