WordPerfect Suite X6- The Other Programs Part 1

By Bayle Emlein

What’s with the mixture of Roman and Arabic numerals in the title of X6? This started with the version after 12. Apparently the folks in Marketing were concerned enough about triskaidekaphobia that they didn’t want to include 13 anywhere in their title. They should have been much more concerned way back at the version after 3: the number Four is considered bad luck in most Asian cultures. Version 4 was a disaster for dBase and for DOS. Use Google if you think that DOS is just the number after uno.

Quattro Pro is spreadsheet component of the Corel office suite. It comes with the package, so it’s included in your $249 list price or whatever your shopping efforts find you. Spreadsheets are used to manipulate numbers, including things like payroll. I use one to balance my checkbook. I think of it as a printing calculator on steroids and find it hard to get too excited about any of them, mainly because I find it hard to get excited about the tasks I use them for. And I don’t use them routinely for very fancy tasks, basically as list-makers in which I can perform arithmetic functions, and have the computer do my searching. I noticed early on that I couldn’t find a way to search in a Notebook (Corel-ese for Workbook) across multiple Sheets (Corel-ese for Worksheet). Maybe it’s there, somewhere.

On the other hand, formulas seem to work exactly as in Excel, which reduces the learning curve and facilitates sharing with Microsoft devotees. I imagine this is because XML below application interface details. No problem importing various versions of Excel or saving as Excel from ‘97 to 2010, dBase (II, III, or IV) or Lotus–among others.

I found the Search All Worksheets in Excel by accidentally bonking something. Looks like I’ll have to stumble blindly in Quattro also. “Help” has not been at all helpful. The discovery method (professional-speak for “random poking”) doesn’t work for spelling, but it seems to be the way to go for data management.

On the other hand, Quattro does have a few nice features. The keyboard shortcut is the same as it is in WordPerfect, rather than a dive through menus. The Lock Titles feature sets the columns titles in stone, so to speak, so that I don’t accidentally scroll into the wrong part of the window or otherwise mess up my Notebook’s GPS system. Not the paradigm shift of Reveal Codes; but with my talent for getting lost in my own data, it’s pretty close.

In another Quattro feature, the Notebooks open with Sheets tabbed out to IV (that’s the letter after H plus the letter after U). Not quite to infinity–but definitely as much as I’ve ever needed. As long as they’re empty, I couldn’t see that the extra Sheets add significantly to file size.

Quattro Pro is part of the Corel suite and is a perfectly serviceable spreadsheet application that interfaces seamlessly with other applications on the market. It is well-integrated with the word processing application in the suite, WordPerfect, reducing the learning curve. That in itself makes it worth considering.

End of Part 1