Corel WordPerfect Office

Corel WordPerfect Office is the perfect office suite for anyone who is fed up with Microsoft Office's annoying habit of formatting your documents in ways you don’t expect. It has a dated interface and no Mac or mobile apps, but it gives you unequaled control over your documents—especially long, complex documents. It's exceptionally attractive for anyone who needs precisely formatted documents, such as lawyers and professional writers. WordPerfect Office is the only Windows office suite that works in a completely different way from our high-powered, full-featured Editors' Choice winner, Microsoft 365, and also completely different from streamlined online suites like Editors' Choice winner Google Workspace.

How Much Does Corel WordPerfect Office Cost?

Like Microsoft Office and SoftMaker Office, Corel WordPerfect Office comes in multiple versions. For most users, Corel WordPerfect Office Standard ($249.99) is the sweet spot. If you need to access Paradox databases created many years ago, you'll want the Professional ($399.99) edition. Keep in mind that all the Corel WordPerfect Office suites are for Windows only, and the current version dates back to 2021 (but so does the latest local install version of Microsoft Office, to be fair). Corel hasn’t indicated when a new version may be available, though the normal interval between versions has been two or three years, so you probably won’t have to wait long.

A basic $99.99 Home & Student version includes the standard office apps: WordPerfect word processor, Quattro Pro spreadsheet app, Presentations (the presentations app, unsurprisingly), and a bare-bones note-taking and file-viewing app called WordPerfect Lightning. The Oxford Concise Dictionary is built into the suite, and Corel also throws in its AfterShot 3 photo editing software.

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Move up to the $249.99 Standard edition, and you get the same software but with added features such as surprisingly effective PDF import, routing-slip, and document-reviewing features, and legal features such as pleading templates and a table-of-authority builder.

The $399.99 Professional version adds PDF form-creation, more flexible ePub export (though without support for the latest ePub formats), the Paradox database manager, Corel's MultiCam screen-and-video capture software, and a software developer's kit for automating the suite.

The price to upgrade from a previous version of WordPerfect Office is $159.99. ??You're not eligible for an upgrade if your existing version is labeled Academic, Home & Student, OEM, or Not for Resale.

All the prices mentioned are for a one-time purchase. Many other apps have moved to subscription pricing instead. As an example, Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. The Business edition of Google Workspace starts at $6 per person per month, though Google apps are free for nonbusiness use with an account. LibreOffice is also free. WordPerfect is one of the few major holdouts offering perpetual license purchases instead of the subscription pricing required by most other vendors.

WordPerfect vs. Microsoft Word

WordPerfect was the dominant word processor in the DOS era of the 1980s and early 1990s, until Microsoft Word supplanted it under Windows. Regardless, WordPerfect for Windows continues to be a major player, especially in the legal market, where it's the only app that offers both advanced legal formatting features and a document management system that doesn't rely on Microsoft's networking software.

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While plenty of suites are essentially Office clones, only two major suites operate differently: Corel WordPerfect Office, which is for Windows only, and Apple's iWork apps, which run only on Apple hardware or in limited versions in a browser. Apple's apps are sleek and up-to-date, while Corel's have an old-school look and feel that won't attract many new users. What sets the WordPerfect Office suite apart from others is the fact that its namesake word processor, WordPerfect, is the only office app that gives you total control over every detail of the documents you produce.

WordPerfect Office remains a major player mostly because all the alternatives, and especially Microsoft Word, make it almost impossible to achieve the same kind of control that WordPerfect offers. They create frustrations that WordPerfect users never face.

I use Microsoft Word when I merely need to write a document that I can send to someone else or when I'm sending something to a publisher. I use WordPerfect when I need to get the format and content exactly as I want them. Think of a book with a massive bibliography and hundreds of footnotes, for example.

WordPerfect uses its own WPD file format, which most but not all rival suites can open. But if you share files with non-WordPerfect users, WordPerfect can open and save files in Word's DOCX format. You can also set DOCX as the default save format, though this slightly slows down file saving and opening.

In some areas, WordPerfect Office lags noticeably behind other office apps. As I mentioned, it’s for Windows only and doesn’t offer mobile or browser-based apps, and its look takes you back almost to the twentieth century. It also doesn't support real-time collaboration, something Google Docs and others have done for years. Later in this piece I will also point out a few specific features and capabilities missing from WordPerfect Office that you do get from Microsoft Office. Whether you need or care about these features may help you decide whether to use Corel WordPerfect Office.

A Novel Word Processor

The one and only reason to go with WordPerfect Office as your office suite is for the WordPerfect word processor. The included spreadsheet app, Quattro Pro, is more than good enough, and Presentations is a decent presentation and graphics app, but no one would choose them over Excel or PowerPoint. WordPerfect, like Word, includes standard modern conveniences like PDF import and export, file comparison, and more. But what makes it stand out is its precise formatting combined with features that make it easy to see exactly why your document looks the way it does.

