Since January 17, 2006, when Corel Corporation officially released WordPerfect® Office X3, a flurry of reviews, press releases, and articles about the suite have been published. You're probably wondering whether you should upgrade from your current version. Like everyone, you want to weigh the advantages of enhancements and new features against the cost of upgrading.

Some improvements affect the entire suite; others are specific to WordPerfect®, Quattro Pro® or Presentations™. The Standard Edition of WordPerfect Office X3 now includes WordPerfect® MAIL™ X3, which is briefly described at the end of this article.

Suite-Wide Improvements in WordPerfect® Office X3
Migration Manager™
Although Migration Manager™ was designed for network deployments and large-scale installations, it works just as simply for single users. You can easily transfer your macros, templates, toolbars, menus, keyboards, user word lists, QuickWord™ entries, address books, and other customized items from previous versions of WordPerfect Office (10, 11, and 12). IT managers can now use a custom command line to migrate settings from previous installations.

New Support for Windows® XP Themes
The first thing you'll notice about WordPerfect Office X3 is its clean, new look. Windows® XP themes are now supported in the updated toolbars, dialog boxes, and controls. When you change to a different Windows XP theme, that change is reflected in the WordPerfect Office X3 applications.

Presentations™ Graphics X3
The tightly integrated drawing tools that have resided for years within WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Presentations are now available as a separate drawing program, called Presentations Graphics X3. Users can access this new program from the Start menu and quickly create, edit, and enhance original drawings and bitmaps. Presentations Graphics X3 offers a broad range of special effects and tools for bitmap editing, and it includes a collection of drawing tools for creating lines and shapes. Users can create basic shapes, such as triangles, circles, or rectangles, as well as lines, arrows, stars, captions, and more. In addition, after users create or enhance drawings with Presentations Graphics X3, they can save them in various file formats, such as WordPerfect graphics (WPG), Windows® bitmap (BMP), JPEG, and GIF.

Enhanced Multilingual Character Support
Support has been added for users who need to create and exchange documents with accented characters. The enhancements include supporting multilanguage documents, displaying and printing multilanguage documents, copying and pasting multilanguage text inside documents, and saving accented character information in RTF format.

Zoom Buttons in Help Topics
One of the most subtle changes will likely become a favorite. Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons in the WordPerfect Help dialog box to let you increase or decrease the size of the font used in the Help topic window (see Figure 1). To zoom in, click the button with the plus sign pointer; to zoom out, click the button with the minus sign pointer.

Figure 1
The new Zoom buttons in the Help Topics window increase and decrease the size of text so that it's easier to read.

Tip: WordPerfect Office X3 offers a unique licensing arrangement that provides a real value for business owners and employees with home computers. When you purchase a copy of WordPerfect Office X3, you are automatically entitled to use it on your home desktop or laptop computer.

New Features and Enhancements in WordPerfect® X3
Import PDF Files
Since 1999, WordPerfect users have enjoyed a robust Publish to PDF feature. WordPerfect X3 introduces a powerful counterpart - the PDF Import feature. By simply opening a PDF file, you can now import its text and graphics directly into WordPerfect and save them in any of the 150 file formats that WordPerfect offers - WPD, DOC, PDF, XML, or HTML, to name just a few. You can now capture and reuse content from PDF files without having to purchase a third-party PDF editing application. See last month's tutorial, "Importing PDF Files in WordPerfect X3", for more information on this exciting new feature.

Improved Compatibility with Microsoft® Word®
Corel continues to enhance the compatibility between WordPerfect and Microsoft® Word® documents. You might be surprised to know that WordPerfect X3 imports more Microsoft Word formats than Microsoft Word 2003 imports. This means you can open and share documents with legacy users of Microsoft Word, regardless of the version they are using. These important enhancements were made to improve document conversion: support for automatic paragraph numbering on import and export of Microsoft Word files, enhancements to text alignment, and improved support for table borders.

Save Without Metadata
Metadata is invisible information that is attached to every WordPerfect file in the form of Undo/Redo history, reviewers' notes, document summary information, hidden text, and comments. WordPerfect X3 introduces a new feature to ensure that you'll never get caught with confidential or sensitive information in your documents. The new Save Without Metadata feature makes it simple to remove all metadata from a document (see Figure 2), without the need to purchase or download an additional utility.

Figure 2
You can select which metadata items you want to remove and, if necessary, enter a new filename in the Save Without Metadata dialog box.

Paste Unformatted Text
If you frequently copy items back and forth between applications, you'll understand the need to paste content as unformatted text. In particular, when you need to repurpose information from the Internet, you can quickly capture HTML content without having to clean up the formatting. A Paste Unformatted Text command was added to the right-click context menu, and the Ctrl + Alt + V keyboard shortcut was added.

Publish to PDF
The Publish to PDF feature has been enhanced to translate WordPerfect table of contents headings into PDF bookmarks. When you open the PDF file, you'll be able to use these bookmarks to navigate quickly through the file.

Yahoo!® Search bar
You can turn on the new Yahoo!® Search bar (see Figure 3) for one-click access to your favorite WordPerfect Office links, including tips and tricks, learning tools, and other resources, and to Yahoo! sites, such as News, Finance, Sports, and Mail. With the new built-in Yahoo! Search, you can right-click any word in a document and search the Web. You can also install a WordPerfect/Yahoo! toolbar that you can use with Microsoft® Internet Explorer for easy access to your favorite WordPerfect tips and tricks, tutorials, videos, how-tos, special offers, and partner information.

Figure 3
The Yahoo! Search bar provides quick access to your most frequently viewed Web pages.

Working with WordPerfect® Documents in a Web Browser
If you have WordPerfect X3 on your system, you can open, view, and print WordPerfect documents from within a browser. The integration with Internet Explorer makes this a breeze. This same integration extends to such products as Microsoft® SharePoint® and IBM® Workplace™.

