| In some ways, the difficulties with CorelCENTRAL are a measure of
its potential. The incomplete integration of Netscape may mean that making an
appointment basically consists in sending a message to yourself, but this also points the
way towards powerful teamwork tools. Options exist, for instance, to send every
member of a group the time and date of an appointment. One assumes that future
iterations of the programme will strengthen these sorts of features further, and more
closely integrate them with Netscape Conference, allowing things like virtual
congresses or automatically finding a time when everyone is free for a faculty
meeting. Moreover, Corel seems to have committed itself quite solidly to CorelCENTRAL,
touting it as a centre-piece of their new java enabled enterprise solutions, code-named Alta. None of these difficulties with secondary elements of the package can detract, however, from the strengths of WordPerfect itself. The most recent iteration builds on WordPerfect's commanding lead in word processing abilities, adding automation, customization, and HTML features. WordPerfect remains the only major word processor to allow users to manipulate directly the codes controlling document format. This feature has, in fact, been strengthened, adding a second slide-bar above the verticle scroll bar, and thereby providing another way to split the screen into revealed codes and WYSIWYG text. The "Reveal Codes" feature is hardly new, but it is to my mind one of the most compelling reasons to choose WordPerfect. In the past two weeks, it has rescued both my wife's and my own CV. A new set of automated tools has also been added to WordPerfect and all of the other core applications. Starting an article formatted to the specifications of the Modern Languages Association is as simple as choosing New | MLA document from the PerfectExpert button at the bottom of the Windows 95 screen. The PerfectExpert macros take care of all the formatting for you, even launching the program itself. There are also PerfectExperts designed to guide the user through creating documents conforming to American Psychological Association style or Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, as well as such things as expense reports, exams, grade sheets, graph paper, several different types of web pages and a hangman game. More PerfectExperts are continuously added to the Corel web site. Representatives of the corporation have informed me by e-mail that they hope to add a citation and bibliography management tool to the next suite, using the CardFile of CorelCENTRAL, along with templates and macros to integrate the data correctly into a WordPerfect document. In addition to the PerfectExperts, WordPerfect 8 also incorporates a number of other new tools. Grammar-as-you-go catches bad sentences as they're typed, though it slows down the computer significantly. Once a word is highlighted, one can left-click on it to receive a suggestion, and an explanation of one's probable error. While this sounds like a feature designed to drive Chaucer scholars mad, it might nevertheless be quite useful for some students. More seriously, prompt-as-you-go provides a sort of running thesaurus function for any word on which one pauses. If one finds this annoying, it can always be turned off. In fact, almost everything can be turned off. The user interface is heavily customizable. One chooses, for instances, whether one's current page number and position on the page is to be displayed, the zoom ratio of the screen, which ruler bars to display, and which of sixteen tool bars will be visible. Users of WordPerfect 6.1 can opt to have its toolbar on its descendant. On the other hand, those who were fond of the minimal display of WordPerfect for DOS can eliminate all toolbars, and those really wishing to make a campaign out of it can fill most of the screen space with toolbars and rulers. Perhaps the most useful toolbar for academics is the "reference" toolbar, which provides simple icons for most of the more menial tasks involved in writing. One of the toolbars available is "Hyperlink Tools," and WordPerfect 8 provides considerable advances over its predecessors and competitors in the area of web integration. WordPerfect both saves and loads web pages, unto a screen which displays HTML well enough to be mistaken for a browser. There are still differences, of course, but it's possible to gain most of the editing capabilities of WordPerfect and save a document that can be placed on the web. In fact, WordPerfect recognizes valid URLs as they are typed, and automatically creates hyperlinks for them. Moreover, one can double check how the document will appear to readers by launching a web browser from within WordPerfect. Any formatting commands not supported by HTML are shaded when the view is set to "Web page," but these limitations can be mostly overcome by another tool which also allows publishing to the web. Corel Barista creates java applets to reproduce more advanced formatting codes, with a small script to allow readers to turn from one page to another. Barista is advertised on the packaging as a "Printer Driver," which is an accurate description. It reproduces paper documents unto web pages, rather than providing a means to edit web documents. A good example of how web capabilities and automated tools can work together was provided for me last week. I wanted to make a series of documents available to a few colleagues with whom I am organizing a conference. To begin with, we wanted a calendar to keep track of our internal deadlines. Fortunately, a PerfectExpert will produce a table in the form of a calendar for months of the user's choosing. I typed a few events under the relevant dates, and then saved the whole file as HTML. The WordPerfect table representing each month was converted to HTML and all of the calendars were strung together as a single web page. I also had to upload our working budget, which had been provided to me by a Microsoft Word user in plain text. I only had to highlight his tab-delimited text, select Table | Table and WordPerfect produced one. A few simple changes had to be made, such as combining cells (another area which has been improved), and adding horizontal lines, then the whole was sent to HTML. The hardest part in producing the web pages, in fact, was probably uploading them. One should nevertheless be forewarned that WordPerfect is not a true HTML editor; on the contrary, it is a word processor which will save in HTML. If you load a web page, and then select "Reveal Codes," you will be shown WordPerfect codes, not raw HTML. As long as one only wishes to design simple web pages, the "Internet Publisher" tool and HTML capabilities will work perfectly. For anything more sophisticated, however, a version of Netscape Composer comes with the suite. I wrote this review on WordPerfect, but am preparing it for web publication with Composer. In fact, it is probably best to consider this package like its predecessor, not as an integrated set of software, but as the world's most powerful word processor, complemented by a large number of value-added bonus applications. Installation can pose difficulties, and CorelCENTRAL still leaves a great deal to be desired; nevertheless, if most of your work consists in word-smithing, which it probably does, then Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 Academic Edition represents an enormously powerful tool at an unbeatable price. Moreover, the package also provides most of the software you are likely to need for simple web page publishing, multimedia presentations, or tracking student grades.
December, 1997 |
