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Summary - Though it did prompt a few complaints, WordPerfect Office 2000 beta 2 did much to change Joe Barr's mind about office suites. Don't miss his surprise at the end. (1,500 words)
If you are a regular reader of LinuxWorld, you know that I've looked at officesuites before and have come away something short of completely enthralled. Itwas, in fact, a negative comment of mine about office suites in generalthat prompted Judith O'Brien to ask if I would be interestedin a prerelease look at Corel's WordPerfect (WP) Office 2000 for Linux.
I caught a glimpse of the office suite at Corel's booth at the LinuxWorldExpo, where the company was showing off beta 1 of the product. Since then, I've received the promised copy of beta 2, and have had a chance to explore it for aday or two. I can tell you this much already: WordPerfect Office2000 is in a different league altogether than StarOffice 5.1.
Figure 1. Beta 2 CD directory
The installation of WordPerfect Office 2000 beta 2 was fast and painless. Iwas ready to start running the applications in the suite in less than ten minutes, and thatincluded the time it took to capture screen shots and do the recommended system restart.
The installation process consisted of starting two scripts, one as root and the other as auser. I ran the initial script from the CD supplied by Corel, and afterreading and accepting the licensing terms, chose the Complete Install option.I did nothing but watch the progress bar for the next few minutes as thevarious packages from the suite, Wine (the Windows emulation package), anda lot of fonts and graphics copied to disk.
The second part of the install was almost instantaneous. It required me to log in as a user and run a script, setupWPO2000 -- force, from my homedirectory. Icons for the various applications were supposed to show upon my KDE desktop afterwards, but they never appeared. Instead, a new entry(WordPerfect Office 2000) appeared in the KDE menu, and beneath it a long listof components appeared: Corel Presentations 9, CorelCENTRAL (Addressbook,Calendar, and Memos), Paradox 9, Quattro Pro 9, and WordPerfect 9.
Figure...