WordPerfect Office X6: the Other Programs Part 2

By Bayle Emlein

Presentations completes the standard office suite trilogy. The analog is PowerPoint, which has become a common noun and verb the way Google and Xerox have. The creation page offers both gridlines and cross hairs. Under View, one can set up options for gridlines spacing (as well as whether or not to have either or both visible or hidden). From my untalented perspective, cross hairs in a drawing program are critical–as  important as Reveal Codes and right up there with a good spell checker and sliced bread. Of course, there are features in Presentations that are missing (or at least really, really hard to find) in other brands, and vice versa. The Tutorial built into Presentations makes it easy to master the functions of the program and create a competent slideshow presentation.


The suite includes two more unheralded applications: Presentation Graphics and Lightning. Presentation Graphics is a respectable bitmap drawing and editing application, useful for do-it-yourself graphics–for copying to slideshows, for example. Presentations Graphics is not to be confused with Presentations, any more than Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer or Outlook and Outlook Express should be confused. It’s the user who’s confused. Users of the Corel Graphics Suite will feel familiar with the toolbar for bitmap drawing (including grids and cross hairs). Charts, text art, and organizational charts are new; maybe just newer than my version of the graphics suite. I appreciate the ease of finding the org chart templates since updating them is another chore I’d delegate if I had the authority.


Lightning is an example of a relatively new kind of application that is most frequently promoted as a study tool. However, given the long history of WordPerfect supporting the needs of the legal profession, this kind of tool is not surprising. Lightning is a tool for aggregating and organizing notes from a longer document, in WordPerfect or Word. The product has just three tools: a Viewer, a Notes window, and a Navigator window. You see your document in the Viewer Window, create notes in the Notes Window and organize them into projects in the Navigator. Much more elegant than the old-fashioned way, copying and pasting into a separate document and organizing files and folders from the menu tree.

Templates–legal and other, eBook publishing to the Mobi format are tucked into the New From Project tab under the WordPerfect File menu. Once you figure out where they are, they’re easy to find and require no extra opening of applications to complete the task.

As noted several times, the Corel products are nicely integrated with each other, reducing learning time and keeping focus on task completion. Formatting options and Reveal Codes put the core word processor in the market to compete with low- to mid-end desktop publishing applications without the need to buy and learn a new program. Excel and Presentations round out the suite, with support from Lightning and Presentation Graphics, resulting in a robust package that is well worth consideration.


WordPerfect X6 (Suite) $249.99
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