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• Office 12 Home Edition • Included Applications

  •  Quattro Pro® 12 – Home Edition • An excellent spreadsheet program that will help you manage your family and personal finances using templates from WordPerfect® Office Ready™ – Personal Finance Essentials collection, a Home financial solution pack.  Quattro Pro 12 Home Edition includes tools for creating 3D-rendered charts, tables, and more.
  
  •  WordPerfect® Office Ready™ • This program installs as an icon on the desktop as well as on the top of the Start menu which gives some hint to its utility.  It features around 100 templates for home, business  and Personal Finance.  Opening a template will start the associated application.  Some of the groups are Family & Home, Credit Management, Education Planning, Financial Condition, and Home among many more.  One note of interest, if the template requires personal information such as name or address, it relies on Outlook’s address book for the information which also means that Outlook needs to be your “default” email client or the this particular functionality in Home Office will fail.  It might also be noted that really missing in the suite is an email client and it relies on Outlook.  I found this a little concerning as I use Firefox Thunderbird as my default email client; maybe this is something that Corel will address in the future.
  
  •  Photo Editor & Organizer.  Corel® Photobook™ Photo Editor •  Using images from your digital camera or scanner, edit, enhance, fix flaws, red eye correction,  and add finishing touches as such as borders, frames and effects.  Photo Editor includes a very wide range of filters from Kai’s PowerTools Package (KPT) that are not found in other consumer level photo editor products.  Corel® PhotoAlbum™ • Turn your digital images into digital photo albums.  Share your images via print, e-mail, and the Internet.  Create slide shows, screen savers, and wallpapers.  In PhotoAlbum™,  drag-and-drop is use to easily create HTML and presentation type slide shows that can be written to CD-Rs.
  
  •  Encyclopedia Britannica® Ready Reference 2005  Electronic Encyclopedia • 25,000 Articles, 1200 videos and images, and a map gallery of more that 190 countries.  Includes Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary & Thesaurus.  You also get a free 1 year subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica® Online.
  
  •  Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD v8 LE • Music & Data disc creator.  Create  CD, DVDs, and copy non-protected CDs.  Arrange & Burn MP3 CDs.  Make regularly scheduled backups of your hard drive to CD or DVD.  One of the features that grabbed my attention is the Instant Write applet on the desktop that allowed me to put in a CD-R (not a re-writeable) CD in the drive and drag files and folders to the applet where it automatically took care of the initialization and writing of files to the CD-R; very nice!  I like ease of use.  One personal complaint of mine is that this a LE or Limited Edition in that the program limits you to 20 WAVe to MP3 file conversions; this seems a bit petty since there are free programs available to perform this function.
  
  •  Norton Internet Security™ 2005 Internet Security Suite with Norton™ AntiVirus and Norton Personal Firewall with a 90-day complimentary update subscription.  I am not sure the vote is in on this Suite as I have noted a number of concerns with this product in the past and haven’t recommended it.  This version does seem to be much improved from what I have seen with improved controls over the settings such as blocking pops up and the like but challenges remain.  For one thing, I can’t access my shared folders on my main computer without turning Norton Internet Security off.  One real positive is that during the Office 12 Home Edition Installation, you have full control over what gets installed and if you already have your computer secured with your own AntiVirus program and are satisfied with your firewall solution, I would not recommend installing Norton’s Internet Security Suite. You'll also want to keep in mind the 90-day limitation on use, basically an evaluation copy,  as it will cost you to continue the subscription beyond the 90 days.

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