News Analysis: WordPerfect Office X3's new PDF import feature gives users a practical tool that's been missing for too long.A new native PDF import feature in WordPerfect Office X3, released by Corel last week, will give the software's users a leg up on Microsoft Office users—even after Microsoft users buy the new version of Office that's slated for release later this year.
At first blush, native PDF import might seem like a ho-hum feature, but it's a big deal. In some corporate environments, a good chunk of the knowledge base and working materials for doing business are marooned in uneditable PDF documents.
People need to get at the content in legacy PDFs—such as technical manuals, corporate policy documents, or marketing materials—but might not have access to the word-processor or graphics source files used to make those PDFs in the first place.
In some cases, the PDF's original author isn't even with the company any more. So the new person responsible for updating the PDF might only have the old PDF from which to work.
"If you look at what full Acrobat does versus what an OCR system does—there's clearly white space that isn't being addressed," says Jason Larock, WordPerfect Office product manager.
"The OCR guys have a final-form document and, basically, OCR it and figure out what the different characters are. Acrobat is set up to edit one line at a time, but it doesn't set you up to make longer changes that would flow off the side of the page. When [a PDF imports into a Corel] word-processing document, you're actually able to [reflow] the document again."
A number of WordPerfect Office users had asked for native PDF import. Market demand, says Richard Carriere, Corel general manager for office productivity, drove the engineering investment in expanding PDF support.
A secondary reason was adding value for all Corel customers. While ScanSoft, Adobe, and other software vendors offer tools for repurposing PDF content, Carriere says, "They are additional applications that cost additional money above and beyond the price of the basic office application."
The X3 edition of Corel's application suite comes in three flavors: Home, Standard and Professional, with the latter two geared toward the general office user.
All three boxes include the Quattro spreadsheet application; the Home edition adds photo-archiving and other utilities such as a DVD burner, while the Standard box includes an e-mail client and Presentations, a Microsoft PowerPoint competitor. Professional adds the Paradox database.
In WordPerfect Office, Corel optimized PDF import to best handle long text documents, as opposed to "this week's Home Depot flyer" loaded with graphics and little text, Larock says.
In testing the import feature, he says that it handles PDF 1.6 documents pretty well—maintaining the look and feel of the original document.
As far as PDF export goes, Corel has extended it to all of the Office apps for version X3, which exports PDF 1.5 files.
Document-format wonks may get their kicks debating what format will ultimately win out as a standard for archivists and office workers during the 21st century, when it comes to Corel's PDF strategy the company really only cares about the users, Larock says.
"There's a lot of things going on behind the scenes right now, a lot of talk about ODF and Office XML," Larock says.
"Formats are great to talk about, but when we talk to our customers, they aren't interested in formats, they are more interested in pragmatically doing what they want to do on a desktop level—exchanging information and reusing content. … Clearly, PDF is a format that's very pervasive in the market."
As for people who might claim that Corel rushed its PDF import feature suite into version X3 as a me-too announcement going with Microsoft's announcement that the next version of Office will support PDF export, Carriere points out that WordPerfect Office added PDF export back in version 8. The latest upgrades are just a logical extension of the Canadian company's PDF support strategy.
"In this case, Microsoft is the one taking the me-too approach," Carriere says. "Three angles are really key to our overall product strategy: compatibility, ease of use and powerful features. I think the way we've incorporated PDF functionality into WordPerfect X3 really touches these three things."