New Word Count Features
The Word Count feature has been significantly enhanced. A new button has been added to the status bar. Clicking this button updates the word count. The Word Count feature can also be customized, so you can select which document elements - for example, headers, footers, endnotes, footnotes, or comments - are included in the count (see Figure 4).

Figure 4
From the Word Count page of the Properties dialog box, you can enable or disable the check boxes to select which items to include in word counts.

Document Routing with WordPerfect® MAIL™
The Document Routing feature now works with both WordPerfect MAIL and Microsoft® Outlook®, so you can use either application to send your WordPerfect X3 documents out for review.

New Label Forms
New label formats from industry-leading suppliers have been added. There are new label definitions from Avery (in letter and A4 formats), C-Line Products, and Wilson Jones.

New Features and Enhancements in Quattro Pro® X3
Publish to PDF
Quattro Pro X3 includes the same robust PDF publishing capabilities available in WordPerfect and Presentations (see Figure 5). In addition, Quattro Pro users who want to export only a section of a spreadsheet can do so by specifying a page range for the PDF file.

Figure 5
The Publish to PDF dialog box lets you specify a filename, a range of cells, and the PDF style settings.

Enhanced CrossTab Reports
Quattro Pro CrossTab reports are the equivalent of PivotTable® views in Microsoft® Excel®. You can easily create custom CrossTab reports in Quattro Pro by simply clicking and dragging. Now, business- and enterprise-scale customers can use Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) to access and refresh a connection between Quattro Pro and their database of choice.

Enhanced Charting Tools
Quattro Pro X3 includes enhanced charting tools that transform the process of creating professionally designed, clearly illustrated charts into just a few easy steps. The tight integration of applications within WordPerfect Office X3 means that these same charting tools are available in both WordPerfect and Presentations.

Improved Handling of Dates
Dates in spreadsheet applications are widely expressed as sequential numbers representing the number of days that have elapsed since December 30, 1899. In previous versions of Quattro Pro, each date and time value needed to be altered for charting. With Quattro Pro X3, you are required to plot the date and time values only once.

Improved Compatibility with Microsoft® Excel®
Two notable improvements were made to file conversion: support for comments within the Excel spreadsheet and support for cell formatting in Excel 2000 exports.

New Features and Enhancements in Presentations® X3
Improved Compatibility with Microsoft® PowerPoint®
Presentations X3 provides improved importing and exporting of Microsoft® PowerPoint® files. The following enhancements have been made to improve file conversions: support for background, master, and layout changes; updates to data charts; the importing of changes to footers from PowerPoint; object transformation based on PowerPoint components (rotating, moving, scaling, and skewing); and the matching of transitions of slides and graphics in PowerPoint.

Enhanced Publish to PDF
For years, Presentations users have used the powerful Publish to PDF feature to share their slide shows. With more than half a billion installations of Adobe® Reader® worldwide, PDF has become the standard format for exchanging files. In Presentations X3, the Publish to PDF feature has been enhanced, so that the slide names in a slide show are translated into PDF bookmarks. When the file is opened in Adobe Reader, the slide show can be navigated much more easily.

New Masters in the Gallery
The Master Gallery now includes some newly created masters on which you can base your presentation or slide show. The new masters save you time and help you achieve the right look.

Enhanced Anti-aliasing
In previous versions of Presentations, some text and images would appear jagged at certain resolutions. Presentations X3 provides anti-aliasing and graphics interpolation to ensure that your multimedia presentations are of the highest possible quality. Now, when slide shows are edited and played back, they appear cleaner, with rounded fonts and images.

Introducing WordPerfect® MAIL™
WordPerfect MAIL, the latest addition to the WordPerfect Office family, is a full-featured, easy-to-use application that provides e-mail, calendar, and contact management (see Figure 6). WordPerfect MAIL is quickly developing a reputation for instantly locating information that has been buried by years of accumulated e-mail, contacts, calendar, and folder clutter. With innovative filing capabilities and outstanding spam protection, WordPerfect MAIL helps users keep their e-mail folders clean and tidy. WordPerfect MAIL also offers automatic features for managing mailing lists, distribution lists, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) news feeds. In addition, users can feel secure knowing that they are avoiding viruses targeted at Microsoft Outlook.

Figure 6
WordPerfect MAIL helps you manage your e-mail, calendar, and contacts, as well as mailing lists, distribution lists, and RSS news feeds.

WordPerfect MAIL provides Quick Search buttons that instantly find and sort all messages by a particular sender, or all messages within a subject. For example, to find a specific message from within a thread of messages, users simply select any message from the thread and click the Quick Search button to view all related messages.

With WordPerfect MAIL, users can take advantage of Smart Groups to manage subscriptions to RSS feeds and online mailing or distribution lists, such as news, reports, and other information that is updated on a regular basis. Smart Groups automatically moves messages from the Inbox to specified folders. RSS feeds from sources such as CNN, Wired, the Motley Fool, and others provide an advantage over standard mailing or distribution lists because users do not have to reveal their e-mail addresses to the provider.

To protect users from junk e-mail (spam), WordPerfect MAIL includes SAproxy Pro, the most comprehensive anti-spam software available today. Using a five-point protection system to fight spam, SAproxy Pro learns from stored e-mail, uses Whitelist and Blacklist tools to filter incoming e-mail, scans incoming e-mail by using rules, consults with community spam lists, and calculates historical averages of received email. Users can train SAproxy Pro to recognize which messages they consider spam and which ones they consider legitimate.

Note: WordPerfect MAIL is included in the Standard Edition of WordPerfect Office X3 and is also available as a standalone application.