Microsoft Office is on just about every Windows desktop in the world. Although your company's volume license might be less than the full $399 retail price for Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003, supplying everyone with an office suite is still likely a significant expense. Alternatives to Office are available, but your business partners probably use Office and all your business data is locked in the Office binary file format. Is switching to another vendor's office suite really an option? To answer that question, I tested Corel WordPerfect Office 12 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 against Microsoft Office 2003. (IBM Lotus SmartSuite was unavailable for review.) Although the functionality of the three suites is similar and both WordPerfect Office 12 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 can read and write Office documents, I found that many document elements don't display correctly in converted files. Let's take a closer look at the products.
Testing Criteria
I evaluated each suite on its ability to read and write Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files, performance when handling a large document, support for large-scale deployment, and price. (For more detailed information about performance, see the Web-exclusive sidebar "Performance Comparisons," http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 47654.)
Although I'm sure die-hard advocates of each product will beg to differ, I found no significant differences in the core functionality of each suite in regards to creating and editing text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in their native formats. Even the menu items were similar in most cases. When they weren't, the online help in both WordPerfect Office and OpenOffice.org had Word feature-comparison tables that let me quickly find the feature I was looking for. Both WordPerfect Office and OpenOffice.org support macro scripting languages similar to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Although neither product could convert and run Office macros, OpenOffice.org preserved macros so that they could be used when a user reopened the document with Office.
WordPerfect Office 12
WordPerfect Office 12 comes in three editions: Standard ($189), Small Business ($349), and Professional ($399). The Standard edition includes the WordPerfect word processor; the Quattro Pro 12 spreadsheet; and Presentations 12, a PowerPoint equivalent. The Small Business edition adds the WordPerfect Mail email client, the PaintShop Pro graphics program, and WordPerfect OfficeReady business-planning software. WordPerfect Mail can access Exchange email via IMAP but doesn't support Exchange calendaring. The Professional edition additionally includes Paradox, a Microsoft Access–like relational database, among other features.
To test WordPerfect Office's ability to use Office documents, I used Office to create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents by using some of the most common features of each program. I opened each document by using the appropriate program from both Office and WordPerfect Office and compared the documents side by side to see differences in rendering. For WordPerfect and Word, I also compared printed versions of the documents. You can find my original Office documents and versions saved with both WordPerfect Office and OpenOffice.org in the Web-exclusive sidebar, "Sample Microsoft Office Documents Saved with Corel WordPerfect Office 12 and Sun Microsystems OpenOffice.org 1.1.4," http://www.windowsitpro.com, Instant Doc 47655.
Word processing. WordPerfect failed to render some minor and more important features from all three proprietary Office file formats (.doc, .xls, and .ppt); for more information about the file formats that Office uses, see the sidebar "Microsoft Office File Formats." Figure 1 shows a sample native Microsoft Word 2003 document, and Figure 2 shows that document opened in WordPerfect Office 12. The most egregious error in the Word document was WordPerfect's inability to convert change-tracking data. It lost some minor formatting, such as double strikethrough and paragraph borders, WordArt, and the fill color in a drawing element. It also added some blank pages around continuous section breaks. I didn't find any differences between the printed and online comparisons.
When working with its native file formats, WordPerfect is equivalent to Word in most respects and superior in some. The WordPerfect users I know are always quick to tell me about WordPerfect's Reveal Codes feature, which displays the hidden formatting codes within the document. This feature lets you quickly fix any formatting issues and truly is wonderful. Office 2003 has a similar feature called Reveal Formatting, but it doesn't show where formatting changes begin and end in the document and will probably disappoint WordPerfect users. WordPerfect also comes with built-in support for creating PDF files (Word doesn't) and a typesetting feature that let me make small adjustments to word positions, something I couldn't duplicate in Word.
Spreadsheet. Quattro Pro had a few problems converting an Excel document. I tested 15 Excel functions across six function categories. The only function that Quattro Pro failed to convert was the financial function Net Present Value (NPV); if you use certain Excel formulas frequently, check that Quattro Pro will convert them before you buy WordPerfect Office 12. Quattro Pro lost formatting on a date field, failed to correctly render the formatting on a chart, and didn't convert a Pivot Table to a Quattro Pro CrossTab report. Although all these things were fixable, I wouldn't want to have to share the converted document with a customer or business partner.
>Presentation. Presentations, the PowerPoint-like presentations program, was the poorest of WordPerfect Office's components at converting Office documents. Presentation converted regular slides fairly well, including charts and graphics, but transitions, action buttons, animation, and slide notes were all lost in the conversion. Although I could save native Presentations files in PowerPoint format, most of the text appeared hidden on the margin of each slide, rendering the presentation useless.
>Deployment. Like Office, WordPerfect Office 12 uses Windows Installer and inherits all its associated functionality, such as Group Policy deployment. It supports silent installs, as do the Windows Installer patches that Corel releases for updates. WordPerfect Office 12 is well-suited for enterprise deployment.
WordPerfect Office 12 offers nearly identical document-creation and editing features to Office at a lower price. However, its limitations in converting Office documents make it problematic for large businesses that have many existing documents and need to share documents with business partners that use Office. If you use Exchange for calendaring, WordPerfect Mail can't replace Microsoft Outlook, and buying Outlook separately will negate your cost savings. WordPerfect Office could be an excellent choice for small businesses whose existing documents don't represent a significant investment, aren't complex enough to have the conversion problems I mentioned, and have limited communications using Office documents. WordPerfect Office might also be a good choice for companies that need WordPerfect OfficeReady for business planning and accounting, since Microsoft's competing product, Microsoft Small Business Accounting, hasn't yet been released.
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