Unlike all other major office suites, WordPerfect Office 2020 doesn’t try to emulate Microsoft 365’s productivity apps. The word processor at the heart of the suite, WordPerfect, produces documents that look like anything produced by Microsoft Word or Google Docs, but it creates those documents in an entirely different way and gives you far more control over formatting and other features. WordPerfect has a loyal user base in law firms, government offices, and academia. Each new version of the suite adds a few features and bug-fixes but leaves the basics unchanged, making WordPerfect is the only word processor that uses the same file format that it started using 25 years ago. That kind of continuity is exactly what its user base needs.
To be transparent, here, I fall squarely within that user base. I have both Word and WordPerfect on my system, and I mostly use Word for writing reviews for PCMag and anything else that’s only a few hundred words long. But when I’m working on anything longer, or anything that needs precise control over formatting, WordPerfect has never let me down.
How Much Does WordPerfect Office Cost?
WordPerfect Office runs only on Windows, not on mobile devices or a browser. It also lacks real-time collaboration features. If you want to run WordPerfect on a Mac, you’ll need virtualization software. The suite comprises the standard three office apps: the WordPerfect word processor, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet app, and Presentations. You also get a file-viewing and note-taking utility called WordPerfect Lightning, plus some utilities for building legal documents, creating eBooks, and managing photos.
I tested WordPerfect Office Standard 2020, which costs $249.99. A Professional version, priced at $399.99, includes the Paradox database software and a few other utilities, but you won’t need the Professional version unless you’re already using Paradox. A $99 Home & Student version omits features like PDF import and form-building, document-reviewing, and legal features. All of these prices are one-time costs, which may appeal to people who are tired of the subscription-based model.
Microsoft charges one-time fees of $439.99 for the standalone Office 2019 Professional version and $149.99 for the Home and Student version—the local, non-subscription versions of Office. Microsoft 365 Personal, the online/local version of the suite has subscription prices starting at $69.99 per year. Either way, you get more from Microsoft; if you choose Corel, you’re likely choosing it because WordPerfect is different from everything else, not because it’s cheaper. If price is what matters to you, SoftMaker Office is only $79.95 for its standard version, and LibreOffice is free.
Outdated Interface
WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Presentations share a menu-and-toolbar interface that resembles Microsoft Office 2003. The menus tend to be crowded and the toolbars look clunky, though you can completely customize and rearrange everything, choosing between different prebuilt menu systems and about twenty toolbars.
Some advanced features are far easier to use in WordPerfect than in Word, however. For example, you can remove multiple styles from a document in a single operation, something impossible in Word. This is one reason I sometimes import badly formatted Word documents into WordPerfect to clean them up before continuing to edit them in Word.
That said, I’m still surprised by things that WordPerfect can’t do. It doesn’t display a live word count—you have to click on the status bar to update it. You’ll still need a third-party macro if you want to replace all the underlines in a document with italics, too. (The best source of WordPerfect macros is Barry MacDonnell’s Toolbox for WordPerfect.) Word has the unique ability to split a document window so you can edit the first page in the top pane and the final page in the bottom pane; WordPerfect’s different architecture probably makes a similar feature impossible.
The Power of WordPerfect
The WordPerfect word-processor is the jewel in the suite’s crown and the only compelling reason to buy it. Quattro Pro and Presentations are relatively low-powered compared to Excel and PowerPoint, and not substantially better than LibreOffice’s free spreadsheet and presentations apps. But, for many users, including myself, WordPerfect is essential; it performs tasks that are almost impossible in Word.
The feature that makes WordPerfect unique is its optional Reveal Codes pane, which shows exactly where formatting like italics, indentation, styles, or anything else begins and ends. Press Alt-F3 or click a toolbar button, and the Reveal Codes pane shows the text of your document interspersed with otherwise hidden codes. If some formatting is wrong or misplaced, you simply drag or delete a code to change it. In Word, by contrast, it’s almost impossible to figure out exactly where formatting begins and ends. Even expert users can be flummoxed by Word’s system of storing formatting inside the normally invisible paragraph mark at the end of a paragraph and by the often unpredictable effects of deleting a paragraph mark or applying formatting to a paragraph mark that you can’t even see. When you italicize some text in Word, you essentially paint it with formatting that is stored in a part of the file separate from the text itself.
All this can make it surprisingly difficult to control exactly how your Word document looks and acts. All other major word processors work similarly to Word, without the direct access to formatting codes that you get in WordPerfect. If all you’re doing is typing school reports or business letters, this won’t matter to you, but it matters a lot when you’re creating documents like legal briefs or technical documents that have rigid format requirements. WordPerfect includes highly focused tools for creating legal pleading papers and similar documents, too.
