Suites for the Sweet: WordPerfect Office 2000 - page 6

Moving a Long-Established Suite to Linux

One of the things that impressed me overall about this release of WP2000 was the effective use of the Internet to provide extra templates and projects. These links were found in every application's version of PerfectExpert. I found them very useful, particularly the sections of the Web pages devoted to sharing other users' templates. Fellow users are often better sources of creative material.

Now for the Flip Side
There were some problems that consistently showed up while using this application. In order to get this suite to the Linux platform, Corel opted to use WINE to make the transition work. Several times during each session I could see error messages generated in the Console window because of WINE. These errors did not seem to hinder the operation of the application or my system, but that many error messages can't be a good thing.

Other hiccups included an unfortunate tendency for applications not to start from the Application Starter menu in KDE. There was at least one instance (in Paradox) where the Import dialog box referred to my Linux partition as D:\, which is not something a hardcore Linux user will want to see.

The full installation of WP2000 takes up just over 450 Mb of hard drive space, which isn't exactly small. Newer PC owners won't flinch too much, but older PCs with smaller hard drives will have to tighten their belts to get this suite running.

Wrapping Up
This product has the look and feel of its Windows counterpart (thanks to WINE) and seems to have inherited some bugs because of it. We can only hope that Corel engineers are working on a true native port of this application to Linux to get the functional issues smoothed out.

Still, for newer Linux users, this office suite is a good one to cut their teeth on, since, to the naked eye, this is a smoothly running set of applications. Experienced Linux users might also be well served to give this WP2000 a try as well, but may be driven slightly by crazy the WINE processes hopping around in the background like annoying gnats.

The pros of this office suite outweigh the cons by a healthy margin and this is a strong entry in the Linux office suite community.