In my tests with a group of PDFs, some remained fairly faithful to the original layouts but in others, text and layout became scrambled. WordPerfect’s ability to edit PDF documents–a weakness in Microsoft’s suite–still falls short of perfection. I looked at WordPerfect Office X5 Standard Edition ($250, or $160 for an upgrade price as of March 25, 2010), which consists of X5 editions of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro for spreadsheets, Presentations (Corel’s PowerPoint alternative), WordPerfect Lightning (a note-taking app), Paperport, and Mozilla Thunderbird for WordPerfect Office (which replaces the old WordPerfect Mail e-mail client and personal information manager). But WordPerfect Office X5 remains a tough sell for general business users who are reasonably satisfied with Microsoft’s core Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps, or their free Web counterparts.

Squeezed by desktop competitors (Microsoft’s powerhouse Office suite and the free, open-source OpenOffice) and Web alternatives (apps from Google, Zoho, and others), can Corel WordPerfect Office X5 bring something to the productivity software table? The suite does deliver some unique features–most notably in PDF support and–with the addition of Nuance PaperPort to the suite–in document management.

Corel office