Product: WordPerfect Office 2000 Standard Edition
Company: Corel Corporation
Website: http://www.corel.com
Estimated Street Price: $299.95 Upgrade: $99.00
Review By: Julien Jay

WordPerfect 9

Corel WordPerfect 9 is probably the software of the whole suite you’ll use most often. It’s very complete high intrinsic value word processor software that comes with a wide brunch of incredible powerful features. Sometimes the use of WordPerfect 9 is a little bit disrupting and complex for some of its features. However, Corel has really made a great job to improve it! Once the suite is installed click start, point programs/WordPerfect office 2000 and click WordPerfect 9. The software will smoothly start and after displaying a nice blue splash screen box you’ll be in front of a white page. 

One of the significant features that WordPerfect has carried throughout the years is that you can view & resize the margins directly from the page that is displayed on your screen! You don’t need to lose yourself in a menus’ ocean. The WordPerfect 2000 GUI features one menu bar and two toolbars (in standard ‘cause you can add or remove some toolbars). One of the bad point of the WordPerfect 2000 suite GUI is the “highlight” feature: indeed, each button, checkbox is flat and when you move your mouse cursor over, it becomes highlighted in 3D which is quite bothering. The toolbars are almost complete but the fact that the icons don’t look like the same as the Microsoft Word ones will disrupt most of the Microsoft Word regular users. Note that you can use Microsoft Word 97 (or old WordPerfect released toolbars) like toolbars but unfortunately the icons are the WordPerfect ones, so the fact you can display third party software like toolbars won’t really help you to find your way in this software.

WordPerfect 9 also comes with new ‘Open’ and ‘Save’ boxes that carry a toolbar and a menu bar that’ll allow any user to find a place to store their documents: you can add your most used documents to a favorites list and you can even preview the file you want to open due to the Outside in technology! It’s really great and it works also with picture files! But that’s not all! Far from that: WordPerfect 9 brings to you seven features that will really simplify your (hard!) life:

• You can switch to caps mode simply by pushing the AB icon of the status bar and vice versa (however you can’t change a word written in caps to a small letters one). The status bar also features a print icon that can be used to quickly print documents or to view (by flying your mouse cursor over it), which is the actual default printer.
  
• The scrolling feature will prevent you to buy a scrolling mouse! Indeed you push the scrolling button and instantly with your standard two buttons mouse you can scroll horizontal and vertical lifts. Great and useful except that it goes too fast on fast computer!
  
• The brand new formatting view will show all the formatting codes that your document holds. So it’s easy to remove, add, change a formatted code. However the high feature’s complexity of use will discourage most users.
  
• The quick font toolbar’s button lists the font (with a little preview) you used the most often and will allow you to apply them to your current selection.
  
• Now to create a PDF file you don’t need anymore to have Adobe Acrobat installed on your system. Indeed WordPerfect allows you to save every documents to the universal PDF file format. Your saved files will be viewable by everyone that has got the free Adobe Acrobat Reader applet!
  
• The ghost cursor feature allows you to put text everywhere on your layout’s page without using Enter key and tabulations. Simply activate this feature, and click on the page’s area where you want to type your text.
  
• Finally the brand new font list of the secondary toolbar will show you an instant & real preview of what your selected text will look like if you choose this font. That is to say, for example, if I select the Arial font for the Word: ActiveNetwork by using the toolbar a small window will display my real word in the new font selection with the current size/color attributes. Great isn’t it?
  

This site is not related to the Microsoft Corporation in any way. Windows and the Windows logo are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. ActiveWindows is an independent site. The information and sources here are obtained from series of hard work & research.