It would perhaps be easy to imagine that Microsoft Office rules the roost when it comes to office suites, and that no other products stand a chance. That is certainly not the case, however, and Word Perfect Office from Corel has made it to the newly released version 12.

The Standard Edition reviewed here is aimed primarily at consumers and smaller businesses, and comprises three main applications: Word Perfect is the word processor, Quattro Pro is the spreadsheet, and Presentations is, well, as you might guess, the presentations generator. If you want the suite's database app, Paradox, you'll need to shell out a little extra cash for the Professional Edition of the software - this is sold on a user licence basis, and for 1-10 users costs £296 per user (inc. VAT).

All the applications in the Standard Edition install from a single CD-ROM, with the second CD providing clip-art, fonts, and a range of potentially useful additional software such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, (We wonder why Corel did not choose Opera as its browser) and the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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Interestingly, you also get Word Perfect Wireless Office Suite, a set of tools which provides access to e-mails from POP3 accounts while you are out and about using a suitable mobile phone, and add-in SMS features too. Extra payments are required to take full advantage of this, and only some of the applications that comprise the suite wanted to install on our machine, so we can't really comment on its utility.

Happily, we had no trouble getting to grips with the three main applications in Word Perfect Office 12 Standard Edition. If you are migrating from Microsoft Word you can choose to see Office-like interface arrangements for Word Perfect, Quattro Pro and Presentations which provide a slightly more familiar look and feel, and some handy extras. For example, in Word Perfect you get a floating toolbar which, among other things, allows you to convert documents between Word and Word Perfect native file formats.

Corel is understandably very keen on luring Microsoft Office users, and it is a bit of a shame in a way that quite a lot of the material advertising Word Perfect Office 12 emphasises how easy it is to switch over rather than extolling the virtues of the suite for its own sake. Sure, there's no point in ignoring Office, but the yellow Post-it style note on the front of the box telling us that the software is 'Microsoft Office compatible' is perhaps preying a little too much on those looking for options when browsing boxes in a computer store.

And all that bluster really isn't necessary. Word Perfect Office, and in particular Word Perfect itself, stands up very well without the constant comparison. One absolutely fabulous out-of-the-box feature, the ability to save documents to both PDF and XML (as well as HTML) barely gets a look in among all the other blurb.

Word Perfect Office 12 is somewhat less expensive than Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition and is a well-featured software suite with a long pedigree. It wouldn't be out of place on either a home PC or in a small office.