Comdex attendees duly received the first worldwide preview of Corel Corp’s next generation of office products yesterday, which in direct competition with Microsoft Corp will be called WordPerfect Office 2000 (CI No 3,514). Currently in beta, the suite includes four integrated core applications: the WordPerfect 9 word processor, Quattro Pro 9 spreadsheet, Corel Presentations 9 graphics, and CorelCentral personal information manager. Corel says it will announce several versions of the suite in months to come, some of them with additional applications such as the Paradox 9 relational database, Print Office small business publishing, Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition tool and the Trellix web authoring and presentation tool (CI No 3,535). It includes added compatibility with Microsoft Corp’s Office suite through the inclusion of Visual Basic for Applications. Naturally Speaking can accept spoken dictation into WordPerfect 9 at up to 160 works per minute. Corel originally promised the software in the first quarter, but now says general availability will be in the second quarter of next year. Microsoft recently made it clear that its own Office 2000 won’t be out until the second quarter either (CI No 3,534), but given the huge market impact that product will have, Corel could have done with getting the product out on the shelves as early as it could.
