Just in time for the holidays, Corel has released the new WordPerfect® Office 12 - Home Edition. There has never been a more attractive collection of easy-to-use applications for a busy household. And the price is simply amazing — only $69 USD/$89 CAD after mail-in rebate. You get eight powerful home PC tools for less than the cost of taking your family out to dinner and a movie!

If you purchase WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition today, you'll have plenty of time to create personalized holiday greetings with your digital photographs and the decorative fonts in WordPerfect. You can choose from among 5,000 WordPerfect clipart images. When you're finished, you'll need a set of address labels to mail out the greetings. No problem! You can produce decorative labels with a simple Merge command. What used to take hours now takes only minutes.

What exactly do you get in WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition? Here's a quick list:

• WordPerfect® 12 - Home Edition
• Quattro Pro® 12 - Home Edition
• WordPerfect® OfficeReady™ Personal Finance Essentials
• Encyclopædia Britannica® Ready Reference™ 2005
• Corel® Photobook™
• Corel® PhotoAlbum™
• Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD v8LE
• Norton Internet Security™ 2005

Using the Task Manager
WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition comes with its own Task Manager, which is the "hub" of the Home Edition.This is where you launch applications (each of the eight applications can be started with just one click), work on special projects, open recent files and get help.

Even better, WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition comes with a large collection of templates that you can use to create a variety of documents and projects. The templates are grouped into categories (Communications, Creative Projects, Education, Events, Finance, Household, Health, and others) on the Tasks tab of the Task Manager. When you select a project, the Task Manager launches WordPerfect (and, in some cases, Quattro Pro). Then, it opens the template, and you're ready to go! The beauty of a template is that most of the work is already done, so all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

The Big Guns: WordPerfect® 12 and Quattro Pro® 12
The cornerstone of the WordPerfect Office Home Edition is WordPerfect 12 - Home Edition. This legendary word processor has everything you need to create letters, practice schedules, to-do lists, school reports, household records, and more. Did you know that WordPerfect has been around for more than 20 years? It has more than enough power to accomplish what your family needs to do.

Quattro Pro 12 - Home Edition is a full-featured spreadsheet application that compares favorably with Microsoft® Excel. With Quattro Pro, you can easily manage your household finances, coordinate multiple schedules, and track any type of project.

The beauty of WordPerfect Office 12 products is that you can open, edit and save files in Microsoft Office formats, including version 2003. In fact, WordPerfect 12 can open files in Microsoft Word format, all the way back to Word 1.0. That's more than Microsoft Word can do! With the new Compatibility toolbar, you can save a file in Word format with just a click of a button.

Let's say that you are working on a fundraiser with other volunteers who use Microsoft® Word and Microsoft Excel. Not a problem — WordPerfect opens Microsoft Word files. When you are finished editing, you can save the file in Microsoft Word format. Likewise, you can open and save Microsoft Excel files in Quattro Pro. You can exchange files with friends and classmates, no matter what programs they have on their computers.

Is someone in your household more familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel? No problem! The Workspace Manager allows you to select an interface that resemble those products (menus, save file format, keyboard shortcuts) and then back again, for those who prefer the WordPerfect and Quattro Pro interface. You truly get the best of both worlds.

Managing Your Finances with the Financial Templates
Some people love spreadsheets. Others need to balance their budgets and plan their financial future, but they don't want to have to learn how to use a spreadsheet program to do it. WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition includes the WordPerfect OfficeReady Personal Finance Essentials, a collection of 50 templates to help you manage your household finances and make personal finance decisions, all without stopping to learn the inner workings of the software.

Here is a list of things you can do with these templates:

• Create budgets
• Track assets and liabilities
• Calculate loan payments (including balloon loans)
• Make mortgage comparisons
• Make auto insurance comparisons
• Decide whether to lease or buy a car
• Calculate real estate closing costs
• Compare and analyze mutual fund performance
• Dollar-cost average investments
• Calculate future value of retirement plans
• Analyze important financial decisions
• Manage investment allocations
• Analyze real income (after inflation)

The image below shows the WordPerfect OfficeReady browser open with the Personal Finance templates in the window.

A complete list of templates in the WordPerfect OfficeReady Personal Finance Essentials Solution Pack can be found here. If you are interested in adding to your collection of WordPerfect OfficeReady Solution Packs, see this page for a complete list.

Researching a School Project
Before personal computers and Internet connections were as popular as toasters, research was done in libraries. We pored over stacks of encyclopedias, journals, and books of all shapes and sizes for facts and stories we could use to create a school report, paper, or essay. Compare that tedious process to slipping the Encyclopædia Britannica Ready Reference 2005 CD in the drive and browsing more than 25,000 articles on a wide range of subjects, complete with high-resolution photographs, informative videos, and colorful maps. The comparison is not even close. You may spend hours exploring the CD, just out of curiosity.

The Encyclopædia Britannica Ready Reference 2005 includes a copy of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary and Thesaurus, making it the perfect combination of reference tools for students. When you register your copy of WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition, you'll receive a free one-year subscription to Encyclopædia Britannica Online, so you'll have access to an additional 100,000 articles, an updated world atlas, thousands of photos and videos, an online dictionary and thesaurus, over 300,000 articles from respected magazines and journals, news headlines, and more.