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Every modern word processor lets you create documents from templates, but WordPerfect includes a range of wizard-style projects that conveniently create graph paper or business letters with your default address and phone number. You can record or write macros in WordPerfect's native macro language, and advanced users can write macros in Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications that can automate almost anything in Windows. 

WordPerfect has a few built-in abilities that Word doesn't, such as redacting its own documents and exporting to ePub and legal filing formats. The app's Make It Fit feature automatically adjusts formatting to prevent the last few lines of your document from overflowing onto a new page.

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Reveal Codes: What They Mean

The feature that makes WordPerfect unique and essential is its Reveal Codes pane, which you can open with a keystroke at the bottom of the document window. The Reveal Codes pane shows the text of your document, interspersed with buttons that represent the otherwise hidden codes that control formatting and other features. It isn't pretty, but once you've tried it, you'll wish you had the ability in Word, too. A not-so-fun fact: twenty years ago, a third-party vendor invented a system that let Microsoft Word display something very similar to WordPerfect’s Reveal Codes, but Microsoft’s updates to Word broke that system permanently.

The first code in the Reveal Codes pane for a typical document is labeled Document Style. Double-click it to open a dialog showing format codes that apply to the entire document, like the default language. You can add, edit, or remove these codes inside the dialog using menus that show you every available option.

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Other codes displayed in the document might include font-size settings or pairs of codes that begin and end the styling for bold or italic. To remove italic type, backspace over one of the paired italic codes or simply drag it out of the Reveal Codes window. This is a far more reliable method than the one used in every other word processor, which requires you to select the text you want to modify and then (for example) remove the italic attribute – a method that never lets you be certain that you’ve changed everything you want to change, and haven’t modified anything that you don’t want to change.

If you've used complex formatting in Word, you've probably been frustrated by unwanted changes that Word makes in your files and that you can't get rid of, for example, the horizontal line that Word inserts beneath a paragraph if you type a line of hyphens. That never happens in WordPerfect (though I’ll mention some other frustrations that may arise), and if anything gets into your WordPerfect file that you don't want there, you simply open the Reveal Codes pane and remove the offending codes. I’m not the only Microsoft Word user who has wanted to bang my head on the desk when trying to remove stray graphics from a Word file.

WordPerfect has been using formatting codes since the 1980s, and code-based formatting mostly went out of style when Microsoft Word for Windows conquered the market. Code-based formatting is an old idea that's become new again. One big example is the rise in popularity of Markdown language, which lets you modify formatting by inserting simple inline codes. WordPerfect's codes are more foolproof than Markdown language because you can only enter them through a menu and can't create non-working or nonsense codes as you can with Markdown and similar languages.

WordPerfect Formatting

Under the hood, Word works entirely differently from WordPerfect, even when the printed output looks exactly the same. Word stores formatting and other information separate from the text of a file. WordPerfect stores formatting codes mixed in with the text.

All too often, Word loses track of the formatting that affects the contents of large and complex documents. Because Word works this way, WordPerfect far surpasses it as a tool for combining multiple documents into one file. Both Word and WordPerfect have a Master Document feature that lets you edit (for example) separate chapters of a book in separate document files that automatically get combined into a single document when you open a Master Document that contains links to the chapters.

In Word, this feature has always been unreliable, and master documents too easily become corrupt, so you can't reconstruct the chapters that go into them. Word's Master Document feature has destroyed too many of my documents for me to risk using it ever again, and Microsoft now buries the feature so that it’s almost impossible to find. (Hint: turn on Outline View in Word, and the Master Document feature appears on the Ribbon.) In contrast, WordPerfect's Master Document feature works perfectly every time.

Despite its unique powers, WordPerfect can be frustrating. It doesn't automatically update the word count in its status bar. It doesn't let you replace, for example, underlining with italics unless you write a macro or use a third-party macro from a site like Barry MacDonnell's Toolbox for WordPerfect. You can track changes only by comparing two versions of a document, not by viewing tracked changes in the current document, as you can in Word. Many users will be discouraged by WordPerfect’s inability to create text in any language supported by the Unicode standard, which means you can’t use Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, and you can’t enter right-to-left text in Arabic or Hebrew.

Furthermore, Word and other word processors let you view two parts of a document in two panes of the current window, with changes made in one pane instantly reflected in the other. In WordPerfect, if you want to view two parts of a document at the same time, you have to open a read-only copy in a second window. Serious WordPerfect users like me learn to live with these limitations, though I wish Corel would find a way to eliminate them.