WordPerfect’s current version enhances the Reveal Codes feature by increasing the amount of information visible in each code. Corel also provides an online PDF that lists and explains all the sometimes obscure feature names that can appear in the Reveal Codes window, so you don’t need to scratch your head over “Box Num Inc” (it means Box Number Increase, a code that increments the number of a graphics box).
Other features worth noticing in WordPerfect 2020 include the ability to create PDFs with fillable form fields. This doesn’t require any extra effort or external software. Simply create a fillable form field in a WordPerfect document, choose the menu option to Publish to PDF, and the resulting PDF is a fillable form. LibreOffice can also create PDF forms, but Microsoft Word can’t. If you create a fillable form field in a Word document, it’s only fillable in Word and appears as static text when you export the document from Word to PDF. A template viewer gives WordPerfect the same kind of template-preview feature found in Office.
WordPerfect’s templates include support for standard academic stylesheets from the MLA, APA, and the Turabian handbook. WordPerfect’s eBook template includes a sidebar that guides you through all the steps of creating and publishing an eBook. Other templates, including the one that creates legal pleadings, include similar guided workflows.
WordPerfect’s other strengths include strong support for long documents, especially master documents made up of separate chapters that can be edited as separate subdocument files. WordPerfect’s master document feature is flexible and reliable—unlike Microsoft Word’s equivalent feature which is so notoriously fragile that Microsoft has removed it from Word’s interface, and you can only use it after dredging it out of a customization menu. I’ve wasted hours rebuilding multi-chapter documents scrambled by Word’s Master Document feature.
WordPerfect’s Master Documents work well because WordPerfect’s system of inserting formatting codes in a document guarantees that it can keep track of where a chapter begins and ends. Word’s method of using pointers in one part of a document file to keep track of subdocuments in another part almost guarantees that Word will eventually get confused about what belongs in specific subdocuments and in the master document that contains them.
WordPerfect’s Performance and Compatibility
I use both Word and WordPerfect, but WordPerfect is now so speedy and adept at importing and exporting Word documents that it’s practical to use only WordPerfect even in an Office-centric world. It imported the 1800-page Word document that I use for testing almost instantaneously and had no trouble keeping up as I navigated it.
Quattro Pro, however, couldn’t import the huge Excel worksheet I use for testing; it simply locked up while trying to open it. If you need that kind of power, stick with Excel. Note that the first time you export to the latest Office formats, WordPerfect will offer to download and install a set of conversion filters. It only needs to perform this step once.
WordPerfect is also the only current word-processor that can save files in legacy formats like WordStar—a feature that may be useful only to George R. R. Martin, who writes Game of Thrones in WordStar. This support is typical of WordPerfect’s unique power with past and present file formats. The same flexibility extends to the Quattro Pro spreadsheet app, which allows you to save files as old Excel formats, something that Excel itself can’t handle.
Quattro Pro, Presentations, and Lightning
As for the rest of the suite, Quattro Pro and Presentations roughly correspond to the feature set in Excel and PowerPoint from Office 2003—though Presentations, unlike PowerPoint (but like LibreOffice Draw), also doubles as a graphics editor. Quattro Pro provides more than enough power for most business and academic uses, though it is not as flexible, elegant, or advanced (it has no equivalent to Pivot tables, for example) as Excel. The latest version of Quattro includes a welcome feature that sets a default zoom level for new worksheets, however.
Presentations offers a feature set that might have impressed you twenty years ago. Don’t expect up-to-date features like PowerPoint or KeyNote’s ability to import online video, trim a video clip, or make subtle variations in transitions. For me, the biggest attraction of Presentations is its option to run as a graphic image editor that’s capable of handling almost any bitmap format, including legacy formats.
The suite also includes a notebook app called WordPerfect Lightning that provides quick previews of Word and WordPerfect documents and has a convenient feature for taking and storing screenshots for future use. It feels limited and outdated, especially compared to Microsoft’s OneNote, which enables you to work with documents, files, and free-form notes. You may want Lightning for its compatibility with WordPerfect itself, however.
For Complete Control and Stability
If you’re using any other alternative to Microsoft 365‘s apps, such as the free LibreOffice, you may want to consider WordPerfect for its greater stability, simpler interface, and deeper feature set for complex documents. For existing WordPerfect users, the 2020 upgrade adds smoother import and export of Microsoft formats, easy ePub exports, and enough interface enhancements and Windows 10 integrations to make it a worthwhile upgrade. WordPerfect isn’t for everyone, but its long-term users won’t accept anything else.