Having Fun with Your Digital Camera
Learning to use your digital camera after you buy it is easy. The real challenge is in managing the picture files. You learn right away that you can't take any more pictures unless you clean off the memory card, so you copy the files to your computer. Then what happens? They sit in a folder until you stumble on them later and think, "I meant to print those out and share them with the family — I can't believe I forgot!"

With Corel Photobook and Corel PhotoAlbum, you won't forget again. Photobook allows you to produce great looking results without having to learn a complex photo-editing program. The Visual Toolbar guides you through the tasks to easily crop your photographs, remove red eye, add decorative frames and borders and more.

If you've ever received a huge picture attached to an e-mail, and you had to scroll back and forth to see the whole thing, you know how important it is to shrink down your digital picture files before sending them to family and friends. With Corel Photobook, all it takes is a few clicks, and you're ready to share your pictures by attaching them to e-mail or posting them on a Web gallery.

Note: Corel Photobook now includes six adjustable filters (Fluid, FraxFrame II, Hyper Tiling, Lightning, Shapeshifter and Goo) from the KPT® family that will let you add dramatic effects to your digital images.

Corel PhotoAlbum is a great tool for organizing your pictures. As you go through them, you can discard the ones you don't want to keep and group the rest into albums. Instead of browsing through long lists of picture files, you can go directly to a particular album and quickly locate the picture you need.

This is where you start to have a little fun. Corel PhotoAlbum creates self-running slide shows that you can send out to your family. Your relatives can enjoy your photographs, regardless of their level of expertise. You can also create screen savers or wallpapers to decorate your Windows® desktop.

A digital camera can be your favorite toy once you've mastered the tools to manage and share your pictures. With Corel Photobook and Corel PhotoAlbum, you can perform routine photo editing and organizing tasks quickly and easily.

Burning Your Own CDs and DVDs
Burning CDs, ripping CDs — just what do those terms mean? Are you creating CDs or destroying them? Burning a CD or DVD is the process of preparing it and then copying files to it. Out of the box, a blank CD or DVD is not ready for you to start copying files to it. With Pinnacle CD/DVD v8LE, creating and copying data CDs and DVDs is a snap. Pinnacle CD/DVD also lets you schedule regular backups so that your important data files are always protected.

When you rip a CD, you "grab" the files off a music CD and copy them to your hard drive. From there, you can create custom music CDs and MP3s. With Pinnacle CD/DVD, you can rip audio CD tracks into Windows Media® files or WAV files. You can then edit the audio files, create dance mixes with crossfades, and even add your own voice recordings. Put another way, you can use Pinnacle CD/DVD to mix and record your own music! Take my advice–when your children find this program, start thinking about adding a set of headphones to the computer.

Protecting Your Family Online
As your family spends more time online — researching purchases, planning vacations, working on school reports, using instant messaging, and downloading music — privacy protection and security become more important. Norton Internet Security 2005 is the leading online security application and was recently awarded the 2005 Editor's Choice Award by PC Magazine.

This special edition of Norton Internet Security 2005 included in WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition contains five products in one suite:

Norton AntiVirus™ has been the leading antivirus program for years. Norton AntiVirus scans your system for viruses and removes them automatically. It can be configured to download the latest updates and install them for you on a regular basis. Norton AntiVirus protects you against computer viruses, spyware programs, and keyboard loggers (programs that monitor keystrokes as you type, potentially capturing credit card numbers and other personal information).

Norton™ Personal Firewall is a program that prevents your computer from being "seen" by hackers on the Internet. It also blocks suspicious incoming traffic (potential intrusions) on your system.

Norton™ Privacy Control essentially keeps your family's personal information from being sent over the Internet via e-mail, instant messages, Microsoft® Office attachments, and Web forms without your knowledge. You can send data to sites that you trust without worrying about releasing it to sites you don't. Particularly when your children are online (because they do not always remember not to give out personal information), privacy control is essential.

Norton AntiSpam™ filters out unwanted e-mail messages, otherwise known as "spam." Parents need to be especially diligent about spam e-mail messages because many of them contain inappropriate content. Filtered messages are moved to a specific folder, so you can review them periodically and make sure that legitimate messages are not accidentally deleted.

Norton™ Parental Control lets you block access to Web sites that you consider inappropriate for your children.

This special edition of Norton Internet Security 2005 includes a complimentary 90-day subscription to the latest protection updates. After 90 days, you can upgrade to the one-year subscription for $39.95US ($30 less than the regular price of $69.95US).

Caveats
There are some important things to keep in mind. WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition is designed for the home user. It is not licensed for commercial use, nor can it be deployed on a network. A few advanced features of WordPerfect and Quattro Pro are not available in WordPerfect 12 - Home Edition and Quattro Pro 12 - Home Edition. For more information on these specific items, see this FAQ on WordPerfect® Universe.

That said, the WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition has some great applications that are not included in the Standard edition or the Student &Teacher edition. The choice is all about how you want to use the software. Home users will find everything they need to run a busy household in WordPerfect Office 12 - Home Edition. Small and medium-sized businesses are better served with the Standard edition of WordPerfect Office 12. For a list of reasons why you might consider an upgrade to the Standard version, click here.