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I looked at WordPerfect Office X5 Standard Edition ($399, or $199 for an upgrade), 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.
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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.
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