WordPerfect Office X4 adds PDF editing capabilities

The new version of the WordPerfect Office suite includes the WordPerfect word processor, the Quattro Pro database, the Presentations program and several additional applications and has been described by Corel as the first PDF office suite worldwide that also supports the Office Open XML and OpenDocument file formats.

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The extended PDF features of WordPerfect Office X4 allow you to open and edit PDF documents in the office applications, and then save them in a way that keeps them editable without keeping the original documents. For this purpose, WordPerfect doesn't directly read the PDF files but imports them using optical character recognition (OCR) which adopts texts, images and formatting. OCR programs with this capability have been available for some time.

Additional PDF export functions allow documents to be password-protected and can, for example, prevent the copying of content in a PDF reader. Users can preview PDFs before actually exporting them, which saves time if corrections are necessary. By supporting PDF/A, WordPerfect can now also be used for archiving PDF documents long term.

Support for Open Office XML – only recently ratified as a standard, WordPerfect Office X4 is perhaps the first application to implement it – and the OpenDocument format allows document exchange with users of Office 2007 and OpenOffice and StarOffice. However, the "File Format Freedom" mentioned in Corel's press release only applies to read access: Documents can't be saved in either of the two formats.

The Corel Visual Intelligence visualisation tool allows data obtained from the web, Quattro Pro or Microsoft Excel to be displayed graphically in real time. Users can investigate trends or perform what-if analyses. WordPerfect Office X4 also includes a notepad application – WordPerfect Lightning – that can save data directly from the web or transfer them to WordPerfect.

For online collaboration, Corel offers WordPerfect Office users a new, team-based web service which among other things includes a calendar, an address book and 200 MB of storage.

The standard package of WordPerfect Office X4 currently costs $300 and consists of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Presentations, WordPerfect Lightning, and Corel Visual Intelligence. The Professional Edition at $400 also contains the Paradox database and a Software Development Kit (SDK). The Home and Student Edition priced at $120 offers all the main applications of the standard version but is not licensed for commercial use.

(jbe)