Corel Home Office

Corel Home Office is an application suite that integrates three tools dedicated to word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, namely Corel Write, Corel Calculate and Corel Show.

The setup kit includes templates for Write and Calculate. However, these can be excluded from setup, along with any of the three utilities.

The GUI is familiar to those of other similar programs, so you shouldn't have any confusions in this regard.

The word processor has a look that resembles older MS Office editions. It allows you to customize font and paragraph settings, apply preset or custom styles, search and replace text on the spot, as well as to insert various types of objects, such as shapes, tables, pictures, charts, mathematical equations, and OLE objects.

What's more, you can add a header and footer into the document, apply numbers on each page, embed frames, callouts and text boxes, put together a table of contents easily with captions and footnotes, as well as insert the current date and time, hyperlinks, breaks and special symbols.

As for the page layout, the project can be personalized in terms of margins, orientation, size, columns, background, workspace and columns color, indent, spacing, text wrapping mode, and others.

Several proofreading tools are put at your disposal, including a spellchecker, thesaurus, autocorrect and word counter, in addition to mailing settings for labels and envelopes, plus macro recording and playback for repetitive actions.

The spreadsheet application shares some options with the word processor, such as font customization, alignment and styles with conditional formatting. You can insert pivot tables, shapes, pictures, OLE objects, columns, lines, bars, areas, scatter and other kinds of charts, together with text boxes, clip art, symbols and range names.

Pages can be customized in regard to their margins, orientation, size, printing area, page breaks, header and footer, while functions can be inserted with mathematical, trigonometric, logical, statistical, financial and other types of meaning. Moreover, you can change the text-to-columns method by picking fixed or delimited original data type, record and play macros, as well as freeze all panes or just the top row or first column.

Similar to MS Powerpoint, this utility lets you place multiple slides side by side to create a compelling presentation with animations and special effects. It has a few types of slide designs that you can choose from, along with a slide master and sorter, permitting you to change the page arrangement, delete slides, customize the background, insert shapes and fill them with color, as well as to add pictures, charts, OLE objects, text boxes, clip art, and symbols to the project.

Adjustments can be made to the slideshow when it comes to slide range to display, manual or timed advancement, loop mode, and pointer color. Spelling and thesaurus tools are available here as well.

No error dialogs were shown in our tests, and Corel Home Office did not hang or crash. It uses a reasonable amount of CPU and RAM. To conclude, this application suite certainly bundles many useful features and configuration settings for creating text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. On the other hand, it lacks some other advanced options. Nevertheless, users can give it a go to see whether it meets their requirements or not.