Corel Home Office 1.0 Video

Corel Home Office 1.0 Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02

>> Slapping together a fancy PowerPoint presentation is one thing when you're working on a desktop or a laptop and another thing entirely when you're working on a Netbook with the screen less than 9-inches. Corel hopes to change all that with the Home Office software suite that's optimized with tiny Netbooks in mind. I'm Jessica Dolcourt with CNET Download.com, this is your First Look at the new Corel Home Office version 1.0. There are three applications in Corel Home Office: A word processor, a spreadsheet app and a PowerPoint presentation builder. Each has been purposely slimmed down in the features department so that the entire application takes up just over 100-megabytes. That's pretty small compared to the one-and-a-half gigs of Microsoft Office Standard. Here's another way that's been optimized for Netbooks. In addition to downloading it, you can also install it via your USB drive from a flash memory stick. The first thing you'll notice about Corel's new Office Suite is how closely it emulates the visual design of Microsoft's office 2007. All three applications in this office suite show the same tabbed interface and really similar icons, but here's the twist. You can alter the toolbar color slightly in the options menu and you can also personalize the workspace background, the page and the column color. As far as the features go, Corel Home Office has all the basic and most of the intermediate features you would expect of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications. Some users will miss the more advanced features however. For example, Corel Write lacks the reviewing and change tracking tools found in both Microsoft Word and in Corel's Desktop Office Suite. The leaner Corel Show, which is the presentations app lacks the full color templates of Microsoft's PowerPoint 2007 and also lacks write protection, proofing and video support. Of the three applications in Corel Suite, Write and Calculate are the most complete, shows the most basic. All three have a confusing workflow for creating and editing charts. So, that part is a disappointment. Corel prides itself on its compatibility with Microsoft's Office and other office documents including OOXML files, but it is flash support for Open ODS. You can save Corel files as Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 documents or as PDF, which is extremely useful. Corel Show in fact, the presentation application, saves your presentations as PowerPoint files by default. Although compatibility is rich on paper, conversions in and out of Corel documents weren't always as smooth as we want it and in one test Calculate had no record of the macros that we had imported from an Excel 2007 Spreadsheet. In another test converting a spreadsheet to a PDF failed. Pasting the data into a new spreadsheet fixed that problem, but it was disappointing that it didn't work the first time around. However, even with some of the conversion flops, converting between Microsoft Office and Corel Home Office work most of the time in creating documents from each without a hitch. If you get this suite it's just one thing to keep an eye on. The Suite's $69 price tag makes it well-priced for medium powered office suite that won't bug down your Netbook, laptop or your desktop. If you're planning to use the basic and intermediate features only you'll do just fine with Corel Home Office and you'll be able to produce attractive looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. While there are other free word processing programs out there like OpenOffice.org, Corel is lighter and has the advantage of Microsoft Word's familiar features and design. Of course if Microsoft Office 2007 has already come pre-installed on your Netbook or laptop, there's really little reason to purchase another office suite to replace it. For more details, you can find our full review at reviews.cnet.com and you can try the suite for yourself at Download.com. I'm Jessica Dolcourt, this has been Corel Home Office version1.0. ^M00:03:50 [ Music ]

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