Wordperfect Office 2002 Professional Edition

The send to mail would be nice if it would work nicely with Outlook or Outlook Express. The Perfect Expert (WP8) and descendants are actually USEFUL unlike that [] paperclip of MS. The templates and the question/answer of Perfect Expert actually help make a hard or unusual or uncommon report, form, etc. easy to make and to do it correctly.
As for the rest of the Suite:
Presentations: Is almost comparable to PowerPoint

Quattro Pro: is NOT as good as Excel, so if you need a spreadsheet as your main application then I highly recommend MS Office. If your needs are Word processing or SIMPLE spreadsheet functions then and only then is Quattro for you. And even then Excel is better.

CorelCENTRAL: well . . . the previous versions where a flop, with good reasons, I am still evaluating the one in 2002 suite. Personally I think a true Outlook replacement would be much better, this would include the ability to just click on a button to send a document in WP to whomever you wanted. I am not sure if this is possible (read EASY) in the present suite. I do know you can, just not how easy it is, and therefore if I can teach my secretary (and other employee's) to use it.

As for the relational database, hmmmm well, its easier to use than Access but not as powerful, on the other hand if something is powerful but not easy to use, its useless. MS AND Corel need to work on their respective relational databases. In this respect I would say that for me MS is better but then again I find that even now, 8 years after the venerable 6.1b WP suite and office 95, I STILL need both MS office AND Corel WP suites to be functional in my office.

Fact is that for my varied uses, I have to say I need WordPerfect, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, (though I kinda lean toward Presentations now), and Outlook.

If you can find WP for about 2/3rds of the price and you're a small business, then WP is better for you. If you absolutely need the compatibility with MS than OpenOffice is better for you.
IF you're an editor, publisher, author, student then WP is better for you, BUT you will have to have as a standby either OpenOffice or MS Office.

If you're a big business, then you have no choice but to get MS Office.

If you're an accountant, or deal with complicated spreadsheets, than Excel, and therefor MS office is a must.

If your in marketing . . . hmmm, Presentations could be good enough, at least in 2000 version. I am still evaluating the 2002 version. I would lean toward PowerPoint and Word, only because it will be compatible with everybody else in the company, and if there is a marketing dept. then you're a big business.

If you're an engineer: Use WP, and give the pointy haired bosses and marketing air heads some headaches. I mean hell, they do it to you, you might as well have fun with them. AND you will love the reveal codes function.

I find the other add-ons of the suites to be useful. Usually I find that I prefer the Corel version over the MS version. Like the PhotoEditor, I prefer Photo house (as a simple picture editor). But that is partly just what you are accustomed to using. Photo house is better than photoeditor but not enough to brag about.

I hope this helps you make an informed decision. Most of this advice is from experience.

WP SUITE CONS
I'm a WP user from back when it and Lotus 1-2-3 were THE killer apps. Though I own WP 2000, I tend to use MS Office. Here's why:
* Excel is far more powerful and has a better interface than Quattro Pro
* PowerPoint is head-and-shoulders easier to use than Presentations
* CorelCentral PIM is virtually worthless compared to Outlook
* Presentations does not preserve formatting of PowerPoint files
* WordPerfect struggles to preserve formatting for Word docs if there are tables (particularly with merged cells) or outlines in the Word doc

WP SUITE PROS
* Paradox is an easy tool for learning about relational databases; it is far easier to use than Access, though not as powerful
* WordPerfect drawing tools are superior to MS Word drawing tools
* WordPerfect is still better for laying out complex documents; the 'reveal codes' feature alone is invaluable--why didn't MS copy that somewhere along the way?
* It costs less
* Can create PDFs (without buying Acrobat) from the WP print menus

PURCHASING RECOMMENDATION
If you do not have to exchange files with MS Office users and do not need advanced spreadsheet or advanced presentations features, get WP Suite. WordPerfect is as good as Word. And Quattro Pro and Presentations have great basic and good intermediate functionality.

If you regularly exchange files with MS Office users but do not need to put tables or other complex formatting in your Word document, get WordPerfect.

But if you really need file compatibility with Office and/or advanced spreadsheet and presentation capability, Office is a better choice than WordPerfect. But there is an alternative...

AN ALTERNATIVE
As much as I would like WordPerfect to survive as a viable alternative to Microsoft's empire, Corel is on its last leg and WP has steadily lost market share over the last 10 years to the point that I don't see how Corel can afford to produce and support it. Sun's StarOffice ($... or available as an opensource application under the name OpenOffice) is a great alternative to MS Office. StarOffice does a far better job of exchanging docs with MS Office.