WordPerfect for Legal Professionals

WordPerfect's legal features include built-in Bates numbering (page numbers with leading zeroes), automated formatting of pleading papers, and export to the EDGAR format required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Law offices and anyone else who works with older documents will value WordPerfect's ability to open files in dozens of legacy formats, including old Microsoft Word documents that current versions of Word block for security reasons. Those security precautions make sense because old Word files that might contain macro viruses can be dangerous in later versions of Word. Word macros won't run in WordPerfect, so WordPerfect can open those files safely.

By the way, WordPerfect's Reveal Codes pane is unique, but WordPerfect isn't the only app that displays formatting codes. The specialist academic word processor Nota Bene can display formatting codes among its view options, though it doesn't have WordPerfect's two-pane view with codes shown in the second pane. Nota Bene is a uniquely powerful system for academic research and writing, especially in ancient and modern languages. It can perform feats of data storage and retrieval that other apps can't even dream of. It effortlessly formats output to match the demands of specialist publishers. That said, it's designed exclusively for the academic market, not general users.

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The Rest of the Suite

As I said, you’ll only want this suite if you want the WordPerfect word processor because all the other apps in the suite are outclassed by the competition from Microsoft, LibreOffice, TextMaker, and other vendors. But if you buy the suite, the Quattro spreadsheet app, Presentations app, and Lightning utility work well with WordPerfect, and the whole suite holds together in an impressive way.

Quattro Pro

Quattro Pro is a solid spreadsheet app that supports advanced features such as web queries, spreadsheet groups, and the equivalent of Excel's pivot tables, which Quattro calls Cross Tabs. However, Quattro can't manage worksheets as large as the enormous ones that Excel can handle, and it slows to a crawl when handling massive data sets. Excel keeps adding convenience features, like one that lets you combine columns of first and last names in a single column, while new versions of Quattro Pro add little more than tweaks, like a redesigned search dialog in the latest version. 

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As part of the WordPerfect suite, Quattro Pro has the advantage that it can use two kinds of automation, depending on what feels most comfortable. It can use the same PerfectScript macro language used by WordPerfect or its native Quattro Pro macro language, which dates back to before the app became part of a suite. A law office that uses WordPerfect can easily create systems that automate the word processor and the spreadsheet for efficient large-scale business operations.

Presentations

Corel's presentation app, Presentations, has an impressive range of transitions and effects. Compared with PowerPoint and Keynote, though, its templates look amateurish, and Presentations lacks advanced features such as the ability to show only part of a video or start a video at a specified time. As part of the WordPerfect suite, Presentations uses the same macro language as WordPerfect, so it’s easy to automate the word processor and presentations app via a single macro that, for example, feeds content from a WordPerfect document into a new presentation.

Corel’s Presentations, uniquely among presentation apps, also doubles as a graphics editor. Installing the suite creates two shortcuts for the Presentations app, one labeled Presentations and the other labeled Presentations Graphics. They both open the same app, but the second shortcut starts up the app as a bitmap editor. If you have graphics in WordPerfect’s own WPG format, Presentations is the only modern app that can edit this file format directly.

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If you don't care about dazzling new features, both Quattro Pro and Presentations get the job done well. Like WordPerfect, both can save to Microsoft Office formats by default if you need to share files in an Office-centric world.

Lightning

Another optional feature of the suite is WordPerfect Lightning, a note-taking app that can’t approach the feature set and flexibility of Microsoft OneNote but has some unique features that you may want if you use the rest of the suite. Lightning lets you view PDFs and Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect documents without taking the time needed to open them for editing. It also lets you create a folder-based structure for any notes you create in the app and send those notes to WordPerfect for use in documents. I’ve never made much use of it, but it can be useful to anyone who collects text and images from the web and other documents for use in their own work.

Do You Need WordPerfect Office?

Do you need WordPerfect Office? If you're a longtime WordPerfect user, as I am, then you don't need my recommendation because you'll buy it anyway. If you're not a longtime user, you might want to consider it if you need advanced automation features for your law office or if you're frustrated that you can't get formatting exactly as you want it in other apps. 

If you work in an office that has old WordPerfect files you need to open, you can mostly manage without WordPerfect itself. LibreOffice opens almost all WordPerfect files, and so does SoftMaker Office. Microsoft Word can open simple WordPerfect files but not complex ones. You’re far better off opening old WordPerfect files in WordPerfect itself.  

With its retro interface, WordPerfect won’t attract many new users, but security-minded users might want to consider it. A few years ago, a Google security engineer named Tavis Ormandy began recommending old WordPerfect versions running in modern Linux for their speed, security, and safety, and that’s the kind of recommendation that I’m happy to trust.

Verdict: An Unusual But Indispensable Office Suite

WordPerfect is one of a kind, and if it suits your needs, there's no alternative. Editors' Choice winner Microsoft 365 still rules the office app world thanks to its vast power and flexibility, and Google Workplace wins for online collaborative office productivity. But I use WordPerfect for long-term projects where I need total control over how they look and act.