Beta WordPerfect Suite 2002 Is Out

Corel Corp.'s new WordPerfect Office 2002
suite will improve Web integration and compatibility with Microsoft
Office formats.

Corel officials said they want to maintain their suite's dominance
among federal users at the Labor and Justice departments and the
Library of Congress.

The suite will be available this summer after a beta rollout. It
will include the WordPerfect 10 word processor, the Quattro Pro 10
spreadsheet and Corel Presentations 10.

The CorelCentral 10 personal information manager will have a
Hypertext Markup Language-compatible e-mail client for Post Office
Protocol and Internet Message Access Protocol mail accounts, as well
as group scheduling.

The PIM will continue to synchronize with devices running Palm OS
from Palm Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.

WordPerfect users can click on a block of text to convert it to a
table. Tables will indicate a cell formula for mathematical
functions, and an auto-formatting function will scan selected text
to suggest an appropriate number of columns and rows.

Reveal Codes Stay

Corel officials said the Reveal Codes function in WordPerfect, long
valued by users, will remain in the new version. In addition,
WordPerfect's ability to publish files in HTML will be enhanced.

On the spreadsheet front, Quattro Pro will automatically size rows
and columns and will have a 3-D rendering engine for graphs.

A Corel agreement with Oxford University Press will provide instant
access to the 30,000-word Pocket Oxford Dictionary, as well as
access to about 70,000 words in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

"We believe this will be the best upgrade to the applications since
the release of Corel WordPerfect 5.1," said Graham Brown, executive
vice president of business applications.