Corel WordPerfect Office Home & Student 2021 Suite

All the features I was looking for at a great price.

Word Perfect is perfect for those of us who only need word processing every so often. I use it at home when I need to compose a letter or address envelopes. It’s lots better than paying MS a fee every year for something I only use a few times a month.

First, I’d like to complain to whoever mailed this to me. The box was a mess when I opened the package. It should have been sent in a sturdily padded envelope at the very least, not just an unpadded plastic bag, and a box would have been better. And no, I didn’t rip the box like that. The unpadded plastic bag was very easy to open without doing that.

Now about WordPerfect Office Home & Student 2021. I just easily installed this software this morning from a disk. The reason I bought a disk was because I live in a rural area with terrible Internet service. I am grateful to Corel for having a disk. I also bought WordPerfect and ditched my Microsoft 365 because I didn’t feel like renting their software.

I have now tried out all of the things that have come with the software: Lightning, Presentations, WordPerfect, and Quattro Pro. I find that it’s excellent. I have absolutely no complaints about the software.

Full Disclosure: I used WordPerfect at work way back in the 1980’s and at home and at work in the 1990’s. Back then, it was a superior product to Microsoft Word and, after it was purchased by the Corel Corporation, I would often have interesting debates with my peers about their use and support of the inferior Microsoft Word, produced and sold by an American company, instead of supporting the superior WordPerfect produced and sold by a Canadian company.

Even though it was a superior product and dominated the market for a time, WordPerfect had little chance of competing in a growing world software market dominated by Microsoft. WordPerfect became a textbook example of a superior product losing much of their market share to an inferior one backed by an endless supply of cash and aggressive marketing strategy.

In the early 2000’s, I began using Microsoft Office at home and at work as the organizations I worked for used it and I did a lot of my work from home. I became quite proficient in its use and noticed it getting better as time went on. After retiring, I was on my own for an office suite. I found Microsoft’s moneygrubbing scheme of “renting” their Microsoft 365 software on an annual basis, repugnant. The outright purchase of Microsoft Office Home & Student at $170 CAD was a little more palatable to me, but in recent years Microsoft has shown that they cannot be fully trusted to support their products for their expected life/usefulness and that they can (and will) change the rules on consumers any time they please.

In looking for a replacement for Microsoft Office, I tried the free Apache OpenOffice and found it to be a decent free option, but it was not really what I was looking for. Corel WordPerfect Office Home & Student 2021 was on sale on Amazon and I purchased it. Software continually changes, often for no logical reason but rather to keep development fluid and moving (anyone who uses Microsoft Windows can attest to this – change for the sake of change, in many cases void of any evident purpose or benefit), and I was blown away by how easy it was to use WordPerfect 20-some years after I last used it.

After using it again, do I believe that the Corel WordPerfect Office suite is better than Microsoft’s Office suite in 2022? Well, there are some definite advantages in word processing such as the reveal codes, keyboard shortcuts and superior formatting options that many professional users prefer, but Microsoft has also made some great strides in their Word software over the past 20 years and I would say the two are closer to being equal in function and productivity for the average user these days.

It is true that to realize the full potential of WordPerfect, some users would have a bit of a learning curve. However, as someone who has experience using both Microsoft and Corel word processing programs, I believe that most users (including those who have previously only used Microsoft Word) who just need a good word processor to handle their day-to-day written communications would have little problem using WordPerfect out of the box. Quattro Pro and Presentations are comparable to their Microsoft counterparts, Excel and PowerPoint. Corel includes Lightning, a note taking app and After Shot 3, a photo editing and management app in their Home & Office suite. At this writing, Amazon.ca is selling: WordPerfect Office Home & Student 2021 (physical disc) for $65 [sale], Microsoft Office Home & Student 2021 (download) for $170, and Microsoft 365 (download including OneNote, Outlook and OneDrive) can be “rented” for 365 days for $75 [sale]. Given my needs, the similar capabilities and lower price, choosing WordPerfect Office Home & Student 2021 over the Microsoft alternatives was the right choice for me.

If you are unsure about WordPerfect Office Home & Student 2021, unlike the Microsoft version, you can download a fully usable 30-day free trial to evaluate it before you buy.

I purchased and found that many of my Microsoft word files had been corrupted by this product. I patiently endured multiple remote support and all ended in failure. The company ( word perfect) reported to me that they would update design development team for this issue which current word perfect could not resolve, and so they would mark my incident as RESOLVED even though it was not. Beware if purchasing and you have an old version of Microsoft word and you load this monstrosity.