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First off I don't own a business or anything I am just a poor student that needed an office program for school. After using Word and MS Office I needed to upgrade (this gets expensive year after year). So I decided to try Corel Office. It does pretty much everything Word, Excel, ect... does. And you can publish to PDF which is a bonus. Its a great alternative to MS and is a good value for the money.

WordPerfect is a nice word processor. But there's nothing really the matter with MS Word either. They're only word processors after all, and both do what any word processor should do. So the question is, how does the rest of Corel's suite compare to Microsoft's offering? The answer is the same as its been for years: not too well. Excel, Access and Power Point are just plain better than Corel's Presentations, Paradox, etc. Do any businesses actually use Paradox or Presentations? I have not encountered any that do. The compatibility with MS has improved a little, but this begs the question why not buy MS Office in the first place? Then compatibility is no longer an issue, and you get applications that 90% of the business world is using anyway. So the key for me (I chose MS Office over WordPerfect) was not the word processor (WP and MS Word are both good) , but the other applications--the spreadsheets, presentation software, etc. Corel just isn't in the same league as MS when it comes to these.

Having now had WordPerfect 12 installed for some time, I can say that Corel has done well in their target area of improving compatibility with MS Office. There really isn't much else new about this version, but improving WP's ability to co-exist with MS Office may be what is needed to keep this once-great suite going.
Why consider WP12 if you're looking for an alternative to MS Office? Put simply, StarOffice/OpenOffice just isn't ready yet. Every part of the WordPerfect suite is more polished, more powerful and more flexible than the equivalent component in SO/OOo. Of course WP12 has Reveal Codes, which neither SO/OOo nor MS Office has, but even in features that they have in common, like Publish-to-PDF, WP's version is more professional than the SO/OOo equivalent.
QuattroPro sometimes gets a bad rap, but it is a very powerful spreadsheet, with its own Pivot Tables (the equivalent of Excel's CrossTabs), and it offers 1 million rows and 18,000 columns, far more than ANY of its competitors.
Paradox is the sort of database app that makes its MS Office "equivalent" look like a child's toy, if you are prepared for the steeper learning curve.
Of course the heart of the suite is the incomparable WordPerfect itself, and version 12 is not an embarrassment to its predecessors. Even though the only major improvements have been to compatibility with MS Office (significantly better in WP, QP and Presentations), there have been some other useful bug fixes and refinements.

The really exciting thing about this release is the evidence that Corel (now owned by Vector, and in a much healthier financial situation than it has been for years) has renewed its commitment to the suite, and is being realistic about what is needed to protect WP's niche in the market. Planning for version 13 is apparently already under way, as is a trial of a version for Linux, so WordPerfect is definitely here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Having used both OpenOffice and StarOffice for over a year now, I can honestly say that, if you are looking for an enterprise-quality, professional business suite alternative to MS Office, WP12 is a much better choice. The quality difference is especially noticeable in the respective spreadsheet applications, with QuattroPro being several orders of magnitude more powerful and useful than Calc.
In summary, if, for any reason, you want an alternative to MS Office, WP12 is it. Sure, it's not free, but the competitive pricing structure for upgrades make it a very economical choice, and the quality of the product is such that the cost is money VERY well spent. WORDPERFECT LIVES!